Mediating Sexual Violence in the #MeToo Era

Dear Colleagues,

From the investigative feature to the Twitter hashtag, old and new media forms have been essential to the global impact of the #MeToo movement. Nineteen million people used the #MeToo hashtag in its first year, powerfully demonstrating the magnitude of the problem of sexual violence and giving it unprecedented attention on the world stage. Interrupting the normalised reiteration of victim-blaming rape myths in public talk about sexual violence, journalists and documentary makers broke high-profile stories of serial offending that cast a rare spotlight on secondary victimisation, exposing organisational systems that protect perpetrators by blaming and silencing survivors. Flipping the script on the longstanding treatment of survivor testimony as lacking credibility, an impressive and growing archive of media and cultural texts advance the #MeToo shift from blaming to believing survivors, from transnationally streamed productions such as She Said, Unbelievable, On the Record, Surviving R. Kelly, Raped: My Story, Athlete A and I May Destroy You through to bestsellers like MeToo founder Tarana Burke’s Unbound and Chanel Miller’s Know My Name. The #MeToo archive also builds a new lens of hindsight through which the problems with past ways of portraying sexual violence become acutely visible.

At the same time, survivors have not been evenly visible in the #MeToo era, with the centring of white cisgender celebrity marginalising BIPOC and LGBTQI+ survivors, disabled survivors, survivors who are indigent or incarcerated, survivors outside the metropoles of the global North, and the many living at the intersections of these and other social identities and locations. The media forms that propelled #MeToo have also staged the backlash against it from a resurgent ‘manosphere’ and its counter-discourses of accused men as victims of defamation, evident in the multimedia storm surrounding John C. Depp, II v. Amber Laura Heard. COVID-19 diverted public attention away from gender-based violence while lockdowns sponsored a ‘shadow pandemic’ rise in its prevalence. Despite progress toward better handling of survivors’ stories on stage, page and screen, #MeToo stories broke across the media and creative industries, with uneven progress towards better treatment of survivors behind the scenes. Where Burke’s MeToo focused on in-person disclosure, as #MeToo globalised, disclosure became public, distant and digital, with benefits and drawbacks for survivors.

We invite scholars across the disciplines to explore the complex terrain of the #MeToo movement and its continuing impact on the way stories of sexual violence are told and heard across the range of media forms. We welcome submissions and are considering the full range of areas of interest including, but not limited to:

• The cultural aims and breakthroughs of #MeToo.
• The visual and narrative signatures of #MeToo era survivor stories.
• Speaking from the margins of #MeToo.
• Refiguring representations of consent, non-consent, violence, post-traumatic stress, secondary victimisation.
• The cultural and affective politics of silencing, speaking out and being heard.
• #MeToo, celebrity and survivor activism.
• Digital and televisual feminisms.
• Privacy, publicity and digital disclosure.
• #MeToo, criminal justice and ‘true crime’ genres.
• Journalist, actor and production perspectives on ethical approaches to survivor stories.
• Media and the legal trials of #MeToo.
• Displaced and resurgent media rape myths.
• Media coverage of #MeToo online and street protests and demonstrations.
• #MeToo, the ‘manosphere’, and weaponised digital communication.
• Mediation, intersectionality and the construction of survivors as ideal or blameworthy.
• Mediation, intersectionality, and the construction of defendants as victims.
• Theorising vulnerability, victimisation, agency, and survival with #MeToomedia texts.
• #MeToostories during COVID-19.
• Teaching triggering content in the #MeToo era.

Dr. Rebecca Stringer
Guest Editor

Georgia Knowles
Guest Editor Assistant

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• #MeToo movement
• media and culture
• sexual violence
• survivor stories
• intersectional survivorship
• disclosure
• rape myths
• celebrity
• backlash
• COVID-19 impacts