Untangling the Heteronromative Narrative of #MeToo

The #MeToo campaign gained traction throughout social media, demonstrating how ubiquitous and deadly sexual harassment and abuse are across all socioeconomic levels. Despite how widespread sexual harassment is, the #MeToo movement did not take marginalized people's experiences into account. Instead, neocolonial narratives were reinforced by the momentum's hyper-focus on wealthy, upper-class, white neoliberal feminists. This idea draws on intersectionality, which challenges masculinist or Eurocentric conceptions of oppression. According to this dualistic view of oppression, a person cannot be oppressed for both their gender and ethnicity. In other words, the heteronormative narrative undermines the #MeToo movement by limiting the variety of effective change agents necessary to eradicate many forms of oppression. Thus, this paper aims to expose the heteronormative rhetoric of the campaign as it homogenized the intersectional experiences of marginalized victims.