CHAPTER 13

It Happened to #Metoo: Queer Feminist

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Critique of Cisgender White Feminism

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Tiina Rosenberg

1
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On November 19, 2017, the hashtag #Tystnadtagning (lights, camera, action)
brought hundreds of Swedish actresses to public demonstrations against sexual
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2 harassment and violence following the call #MeToo. On October 5, 2017, the
3 New York Times had revealed that film producer Harvey Weinstein had regu-
4 larly abused women for some thirty years. The article recounted a pattern that
5 evoked the perennial feminist question: Why does no one put a stop to men
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6 harassing women? Weinstein was fired and the story could have ended there,
7 but ten days later actress Alyssa Milano posted the message, now legendary,
8 that went viral on Twitter: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write
9 ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Thereby global momentum for sharing expe-
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10 riences of sexual assault was set in motion. The situation changed dramatically
11 and sexist behavior was publicly condemned worldwide (NY Times Editorial
12 Staff 2020).
13 The term #MeToo was not a new one but had been used since 2006 by
14 African-American activist Tarana Burke. In her work against sexual violence
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15 she coined the term to let other survivors know they are not alone and to
16 create solidarity among victims. But it was Milano’s message on Twitter that
17 spread around the globe. In just a few days her tweet received thousands
18 of answers from women in different countries and professions, revealing a
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19 vast structural problem. As for Harvey Weinstein, he became synonymous

T. Rosenberg (B)
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: tiina.rosenberg@teater.su.se

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 223

Switzerland AG 2021
S. D’Urso et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans
Feminisms in Contemporary Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69555-2_13

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 224 T. ROSENBERG

Fig. 13.1 #MeToo

(2017)is a social
movement against sexual
abuse and asexual
harassment against
women.

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20 not just for Hollywood’s casting-couch culture, but for sexual assault women

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21 have endured in workplaces for centuries. While #MeToo was conquering
22 the world, a related movement, #Time’s Up, was launched through the New
23 York Times. Supporting the project were prominent actresses such as Reese
24 Witherspoon, Natalie Portman, and Emma Stone. Oprah Winfrey’s #Time’s
25 Up address, delivered at the 2018 Golden Globes when she became the first
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26 African-American woman to receive the Cecil B. de Mille Award, made the
27 messianic claim: “A new day is on the horizon where nobody has to say ‘me
28 too.’”.
29 Following millions of shared stories of sexual assault, harassment, and
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30 violence, Time magazine celebrated those in the #MeToo movement who

31 broke the silence as the “person of the year 2017.” Nevertheless, the question
32 remains whether all women were included in the movement. As journalist and
33 activist June Eric-Udorie writes, “When white feminists focus their attention
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34 on issues that mostly affect affluent, cisgender, heterosexual, white women like
35 themselves, they fail to address life-or-death issues facing millions of women of
36 colour, disabled women, queer women, trans women, poor women and other
37 marginalized groups (2018, pp. xix–xx) (Fig. 13.1).
This is what happened to #MeToo in Sweden, where the movement was
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38

39 widespread. This chapter examines whether the testimonial performances of

40 the #MeToo movement were a liberating feminist revolution or only a social
41 media hype for white, cisgender, and privileged women. It considers that while
42 feminists have been organizing against violence for centuries, these actions
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43 have had their limitations with regard to disadvantaged women and under-
44 represented communities. By using a broad definition of violence that includes
45 effects on quality of life and leisure, psychological and sexual well-being, and
46 physical and mental health, I also claim that the mainstream cultural and polit-
47 ical impact of #MeToo re-focused attention away from violence towards all
48 women, thus functioning, at least partially, as a backlash against feminism and
49 women’s rights (Boyle 2019).

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 13 IT HAPPENED TO #METOO: … 225

50 Hashtag Feminisms
51 Feminist activism is all about timing and context. While this may take many
52 forms, activists today come together by organizing around social media
53 communities. Social media is defined as any online space that relies on a partic-
54 ipatory mode of production to proliferate content. The actual “space” of social
media encompasses countless functions beyond content, such as communica-

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56 tion, networking, and file sharing. There has been a shift between a top-down
57 style of production, where content was produced by a small elite for mass
58 consumption, towards a more horizontal approach in which content is created
59 and shared by those who consume it (Fuchs 2017).

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60 Global outrage prompted by the hashtag #MeToo and the subsequent
61 outpouring of related hashtags and social media debates about sexual assault
62 were manifestations the world needed to hear. A hashtag is a phrase on social
63 media denoted by a pound sign (hash) in front of it and used to identify

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64 messages on a specific topic. Twitter is an online social networking service in
65 which users are able to read and post messages of 140 characters or less called
66 “tweets.” Users can choose to “follow” other users, which allows them to read
67 and respond to their posts. Twitter is primarily designed for speech–strong,
declarative utterance—that makes it an especially powerful vehicle for activism.
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69 This new technology has become an essential tool in social movements world-
70 wide as a departure from conventional face-to-face networks. Movements
71 such as the Arab Spring (2010), Spain’s Indignados/15-M Movement (2011–
2012), and the global Occupy movement (2011) pioneered in utilizing social
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72

73 media platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, for organizing activism

74 (Macías 2015, p. 45).
75 Political scientist Shlomo Avineri states that social media have made an
76 enormous contribution to the democratization of public discourse and the
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77 empowerment of people who had previously been rather passive recipients of

78 traditional means of communication, such as newspapers, radio, and television.

79 What we are witnessing today is something like virtual direct democracy. This
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80 ‘Twitter democracy’ does not even make it necessary for one to stand in the
81 heat or rain in the Athenian agora. One can comfortably recline in one’s chair at
82 home or in the pub and address millions above the heads of their elected leaders,
83 political parties, and newspapers. The traditional mediating institutions, which
84 helped to moderate extremism and made compromises and coalitions necessary,
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85 are being swept aside by the unfiltered vox populi. (Avineri 2017, p. 32)

86 However, social media is neither another nor an alternative world. The net
87 giants’ hegemonic power is one of the greatest problems of our time, as the
88 internet is the perfect habitat for the monopolistic knowledge of our habits and
89 emotions. Facebook is a good example of this. Social media has also proven
90 to be an effective weapon in the hands of powerful public figures like Donald
91 Trump, the “Twitter president.” The #MeToo movement has emerged in a
92 political context that has seen the rise of “respectable” sexism and racism

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93 tied to right-wing populism in a culture largely characterized by appeals to

94 emotion and disconnected from facts. With Trump’s accession to power in
95 the US, politics have been defined by his erratic Twitter outbursts, blatant
96 racism, and sexism, and flagrant lies, forcing his administration to operate as a
97 government in perpetual crisis. The political climate has changed dramatically:
98 whereas from the 1970s to the early 2000s the support for such demo-

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99 cratic principles as minority rights and freedom of expression had increased
100 in Europe, the trend then reversed, with nationalists and right-wing populists
101 gaining increasing attention. Judged by the results of recent parliamentary
102 elections, the liberal democratic values of Europeans have declined (Mudde

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103 2016, 2017).
104 Although there are challenges to how social media platforms are designed
105 and used, global conversations have undeniably been made accessible to many
106 more participants than before. While the current generation has been accused
107 of spending too much time on their cell phones, social media has been key
108

109

110

111
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in mobilizing those who previously felt disempowered to put pressure for
change on cultural and political institutions. Social media activism connects
grassroots activists from many different parts of society with other femi-
nists. Writing about Black Twitter, media scholar Kelly Macías, emphasizes
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112 the importance of this way for women of color to connect with each other
113 to discuss issues pertaining to Black feminism (2015, p. 14). Black feminist
114 scholar Joan Morgan says that social media “allows women to get access to
115 women [such as] bell hooks and even me, without a classroom. It enables
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116 feminism to meet them where they are and where they live, which is actually
117 where I think they should be getting it” (cited in Lemieux 2014, p. 14).
118 Although social media is an efficient means, we should pay attention to
119 feminist activists’ unpaid work. In mapping feminist geographies of digital
work, human geographer Lizzie Richardson, states that we need to closely
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120

121 follow the development of digital spaces and the role feminist activism will
122 have there. Social media platforms are used as course reading at universi-
123 ties and as contemporary sources for feminist research. They report directly
124 from the field, have a global spread, and are generally a step ahead of journal
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125 articles and books that do not see publication for months or years. In chal-
126 lenging normative categorizations of work Richardson appends feminist digital
127 activist labor to the definition of working activities, pointing out that feminist
128 blogs, tweets, and Facebook updates are often used and plagiarized, while the
feminists who produce this work are neither paid nor acknowledged (2016,
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130 pp. 244–263).

131 White, Straight Celebrity Feminists

132 While social media is the place for feminist activists to create and share content,
133 it is also an influential platform for discussing feminism itself. For some
134 time now, high-powered women from Hillary Clinton to Beyoncé, have been
135 identifying as feminists in public. Celebrities such as Patricia Arquette, Lena

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136 Dunham, Sarah Silverman, Emma Stone, Meryl Streep, Emma Watson, and
137 Kate Winslet, among others, have used their cultural capital to openly make
138 statements about gender equality. However, as media scholar Laurel Schwartz
139 points out, while feminism has had its moment in the sun as many pop culture
140 icons embraced it, the system in which those personalities operate and gain
141 power has often degraded them (2015, p. 49).

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142 What makes celebrity feminism noteworthy is not simply that celebrities
143 come out publicly as feminists. Rather, it is that they are feminist celebrities
144 who capture the attention of people who might otherwise have had very little
145 exposure to feminism. But however much-making problems visible is impor-

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146 tant, it might not be the solution to them. Kathy Davis, co-editor along with
147 Dubravka Zarkov of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, discusses the
148 unfolding of the #MeToo movement with mixed feelings:

149 I want to raise the question here of who is able to speak out. There are still
150

151

152

153
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many women who would not be able to participate in what has now become the
#MeToo movement, either because they don’t have access to the (social) media
or because the sanctions would be too great. While it certainly took courage
to come out on #MeToo, it was also a platform for individual women who
were confident enough to stand up and powerful enough to be heard. Many of
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154

155 the women were well-known celebrities and they situated themselves as agents,
156 not as victims. This is a very different kind of activism than, for example, Take
157 Back the Night rallies in the USA, the collective protest in India around the
158 ubiquitous harassment of women in public (called ‘eve teasing’) or OpAntiSH
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159 (Operation Anti Sexual Harassment) in Cairo where women and men support
160 women’s access to political demonstrations and religious festivals and rescue
161 them from situations where they are being harassed or assaulted. This kind
162 of activism does not focus on the testimony of individual woman, but frames
163 sexual violence as a collective issue facing all women, which requires raising
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164 public awareness and involving both women and men in grass-root activism as
165 well as transforming institutions which condone violence against women. (Davis
166 and Zarkov 2018, 25:1, p. 5)
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167 Literary scholar Sandra M. Gilbert observes that one of the problems with
168 the #MeToo movement has been its focus on celebrities harassing celebri-
169 ties. However, as the movement’s rapid growth suggested, the main victims it
170 attracted were not models, actresses, or other glamourous women (although
171 they too may be victims), but thousands upon thousands of women in the
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172 quotidian workplace where sexual aggression all too often accompanies power
173 (2018, p. 18). Therefore, a widespread embrace of pop and celebrity femi-
174 nism as a symptom of progress is often a decontextualized and depoliticized
175 marketplace feminism (Rottenberg 2018; Zeisler 2016). The problem appears
176 to be that the feminist revolution has become privatized, neoliberalized, and
177 estranged from its original objective of taking collective action to change
178 whole systems (Zeisler 2016, pp. 249–258; Rosenberg 2018, p. 89).

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179 Nevertheless, there have been many examples of noteworthy feminist

180 performances by pop artists over the years. It is significant that celebrities are
181 involved because celebrity addresses and contemporary pop-feminism reach
182 large audiences, while more underground actions by feminists seldom make
183 newspaper headlines. Pop-feminism can, therefore, act as an introduction to
184 feminism for a wider public. Laurel Schwartz states that “while these celebrities

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185 may simply be people who create public artistic work, they also facilitate a plat-
186 form for strategic organization that is accessible to a mass audience of people”
187 (2015, p. 12). She refers to Black feminist theorist bell hooks’s notion of
188 “organized strategy” within the context of the feminist movement. Feminists

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189 have historically situated gender as the primary cause of inequality for women,
190 without addressing the multiplicity of ways many women experience marginal-
191 ization (2015, p. 12). The women’s liberation movement, for example, was
192 strategically organized to “liberate” a specific group of privileged women. As
193 hooks explains, “The women’s liberation movement has not only been struc-
194

195

196
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tured on a narrow platform, it primarily called attention to issues primarily
relevant to women (mostly white) with class privilege” (2000, p. xii).

Solidarity Matters
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197 “By saying ‘me too’ individual woman makes herself a part of a broader group,
198 and chooses to stand with others who have been harassed, assaulted or raped.
199 This solidarity is powerful,” journalist Moira Donegan writes in The Guardian
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200 (May 11, 2018). However, it can be argued that #MeToo missed the chance to
201 become a truly broad global and intersectional movement, at least in Sweden.
202 Although many feminists associated #MeToo with solidarity and sisterhood,
203 not everyone felt included in the movement. #MeToo has been criticized for
being white, cisgender, and heteronormative, and this is the reason why many
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205 LGBTQ+ activists refused participate in it (Dahl 2018, p. 21).

206 On November 19 and 20, 2017, a group of performers in Sweden called
207 PoC (People of Color) emerged as a reaction against the first public #MeToo
208 manifestations, when hundreds of actresses testified of sexual assault, harass-
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209 ment, and violence in the performing arts, cinema, and television (Pascalidou
210 2017). Although the #MeToo movement did manage to bring about change
211 in the industry, it failed to include women of color. Miriam Andersson, a
212 spokeswoman for the PoC group, argued that the public testimonials acted to
consolidate exclusion and invisibility for women of color in Sweden. She writes
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214 that “our concrete and constructive suggestions on actions that would not
215 seem offensive to us were met with a request not to ‘rock the boat’ and think
216 positively. Interest was shown by some parts of the movement, but those at the
217 forefront remained distant” (Andersson 2018; Twum 2019, p. 55; translation
218 mine).
219 Andersson urged that we should not forget that it was an African-American
220 activist, Tarana Burke, who started the #MeToo movement, and that she was
221 initially deprived of her role in this feminist herstory. Burke has encouraged

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222 young women to speak up and testify anonymously. When the #MeToo move-
223 ment was captured by a white Hollywood celebrity, history repeated itself with
224 white people taking up all the attention (Twum 2019, p. 55). Burke, who
225 has been running healing circles since 1998 for survivors of sexual violence,
226 was taken by surprise as women worldwide adopted her notion “MeToo” as a
227 hashtag in October 2017. Her community-based approach to healing suddenly

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228 had started a global movement. As Burke describes it:

229 What actually happened on October 15 was people raised their hands to say, ‘Me
230 too,’ they opened up and said, ‘Yeah this happened to me.’ And it was millions
of people from all walks of life, every stripe, and I really feel like those people

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231

232 still have their hands up. [....] We are working diligently so that the popular
233 narrative about #MeToo shifts from what it is. We have to shift the narrative
234 that it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that
235 it’s only for a certain type of person–that it’s for white, cisgender, heterosexual,

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236 famous women. That has to shift. And I think that it is shifting, I really do. But
237 that’s a part of our work, too. (Cited in Rowley 2018, pp. 1–2)

238 Malin Gustavsson, a gender equality consultant in Helsinki, Finland, said that
239 many women had such an urgent need to share their testimonies that they did
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240 not pay attention to diversity: “The campaign affected many and in the explo-
241 sive culmination of #MeToo, the majority ignored minorities” (Salo 2018,
242 p. 16, translation mine). One flagrant example of intersectional ignorance in
243 Sweden has been the book Historiens metoo-vrål (A #MeToo Roar of History,
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244 2019) by literary scholar Ebba Witt-Brattström. It is a universalist herstory

245 lession about sexual violence against women in Western literature in which
246 the author uses the term “black feminism” without knowing what it means.
247 The subtitle of the study is “Ain’t I a human being,” but Witt-Brattström
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248 also misses this reference to the African-American abolitionist and women’s
249 rights activist, Sojourner Truth, who in 1851 delivered her famous “Ain’t I a
250 woman?” speech, and bell hooks’s early book Ain’t I a woman? (1981). In
251 Witt-Brattström’s version, “Black feminism” means women writers pleasing
male readers, a peculiar interpretation and an embarrassing sign of political,
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252

253 historical, and theoretical lack of knowledge.

254 The blind spots of white mainstream feminism are in fact many. June
255 Eric-Udorie wonders why it is so difficult for white feminists to understand
256 that they have so much more privilege than the average trans woman, queer
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257 woman, or woman of color. She writes:

258 As a Black woman, I was offended when I attended a feminist rally in London
259 and saw a white woman holding a sign that read, WOMAN IS THE NIGGER
260 OF THE WORLD. In the Women’s March, millions of women and men
261 marched worldwide to protest at the election of Donald J. Trump as the US
262 president and rising levels of fascism and xenophobia. Many of the women wore
263 pink ‘pussy hats’ as a response to Trump’s comments about grabbing women
264 ‘by the pussy’. It was an empowering sight of unity and resistance to see tens

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265 of millions come together, all of them marching for a common cause. But it
266 also stung when I thought about the gender-nonconforming people and trans
267 women for whom the pink pussy hats suggested that womanhood is contingent
268 upon having a vagina, thereby excluding them. I found it painful to stomach
269 how many women marched carrying signs with slogans like PUSSIES AGAINST
270 FASCISM and VIVA LA VULVA. With such signs, did they not see how they
were furthering the cissexist idea that trans women are not ‘real’ women because

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272 they do not have vaginas? (Eric-Udorie 2018, pp. xi–xii)

273 The concern here raises “troubling questions about how we think about how
274 we think and learning to learn differently when notions such as ‘giving voice,’

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275 ‘dialogue,’ ‘telling and testifying,’ and ‘empowernment’ have lost their inno-
276 cence” (Lather 1991, p. 75, italics mine). This conflict is not new. In her
277 essay, “Can the subaltern speak,” postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak
278 wrote that the subaltern has no recognized position in the struggle for hege-
mony and, therefore, cannot be heard (Spivak 1988, p. 271). It is impossible

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279

280 for a privileged, hegemonic group to represent the subaltern (the powerless).
281 On the contrary, it is a misuse of power (“epistemic violence”) to believe
282 that hegemony can reproduce an adequate representation of the subaltern.
283 Rather than asking the question “Can the subaltern speak?” one should ask
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284 the question: “Can the elite listen?”.
285 Sexual violence intersects with other social aspects, such as racial harass-
286 ment, unequal pay, and gender discrimination. The latter is not always the
287 same as discrimination against women. Many people who do not conform to
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288 gender norms of feminine or masculine suffer from discrimination and violence
289 on daily basis. Not all gender discrimination can be explained by the frame-
290 work of masculine domination without an intersectional understanding the
291 role of age, class, immigrant status, race, religion, and sexuality, just to name
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292 a few possible intersections.

293 Whitening Intersectionality

The recurring problem with white mainstream feminism, according to June
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294

295 Eric-Udorie, is the frivolity of the issues it champions: “As they fight these
296 lesser battles, white women ignore the ways that their Black and brown,
297 disabled and trans sisters are still shackled by multiple forms of oppression”
298 (2018, p. xviii). She asks where all the white women were when the #SayH-
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299 erName movement marched in 2015. The #SayHerName movement was put
300 together by the African-American Policy Forum to make visible the names
301 of Black women killed by the police, women who were often ignored in
302 conversations that focused on Black men (2018, pp. xviii–xix).

303 Do these so-called feminists ever stop to consider the fact that there are women
304 who can’t even get through the door–whether because racism, fatphobia, homo-
305 phobia or transphobia–let alone into a boardroom? And when we fail to think

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306 of these women–to advocate for them, to rally for them, and to listen to them–
307 it’s equivalent of saying that their lives, their experiences and their struggles are
308 not important. This kind of feminism is not only wrong but also dangerous.
309 Mainstream feminism’s lack of an intersectional focus could be a mortal threat
310 to its very existence if a plurality of women and non-binary folks don’t see it as
311 a tool that has the power to change their lives. (Eric-Udorie 2018, p. xx)

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312 Feminist legal scholar and anti-racist activist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who in
313 1989 coined the term intersectionality to describe the way different forms of
314 discrimination overlap and compound each other, was also one of the leading
315 activists of the #SayHerName campaign. Media often shines a spotlight on

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316 male victims, passing over Black women who suffer the same fate. Therefore,
317 when Crenshaw speaks at public meetings, she asks everyone to stand up until
318 they hear an unfamiliar name. When she recites the names of the unarmed
319 black boys and men who were killed by the police “virtually no one will sit

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320 down,” but “Then I say the names of Natasha McKenna, Tanisha Anderson,
321 Michelle Cusseaux, Aura Rosser, Maya Hall. By the time I get to the third
322 name, almost everyone sat down” (cited in Khaleeli 2016). In her schol-
323 arly and activist work, Crenshaw writes about the urgency of intersectionality,
saying that propounding this concept has been her attempt to make feminism,
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324

325 anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law do what they should, namely,
326 highlight the multiple ways to understand and discuss intersecting forms of
327 racial and gender oppression (Crenshaw 2015).
328 Feminist scholarship and activism today require transnational and intersec-
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329 tional analysis to enable discussions of overlying complexities. Such debates

330 have gradually (and, in the case of white feminism, often after much struggle)
331 expanded to include other dimensions of gendered identities such as age,
332 class, disability, nationality, postcoloniality, race, religion, sexuality, and more.
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333 However, as sociologist Silma Bilge contends, a whitening of intersectionality

334 has taken place through depoliticization and neutralization. She points out
335 that many recent movements for social justice and democratization have fallen
336 short of intersectional reflexivity and accountability, despite their best inten-
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337 tions of embracing inclusiveness and solidarity, and have also resulted in silence
338 over the misrepresentation of subordinated groups (2013, p. 405).
339 Bilge’s examples include the Arab Spring, the Indignados, the Occupy
340 movement, SlutWalk, and the international student movement. The Occupy
341 movement, to take one example, was challenged by Aboriginal peoples for
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342 lacking decolonial awareness from an anti-colonialist and indigenous-centered

343 perspective (p. 406). Bilge states that the appropriation of intersection-
344 ality by disciplinary feminism is by no means coincidental to the systematic
345 marginalizing of racialized scholars and activists.

346 Reframing intersectionality as a creation of ‘feminism,’ an outcome of feminism’s

347 internal debates, effectively erases a landmark oppositionality from which inter-
348 sectionality emerged: feminists of color confronting racism within feminism. In

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349 this disarticulated and rearticulated intersectionality, race also becomes optional,
350 paving the way to similar oppressions and marginalizations, taking place this
351 time not within feminism, but within feminist intersectionality studies. (Bilge
352 2013, p. 420)

353 Bilge wants to reconnect intersectionality with its initial vision of generating
counter-hegemonic and transformative knowledge production, activism, peda-

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354

355 gogy, and non-oppressing coalitions. In analyzing several activist trends, she
356 criticizes work that neutralizes the political potential of intersectionality, such
357 as confining it to an academic exercise of metatheoretical contemplation, as
well as whitening it by claiming that it requires a broader genealogy than the

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358

359 one that is explicitly connected with Black feminism.

360 Testimonials as Genre: Trauma

and “Wound Fetishism”

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361

362 Although the #MeToo movement largely took place as social media activism,
363 it also had performance spaces other than the internet. Some testimonials were
364 performed in more traditional theatrical settings in solidarity with the feminist
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365 slogan “the personal is the political” that dominated the 1970s. During that
366 era feminists highlighted the importance of participatory processes and collec-
367 tive meaning-making, and the method used was called consciousness raising
368 (Reger 2004).
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369 Literary scholar Nancy Miller has observed that “feminist theory has always
370 built out from the personal witnessing ‘I’ of subjective experience” (1991,
371 p. 14). Testimonials take many forms and circulate in a variety of media (televi-
372 sion, radio, internet, social and mobile media, live performances, presentations,
printed material, works of art, etc.).When thousands of women stand up and
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373

374 attest the sexual harassment and abuse they have suffered, it becomes vital
375 to investigate what supportive norms exist in contemporary society, in the
376 historical record, and in the arts. Sandra M. Gilbert writes that the #MeToo
377 movement raised awareness of the ancient tale of the Minotaur in which “one
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378 lovely girl after another must sacrifice herself to a repellent, all-powerful Ruler”
379 (2018, p. 14).
380 Testimonial literature and performance have been stigmatized as too confes-
381 sional, naïve, private, and sentimental. In the 1980s the rethinking of testi-
monials came from two sources: Holocaust testimonies and Latin American
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382

383 testimonio. Gender scholar Rosanne Kennedy reminds us that testimony over-
384 laps but differs significantly from autobiography and documentary. She writes
385 that “testimonial literature is motivated by the desire to inform the public
386 about an atrocity. The narrator reveals her personal experience not to express
387 the ‘truth’, but to bear witness to a collective injury” (2000, p. 470).
388 Feminist theorists Jackie Stacey and Sara Ahmed find it no coincidence that
389 according to trauma theory a crisis by or within testimonial cultures has been
390 most closely addressed (2001, p. 2). They refer to Freud’s work on hysteria

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391 and mourning, analyzing the way in which the trauma itself is not witnessed:
392 its truth as an event is never grasped in the present, but comes into existence,
393 belatedly, through the recurrence of flash-backs. In tracking an archive of
394 trauma, gender scholar Ann Cvetkovich points out that trauma puts pressure
395 on traditional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration.
396 It gives rise to new genres of expression, such as testimony, and new forms

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397 of monuments, rituals, and performances that can call into being collective
398 witnesses and publics (2003, p. 7).
399 “What happens when feminists speak out against forms of violence, power,
400 and injustice? What role do emotions play in acts of speaking out and in the

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401 ‘spectacle’ of demonstrating against such forms of power,” Sara Ahmed asks
402 (2004, p. 168). She argues that there are good reasons to avoid assuming that
403 women’s pain provides the foundation of feminism, but this does not mean
404 that feminism has nothing to do with pain. Rather, the feminist response to
405 “wound fetishism” should not be to forget the wounds that mark the place
406

407

408

409
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of historical injury. The feminist task is to learn to remember how embodied
subjects come to be wounded in the first place, which requires that we learn
to read that pain (p. 173). When moved into the public domain the pain is
transformed, Ahmed writes; feminism is then shaped by what it is against, just
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410 as women’s bodies and lives may be shaped by histories of violence that bring
411 them to a feminist consciousness (p. 174).

412 Violence Performed: Is a Burden

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413 Shared a Burden Halved?

414 In Violence Performed (2008) Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon are of the
415 opinion that scholars of performance studies are ethically obligated to explore
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416 specific sites of violent acts in addition to addressing larger questions about the
417 performative ontology of violence. Performance studies scholar, Diana Taylor,
418 points out that analyzing performance is not exclusively about what is, but,
419 more importantly, what performance does, what it allows us to see, to experi-
420 ence, and to theorize about, including its complex relationship to systems of
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421 power (2016, p. 6).

422 Anderson and Menon identify three characteristics of violence performed:
423 First, performances of violence are both spectacular in their cultural impact
424 and embodied in their transaction and effect (2008, p. 4) The visual power of
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425 violent acts begins by evoking horror (often experienced with some measure
426 of delight). The practice of witnessing has been critiqued as “impossible” by
427 philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and
428 the Archive (1999), but it is neither accidental nor innocent in the context of
429 contemporary politics. Despite the potential for empathy facilitated by public
430 performances (the sense of having “really been there”), it is the experience
431 of suffering that is primarily lost when images of sexual violence enter the
432 public visual realm. Sexual violence, then, acquires its immense significance
433 in a delicate pivot between the spectacular and the embodied (ibid.). It is

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 234 T. ROSENBERG

434 this quality that calls for consideration by scholars in queer and transfeminist
435 performance studies.
436 Second, sexual violence is a binding affective experience that intersects with
437 the domains traditionally distinguished as the physical, the psychic, and the
438 social (Anderson and Menon 2008, p. 5). Suffering that extends from sexually
439 violent acts cannot be isolated to one single register; it is not simply phys-

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440 ical, psychic, or social. The suffering that extends from violent acts oscillates
441 between the individual and the collective, and are unconsciously as well as
442 somatically significant. The #MeToo movement, as its advocates emphasized,
443 was only to a very small extent about identifying specific individuals. Rather,

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444 it encouraged personal testimonies that revealed repeated social patterns. The
445 movement exposed how men in positions of power have systematically taken
446 advantage of women, and how these crimes have been ignored. Many skeptics
447 protested that it is not easy to know how many men were actually guilty of
448 these accusations. Nonetheless, the resounding question is how many acts of
449

450

451

452
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sexual violence are there that we have never heard of (Irenius 2018).
Third, the conventional distinctions between “victim” and “aggressor” are
often inadequate for fully explaining the effects of violence (Anderson and
Menon 2008, p. 5) This is not to ignore the destructive, often deadly, inten-
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453 tions behind violent actions. Instead, it is more constructive to situate sexual
454 violence within a matrix of conflicts whose complexities are often forgotten in
455 the binary language of domination and resistance. Those who saw the value
456 of #MeToo emphasized that being subjected to sexual harassment and abuse
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457 has long been shameful for the victims. It is, therefore, a major step forward
458 for women who have now dared to share their testimonies in public and place
459 the guilt where it belongs, namely, with the perpetrators. Those who primarily
460 saw disadvantages in the #MeToo movement objected that the movement was
overwhelmed by sensationalist media hype. Individuals were denounced on
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461

462 questionable grounds and those who tried to problematize or challenge the
463 movement were met by resistance and hatred (Irenius 2018).
464 Thus, manifestations and artistic representations of sexual violence are not
465 innocently mimetic, and in fact risk extending the very trauma they seek to
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466 expose. According to Anderson and Menon, representations of specific acts

467 of sexual violence are both descriptive and performative: not merely in their
468 staging and framing, but also in recreating the context in which these violent
469 acts are rationalized. They point out that violence can be traced in the inter-
section of lived experience and systematic social structures, and such violence
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470

471 is also connected to trauma’s place in the social history of sensation (2008,
472 p. 1). The increasing mediatization of violence saturating the public sphere and
473 creating spectacular new forms of what cultural theorist Raymond Williams
474 called “dramatized society” is the result of infusing everyday life with more and
475 more forms of theatrical, cinematic, and televised reproductions of “reality”
476 (cited in ibid.).
477 One of the challenges of using a performance vocabulary in this context is
478 the contested relationship between theatricality and performativity. It is not

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 13 IT HAPPENED TO #METOO: … 235

479 clear what is “just theatre” and what is “truly performative” that brings about
480 real change. “Performance,” Diana Taylor writes, “is a wide-ranging and diffi-
481 cult practice to define and holds many, at times conflicting, meanings and
482 possibilities” (2016, p. 6). For her, performance is not limited to mimetic
483 repetition. It includes the possibility of change, critique, and creativity within
484 frameworks of repetition (15).

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485 Feminist Organizing from the Margins
486 Philosopher Judith Butler (2018) states that the most significant contribution

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487 of the #MeToo movement was that it has enabled a larger public to grasp the
488 existence of systematic and pervasive sexual violence against women. Many
489 perpetrators have managed to carry out their predations under the radar. Even
490 though “everyone knew” their public secret, they were protected by leaders
491 and colleagues. In addition, the media spotlight could not cover all the testi-
492

493

494 DP
monials simultaneously. However, the #MeToo movement has been fixated on
high drama and obsessed with perpetrators. Tarana Burke wants to shift the
focus back to survivors:
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495 What #MeToo allowed people to do was create community with these shared
496 experiences. You have a built-in group of people who automatically gets you,
497 who automatically believes you, who automatically wants to hear you. That’s
498 the wildfire of it. […] At the end of the day, there is a body of work that we’re
building to help those people who have their hands raised. And I’m proud of
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499

500 that. (Cited in Rowley 2018, p. 2)

501 Burke says the #MeToo movement is actually working when the public under-
502 stands that there is no expected narrative, standard perpetrator and victim, or
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503 archetypical story of abuse. Not all gender discrimination can be explained
504 by the framework of masculine domination without an intersectional under-
505 standing of social injustice. Burke also states that the feminist struggle for
506 social justice should not be reduced to the take-down of specific individuals,
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507 neither should sexist structures be obscured by media hype.

508 Although #MeToo anger has been broadly justified, it raises issues about
509 feminist organizing and feminist solidarity, or its lack of it. Women’s anger has
510 been instrumental in several political movements as author Rebecca Traister
511 shows in Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018).
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512 Such anger exists within progressive feminist coalitions and is directed to ways
513 sexism, racism, and white supremacy set up discriminatory hierarchies with all
514 their iterations. However, as Traister points out, women’s anger is not always
515 progressive. Many women of color have been at the forefront of numerous
516 political movements, but have seldom been given credit for it. Both women
517 of color and queer women are under-represented in the movements they have
518 worked for and have rarely had their perspectives, experiences, and priorities
519 made central. “Because of their proximity to white men, white women have

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 236 T. ROSENBERG

520 been able to grab the microphone and usurp or blot out the work of women
521 of color when they become involved in the movement (usually very late),”
522 Traister says (cited in Winchester and Privett 2018). This happened to the
523 #MeToo movement: white women stepped into the forefront because they
524 could and because they were likely to be heard.
525 Queer and trans feminist initiatives should follow the central feminist prin-

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526 ciple that calls for organizing from the margins, that is, prioritizing the needs
527 of the most vulnerable and multiply disadvantaged (hooks 1984). In addition
528 to the greater urgency of protecting those groups, failure to think intersec-
529 tionally can re-entrench other forms of discrimination and sexual violence.

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530 The most vulnerable are already subject to the material and psychic burdens
531 of an ableist, exploitative, homo-/transphobic sexist, and racist society, and
532 are the first to get marginalized in matters of social justice (Zheng 2018,
533 pp. 247–248).
534 June Eric-Udorie urges straight white feminists to look at who is in the
535

536

537 DP
room and who is not, and at what they can do to draw a more diverse feminist
crowd to feminist gatherings and organizations. “If that fails, go to where
those women are,” she writes and says:
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538 To those women with privilege, this is what we need from you: Organise with
539 us, but let us be the authority on our own experiences and in our activism.
540 Don’t speak for us–we can speak for ourselves. And if we can’t, because it is
541 too dangerous or the consequences might be too much to bear, then use your
privilege to raise our voices and our struggles. Show up and show out for us.
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542

543 (Eric-Udorie 2018, p. xxii)

544 A largely unexplored question is what the performing arts can do in combi-
545 nation with feminist intersectional activism. For one thing, the arts in general,
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546 and the performing arts in particular, can address silenced voices and subal-
547 tern forms of life. One purpose of the arts is to introduce new things to the
548 world: voices that have not been heard, bodies that have not been seen, and
549 relationships that have not been acknowledged. For bell hooks the function
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550 of the arts is to imagine what is possible and she writes, “Art constitutes one
551 of the rare locations where acts of transcendence can take place and have a
552 wide-ranging transformative impact” (1995, p. 9). The performing arts are
553 as multifaceted as democracy, and, are by definition social and collective. As
554 live performances, the #MeToo testimonies were well suited to communicate
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555 that alternatives, possibilities, and ultimately hope exist. One might argue that
556 these testimonies are about democracy and human rights more than anything
557 else.

558 Feminist Agonist Pluralism

559 In Toward Democracy (2016), historian James T. Kloppenberg identifies three
560 key elements of a democratic culture: diversity, negotiation, and mutuality.

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 13 IT HAPPENED TO #METOO: … 237

561 These principles may also be applied to various forms of feminisms. First,
562 depending on the context, feminist positions vary in their diversity. In fact,
563 discussing what feminisms are about may constitute the foundation of the
564 movements. Major shifts are going on in feminisms. Intersectional queer and
565 trans feminisms, for example, are necessary re-examinations of feminist prac-
566 tices aiming at strengthening democracy. However, it is unrealistic to believe

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567 that all feminist conflicts and tensions would disappear overnight. Rather, it
568 means that feminists should learn to live with ideological differences.
569 Second, managing democratic diversity requires negotiations. Political
570 scientist Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2013, 2018) claims that an effective demo-

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571 cratic pluralism presupposes an agonistic confrontation between hegemonic
572 projects. She sees politics as unfolding through antagonistic relationships
573 between friend and enemy. Mouffe not only distinguishes between the
574 agonistic and the antagonistic, but wants to replace the concept of antago-
575 nism with agonism. In an agonistic approach, political conflicts can be worked
576

577

578

579
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out in a way that leaves some of them unresolved; Mouffe believes that not
all divergencies need a solution. She concludes that it is good to let some
disagreements exist because they keep the democratic dialogue alive. The move
from an antagonistic to an agonist approach necessitates a restructuring of
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580 power relations within a given society. Mouffe argues that while agonism is a
581 real confrontation, it takes place under democratic auspices and is governed
582 by a set of mutual ground rules approved by political opponents. Rather than
583 attempting to devise institutions with supposedly impartial procedures that
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584 aspire to unite all conflicting interests and values, democratic theorists and
585 politicians should consider setting up an agonistic public sphere where various
586 hegemonic political projects can be confronted. According to Mouffe, this
587 would be an effective exercise of democracy (2005, 2013, 2018).
Third, democracy is also about mutuality. Queer scholar Jack Halber-
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588

589 stam proposes that the reactive positions that anti-transgender feminism
590 has produced should be relinquished and replaced with an affirmative
591 trans*gender project that builds less on antagonistic standoffs and “instead
592 favors odd and quirky theories of self, other, home, world, body, identity,
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593 touching, feeling, knowing, being, becoming, and moving” (2018, p. 110).
594 Halberstam suggests that in order to do so one must both connect with other
595 intellectual feminist genealogies, and also understand the conflicts between
596 some feminists and some transgender women. Halberstam sees new landscapes
of power and domination emerging as a result of the shift from neoliberal
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597

598 inclusion to the post-democratic policies of violent exclusion and the enforce-
599 ment of homogeneity. The conclusion is that “we need to situate sexual and
600 gender minorities carefully rather than claiming any predetermined status of
601 precarity or power. It remains to be seen what the enemy will do, but one
602 thing is sure, for trans* people everywhere, the true enemy has nothing to do
603 with feminism” (2018, p. 128).

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 238 T. ROSENBERG

604 Toward Feminist Coalitions

605 The #MeToo movement shook the world with its anonymous testimonies
606 of sexual violence, and it created strong reactions in many countries. As the
607 process is still ongoing, the global outcome is hard to summarize. It is part
608 of a continuum of feminist activism against the present climate of reactionary
politics and violence. Unfortunately, despite of its successes, it has repeated

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609

610 many of the mistakes that characterize feminism’s history, particularly in its
611 failure to include all women. None of us want to return in time to 1969
612 when the acclaimed straight white feminist, Betty Friedan, argued at a National
613 Organization for Women meeting that lesbians were a threat to the femi-

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614 nist movement because they were a distraction from the feminist struggle for
615 economic and social equality.
616 In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) Butler observes
617 that disenfranchised groups do not share vulnerability homogenously or

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618 equally. Instead, “women, queers, transgender people, the poor, the differ-
619 ently abled, and the stateless, but also religious and racial minorities” suffer
620 in different ways and to differing extents from “failing social and economic
621 networks of support.” In addition, they are “differently exposed to injury,
violence, and death” (33). Thus, the collective feminist “we” is always organic
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622

623 and dynamic, and non-uniform. Such a diverse assembly brings the sphere
624 of appearance into being in the first place, so that what counts in resistance
625 movements is not identity but alliance (60).
Butler has issued a ringing statement concerning the #MeToo movement:
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626

627 For me, the task is not to find a single or synthetic framework, but to find a
628 way of thinking in alliance. The alliance is broad, and this is expanding, and it is
629 a struggle for a more radical democracy. If there is a common political project,
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630 it is to be found in the affirmation of a society that will join together to fight
631 the new forms of authoritarianism and fascism – women and their allies will
632 doubtless be at the forefront, but so too will be the queers and the trans, the
633 sans papiers, and those whose work no longer pays them a living wage. If we
634 know what we are fighting, and what kind of world we wish to build, we may
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635 find our common cause. (Butler 2018, L’Humanité. March 8. https://www.
636 humanite.fr/etiquettes/judith-butler)

637 Sexual violence in society in general, and in the performing arts in particular,
must be resisted through collective solidarity across varying levels of privilege
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638

639 and vulnerability. Special attention should be paid to disadvantaged commu-

640 nities. By keeping their interests before us and rejecting proposals that do
641 not work for them, we undo the gendered and racialized logics at the core
642 of the system (Zheng 2018, pp. 247–248). In reference to Stefano Harney
643 and Fred Moten’s book, The Undercommons (2013), Halberstam concludes
644 that the way to address racism, sexism, and homo-/transphobia is to realize
645 that discrimination affects everyone, not only the people toward whom it is

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 13 IT HAPPENED TO #METOO: … 239

646 directed. What is needed is a coalition that understands that change for some
647 means change for everyone (2018, p. 135).
648 Political action is an interaction with others. Sexual violence can create
649 submission, but cannot rule over queer lives in the long run. The #MeToo
650 movement was both a media hype and a part of an ongoing feminist revolution
651 that envisions a truly democratic society. A burden shared is a burden halved.

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652 We feminists need to identify equitable approaches to the diversity within
653 our ranks, mindful that there may be conflicts, but committed to embracing
654 complexity with an open mind, and a still more open heart.

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655 Bibliography
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790 Traister, Rebecca. 2018. Good and Mad. The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.
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803 Websites and Podcasts

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ments of the stage). Swedish Radio, October 15, 2010. https://sverigesradio.se/
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Milano, Alyssa, tweet October 15, 2017, https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/
919659438700670976.
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809 MeToo movement in the US: https://metoomvmt.org.

810 MeToo movement in Sweden: https://metoouppropen.se.
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812 Other Women Can Be Instructive”. Reading women podcast December 12. https://
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813 lithub.com/rebecca-traister-the-anger-of-other-women-can-be-instructive/.
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