MeToo. Meenakshi Gigi Durham
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Dedication
Dedicated to Jayalakshmi Venugopal, a feminist in times and spaces where it wasn’t always easy, and the best mother anyone could have.
MeToo
The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media
Meenakshi Gigi Durham
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Meenakshi Gigi Durham 2021
The right of Meenakshi Gigi Durham to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3519-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3520-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Acknowledgments
This book came to its conclusion in turbulent times, as a deadly virus wracked the globe and Black Lives Matter demonstrations called out the ongoing crisis of racial injustice. Writing was challenging, in part because of the emotional toll these events took, and in part because I couldn’t easily get to the library or to my office at the University of Iowa. So I wrote at home, in between checking news feeds, and I am eternally grateful to my family for understanding and support, as random stacks of books piled up everywhere and I huddled with my laptop behind closed doors. My heartfelt thanks go to my husband Frank, who (as he has done for years) mulled over ideas with me, read and edited draft chapters, brought me cups of coffee when my energy was flagging, and got me to take exercise breaks. My daughters Sonali and Maya inspire me every day with their commitment to feminism and racial and social justice. I’m also deeply grateful to the University of Iowa librarians, especially Tim Arnold and Donald Baxter, for helping me obtain the materials I needed even when campus was officially closed. The amazing colleagues and friends who have supported and encouraged me have my deepest gratitude: I feel lucky to be part of such a lively and collaborative community. Many thanks to Mary Savigar and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer at Polity Books for believing in this project and for their encouragement, knowledge, and patience.
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.
Epigraph
In ancient Greece, Pandora’s box was not actually a box but a jar, or a clay pot with a lid that was kept in the kitchen, where the women were also kept. Maybe it contained evil—or maybe it just concealed it. Maybe Pandora let the evil out, or maybe she blew the lid off what was really going on back there, where nobody else could see it. Anyway, the truth got out, and all hell broke loose, leaving behind only hope.
Carina Chocano, “Plain Sight,” New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2017, p. 13
A feminist ear can be how you hear what is not being heard.
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 2016, p. 203.
Introduction
The media are a linchpin in the contemporary feminist movement against sexual violence.
We are in a “MeToo1 moment”—or so the media tell us. The very term is a media goldmine: not only is it jauntily alliterative, but it seems to have an instantly recognizable meaning. It pops up in headlines and in TV news teasers whenever a famous man is accused of sexual abuse, assault, or harassment, which seems to happen on the hour somewhere in the world.
Although sexual misconduct in the workplace and elsewhere is not a new issue and feminist activism against sex assault has persevered for at least a century now, the intensity of the global upheavals of this MeToo moment marks a striking social shift. The scope and virality of MeToo/#MeToo have exceeded those of any previous online organizing effort around sexual violence.2 The movement is variously referred to as a “culture shock,” a “tsunami,” or an “explosion,” since its ripple effects are being experienced in life-changing ways at multiple levels across the world.
The media are in fact, quite literally, sites of sexual violence: for decades, sexual harassment and assault have been routinized and concealed in corporate media workplaces. Acts of rape have been committed in newsrooms, on film sets, in media executives’ hotel rooms. The strategies used by many media corporations to conceal, and thereby enable, serial sexual assaults show that sexual violence is systemic violence, embedded in the structures of workplaces and buttressed by other institutional mechanisms, such as legal processes and human resources (HR) policies. In the wake of #MeToo, it has become increasingly apparent that these mechanisms and structures are deeply entrenched in a variety of social institutions and in most countries and cultures. The media industries are not unique, but they have awakened a realization that workplaces harbor a rape culture—a culture that not only facilitates rape but, perhaps most damningly, silences its survivors. Media worksites, mediated images and messages, and media social networks all serve to illuminate the way sexual violence percolates throughout societies. The media’s relationship with rape culture is thus of vital contemporary importance.
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