Chapter 2 - Graphic Witness: Visual and Verbal Testimony in the #MeToo Movement

Summary

During 48 hours in October 2017, nearly one million women shared the words ‘MeToo’ on social media and brought a new level of visibility to the old problem of sexual violence in women’s lives. Words were central, but images quickly emerged to visualise a graphic witness that was testimonial rather than confessional. This chapter explores how the histories underlying the MeToo movement were revealed by the co-evolution of words and images in the early months of a resurgent public conversation about sexual violence and accountability. Taken together, they illustrate the testimonial trajectories of women’s accounts of harm in a public sphere primed to doubt and discredit them. In the absence of intersectional feminist analysis about the history of advocacy for survivors by women of colour and the harm of chronic and pervasive doubt, blame, and injustice in women’s lives, MeToo narratives fragment into confessional shards that are as likely to cut the victim as the victimiser. However, contextualising the MeToo movement within the testimonial tradition of race and gendered self-representation and the history of feminist advocacy for survivors explains the power of graphic witness.