The #MeToo Effect

February 27, 2023
In this sharp study, Gilmore (Tainted Women), a professor emerita of English at Ohio State University, examines how the #MeToo movement used narrative “tools to revive a longstanding public conversation about sexual justice.” She contends that sexual assault survivors sharing their stories on social media under the hashtag #MeToo in late 2017 constituted the “gelling of millions of diverse accounts into a collective voice that exposed systemic bias.” The collective nature of the movement was crucial, Gilmore posits, because the sheer number of accounts made it difficult to dismiss sexual abuse as a widespread and systemic problem. Touching on Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 slave narrative, the transformations undergone by rape survivors in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Senate testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, and Mary Gordon’s 2020 novel, Payback, Gilmore encourages “reading like a survivor,” which entails extending the empathy and “care we feel for literary characters to actual survivors.” The author’s mixture of literary and feminist analysis yields eye-opening insights and provides fresh ways of thinking about the power of survivors’ stories. The result is a thoughtful and thorough consideration of a global movement.