In the wake of the MeToo movement, revelations of sexual assault and harassment continue to disrupt sexual politics across the globe. Reports of widespread misconduct—in workplaces from doctors’ offices to factory floors—precipitate firings, legal actions, street protests, and policy punditry. Meenakshi Gigi Durham situates media culture as a place in which these broader social struggles are produced and reproduced. The media figures whose depravity sparked the #MeToo movement are symbols of the complexities of sexual desire and consent. Pop culture fuels controversies about rape culture; social media users have launched feminist resistance that turned to real-world activism; and investigative journalists have broken stories of assault, offering a platform for survivors to speak truth to patriarchal power. Arguing that the media are a linchpin in these events, Durham provides a feminist account of the interrelated contexts of media production, representation, and reception. She situates the media as the key site where the establishment of sexuality and social relations takes place, and traces the media's powerful role in both reifying and challenging rape culture. This timely and stimulating book will be of interest to students and scholars of media, communication, gender studies, and sociology, as well as to anyone concerned by the current state of sexual politics.
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Meenakshi Gigi Durham. MeToo
Table of Contents
Guide
Pages
Dedication
MeToo. The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Introduction
Notes on Terminology
Notes
1 Rapacity. Monsters, Inc
Danger Zones
Of Presidents and Pussy Grabs
Notes
2 Representation. E-race-ures
The Naked and the Damned
Reporting and Rape Culture
Notes
3 Resistance. Reckonings
Redress
Notes
Coda Reformulating Desire and Consent
Notes
References
Index
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Dedicated to Jayalakshmi Venugopal, a feminist in times and spaces where it wasn’t always easy, and the best mother anyone could have.
Most of all I thank my mother, Jayalakshmi Venugopal, for her brilliance, sense of humor, and love. Her passing this year has left a chasm in the world.
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The silencing of sexual violence survivors as a result of the influence of rape myths is one of the most serious consequences of rape culture. Sexual assault survivors are reluctant to report for a range of reasons, many of which are related to fears created by rape myths. It is telling that such fears are reflected in studies across a wide range of countries and cultures, races and identities. Worldwide, a pitifully small percentage of sexual assaults are reported to the police or other authorities: the estimates of reported cases of sexual violence range from 5 to 25 percent of the number of actual cases.16 Even for rich and famous white women in the global North, a culture of silence allowed multiple incidents of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment to continue unchecked for decades in some of the world’s wealthiest corporations.
In the chapters that follow I will trace the specific strategies and structures of rape culture that harbored and hid sexual predation in the media industries, silencing the capacity of survivors to disclose their assaults. Delving into these processes requires a multifaceted analysis of the media environment: the workplace conditions that condone and conceal sexual violence, but also the mediated representations and images through which rape culture is circulated and interpreted and the ways in which the media—especially social media—have become a catalyst for silence breaking and for feminist activism against rape culture.
