The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women

For many years, it has been a sport for journalists to blast the annual MLA conference for obscure topics and esoteric theories, implicating literary criticism and all who practice it for our self-indulgent, time-wasting pursuit. What use is there in it? To these ill-informed judges I present Leigh Gilmore’s The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women, a most useful book for understanding this movement to end sexual violence. In it, Gilmore demonstrates how feminist and autobiographical theory, well-practiced, can illuminate undiscovered depths in even a cultural phenomenon as cross-examined as “#MeToo.”Gilmore, professor emerita of English at Ohio State University, has long been a distinguished scholar of women’s autobiography and life-writing, having published the influential Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation in 1994. And so, she arrives at the #MeToo moment with a depth of analysis and sharpened insight delightful to follow from page to page. Resting on a foundation of real-world examples, of critical textual examination of women’s stories, and of confidence in the power of narrative, she builds an argument that this internet-phenomenon-turned-social-change-movement provides a much-needed extrajudicial path to gender justice in systems built to block it. But what makes the argument downright exhilarating is that, without fanfare or apology, Gilmore’s book celebrates that old feminist link between theorizing and activism so often under fire today. This careful analysis supports, legitimates, and escalates the movement.Gilmore begins with the legal conundrum of “He said/She said” that has traditionally and purposefully undermined women victims’ stories in court. Introducing a concept she reiterates throughout, Gilmore asserts that “doubt hounds women,” that our legal system has insisted on corroboration of rape accusations in a way it doesn’t require of victims of any other crime. If he said this and she said that, a context of unequal power convinced us that his voice was more credible. #MeToo, however, tipped the balance. Gilmore writes, “As the group credibility of survivors rose, it created what I call the #MeToo effect: the gelling of millions of diverse accounts into a collective voice that exposed systemic violence” (4). As she frames it, “He said/She said” became “We said.”The first half of the book, then, establishes #MeToo as a breakthrough, representing a shift in what was expected of victims of sexual violence. Gilmore describes this move as not just from victim to survivor, but also from confession, which appeals to authority for forgiveness, to testimony from “a subject who bears witness to harm and seeks justice” (67). She recounts “how survivors used narrative rather than strictly legal, administrative, or policy tools to revive a longstanding public conversation about sexual justice” (xii). In short, a chorus of women broke through the barriers of practices and policies that had, until then, minimized their experience and silenced their voices.However contemporary the movement seems to be, arriving to combat today’s structural injustices with collective truth-telling, Gilmore reminds us of the many narratives that laid the groundwork for #MeToo. Throughout the text, she examines these precursors as well as those that came in the wake of the movement, stories as diverse as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, the testimony of Anita Hill, the Women’s March in 2017, Tarana Burke’s activist action that created the original platform for #MeToo, and the multiplying Tweets from the likes of Alyssa Milano, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga that advanced the movement. Gilmore’s account of the hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in chapter 5, “#MeToo Stress Test,” is particularly effective, highlighting as it does the attacks Christine Blasey Ford endured for her testimony that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. It was as if she were the one on trial, writes Gilmore, as the Senate Judiciary Committee “attempted to stuff the #MeToo genie back into the ‘he said/she said’ bottle” (83). The result was predictable. When a woman speaks out against a perpetrator “in their rise to or maintenance of power and reputation,” she is sacrificed while he is protected “in proceedings freighted with gendered doubt” (94, 95).The idea of learned “gendered doubt” carries through in the second half of the book, as Gilmore takes the insights of the movement into a series of practices for its continuation under the stress of persistent patriarchal dismissal. She argues for a critical practice that allows survivors to be heard, one that witnesses their trauma, a practice she calls “survivor reading.” Guiding readers through literary texts, beginning with Antigone, where the story has turned on the denial of women characters’ witness, Gilmore poses the question: “Why is it so hard to give women a hearing?” (118).The practice of doubt is deeply embedded, as she demonstrates. As readers build critical skills in cultural, canonical, and historical contexts, we learn who is suspect, who is most often an unreliable narrator, or whose voice is simply insignificant. Then our learned practice of doubting women characters “migrate[s] from rhetoric and literary studies into the public domain, where it attaches readily to victims of sexual assault” (122). Reading literature prepares us to render certain characters unhearable, to ignore their witness, she argues. Think of Daisy in The Great Gatsby and her repeated attempts to get anyone to notice that her husband is violent, Gilmore points out. Of course he is violent, but because the knowledge comes from his mistress, Myrtle, it slips by readers. Consider, too, Daisy’s friend Jordan, whom Nick, the unreliable narrator who amasses credibility by the novel’s end, quickly judges a liar. With Nick, we read these women characters as attention-seeking, overly dramatic, or simply untruthful; in this way, practices of reception, in patriarchal contexts, train readers to dismiss women’s stories (with tragic consequences for Gatsby).And we come back to the feminist question of Gilmore’s subtitle: “What happens when we believe women?” What if we could read survivors “as credible rather than unreliable by default” (123)? With Tarana Burke’s call for empathy and identification as a model, Gilmore’s survivor reading invites new practices of listening and witnessing. It offers communal and contextual confirmation and epistemic justice in the face of embedded injustice. It should also be noted that for this project Gilmore defines “woman” as a category of feminist analysis, and “as a name people call themselves,” rather than as a biological descriptor. It is certainly, in this study, a category with considerable cultural and legal consequence.Gilmore ends with a return to “narrative activism” and a call for “justice through memoir.” She encourages both writing, “#MeToo storytelling” that, again, creates “group credibility,” and reading, the more attentive “survivor reading” that catalyzes a community of witnesses who can hear and believe women’s stories. Together, they can open doors not only to better reading, but to practices of reception that move us closer to justice beyond the texts. It is striking, however, given the many disturbing stories of injustice she tracks here, that her concluding question is not about reading or writing but about action: “What do we owe survivors?” (180). Gilmore calls for “a new norm of credibility and accountability where doubt and impunity previously ruled” for those who have endured sexual violence (180).Following a clear path of activist theorizing, from the early writings of Mary Ellmann and Kate Millett that recentered women writers and marginal women characters, through Judith Fetterley’s practice of “resisting reading” of patriarchal texts, to Toni Morrison’s all-out refiguration of the American literary tradition as “playing in the dark,” Gilmore’s book offers direction for feminists aiming to tell the truth about sexual violence. With The #MeToo Effect, Gilmore effectively identifies, credits, elucidates, and energizes both feminist literary theory and feminist activism in this twenty-first century context.