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Join Leigh Gilmore, author of The #Metoo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women for our April Be the Change. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event!The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?
Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism—storytelling in the service of social change—elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: uniting millions of separate accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.
Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how “reading like a survivor” provides resources for activism.
Leigh Gilmore is professor emerita of English at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (Columbia, 2017), The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (second edition, 2023), and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (1994), as well as coauthor of Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (2019). She contributes regularly to WBUR’s Cognoscenti.
Hillary Chute is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. She is the author or editor of seven books, including Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (from Columbia University Press in 2010), Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (from Harvard University Press in 2016), Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (from Harper in 2017), and the collection Maus Now: Selected Writing (from Pantheon in 2022). She has written for venues including Artforum, Bookforum, the Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, which began running her “Graphic Content” column in 2018
Porter Square Books will donate 20% of sales from 3-5PM to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.
Founded in 1973, the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC) is the only comprehensive rape crisis center in the Greater Boston area and the oldest and largest center of its kind in New England. Their mission is to end sexual violence through healing and social change.
BARCC provides free, confidential support and services to survivors of sexual violence ages 12 and up and their families and friends. They work with survivors of all genders, and our goal is to empower survivors to heal and seek justice in ways that are meaningful to them. They meet the needs of survivors in crisis and long after, and they also assist them as they navigate the health-care, criminal legal, social service, and school systems.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Porter Square Books, 25 White St,Cambridge,MA,United States