#MeToo

<p>This edited collection on #MeToo activism challenges the overwhelming whiteness and straightness of #MeToo discourse and coverage. Using intersectional and decolonial frameworks and historical, archival, organizational and legal methods, these essays offer a rich exploration of #MeToo to understand how activism around sexualized violence reproduce and harm a wide variety of people. </p><p>The swift and powerful arrival of #MeToo as a compilation of complaints about sexual misconduct (especially in the workplace) has created pressure to dive deeper into the history of sexual assault and abuse in the United States. <i>#MeToo: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist</i> answers the call for more complicated analyses of systemic sexual harassment and abuse with essays that are deeply concerned with the whiteness and heterosexuality of #MeToo coverage and media framing to understand how and why #MeToo began to capture the public’s attention in 2017 against the backdrop of Donald J. Trump’s presidential administration. </p><p>These essays offer the first comprehensive study of the rhetorical politics of #MeToo. They tackle the complexities of sexual harassment, sexual violence and rape beyond white celebrity discourse to understand: how both violence and #MeToo activism affect transgender people; how #MeToo fails Black male victims of assault and rape; how Indian-American masculinity and comedy skirt sexual accountability; how the legal and affective precedent in the Supreme Court during the Kavanaugh hearings amplified concerns about sexual assault and rape; decolonial approaches to resisting sexualized violence from indigenous peoples; and narratives about assault from within the higher education community. </p><p>The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of <i>Women's Studies in Communication.</i></p> <p>Introduction: The #MeToo Moment - A Rhetorical Zeitgeist 1. (Trans)forming #MeToo: Toward a Networked Response to Gender Violence 2. Expendables for Whom: Terry Crews and the Erasure of Black Male Victims of Sexual Assault and Rape 3. #AzizAnsariToo?: Desi Masculinity in America and Performing Funny Cute 4. Anger’s Volumes: Rhetorics of Amplification and Aggregation in #MeToo 5. "Our Bodies Are Not <em>Terra Nullius</em>": Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence 6. Isolating Structures of Sexual Harassment in Crowdsourced Data on Higher Education </p>