ENGL 391 B1: Topics in Women's Writing: #MeToo

T. Zackodnik

In 2006, Tarana Burke founded the MeToo Movement to support Black and brown women and girls who had survived sexual violence and to connect them with resources to support their survivorship. She has since also identified the movement with work on harm reduction. On October 15, 2017, #MeToo went viral when actress Alyssa Milano invited others to tweet "me too" if they had, like her, survived sexual violence. Since then #MeToo has gone global, has been identified with white celebrities, and has also become what many call a labor movement when workers in the service industry walked out to protest sexual violence (including harassment) at their workplaces. We have also seen #MeToo in academia, with iterations around the world. Accompanying #MeToo on social media, particularly Twitter, has been what we might identify as #MeToo literature. In this course, we will take #MeToo as a focus to read women's writing in various genres and mediums that articulate what has been called "women's anger" or "women's rage" over the couplings of sex, power, and forms of violence in patriarchal societies. Throughout, we will pay attention to racialization, gendering and genders, and sexualities as pressure points for what a mainstreaming of #MeToo has made possible, in both affordances and challenges.