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A review by barel93
The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women by Leigh Gilmore
3.0
This is a case of "It's not you, it's me" -- for the most part. I have read my fair share of academic and non-academic books on the #MeToo movement at this point and I found this one to be saying pretty much the same thing. In that sense, if you want an overview of the key events and figures of the #MeToo movement (as the story is currently being told) and a precursory look into how it fits with the longer history of anti-rape activism in the US, this might be a good start. It hits all the major moments (Weinstein, Tarana Burke, Christine Blasey Ford) with some interesting additions (tracing the genre of rape memoir to Harriet Jacobs, talking about Vanessa Springora's book "Consent").
Overall, I found myself disappointed in this book. It treads very well-established ground both on the side of the history of anti-rape activism, and the literary theory aspect of it. In addition to the actual facts and events being repetitive, I think the most interesting concepts were given a surface-level treatment and never really unpacked with the thoroughness they deserved. For instance, Gilmore introduces the concept of "reading like a survivor" as a strategy for engaging with stories of sexual violence, but she never makes the distinction between reading survivor's stories and reading literature more broadly. Nor does she probe or problematize the notion of reading or the ethics of asking art and readers to do the work of repair.
In fact, I thought she was going in a very thought-provoking directions by bringing up the hermeneutics of suspicion as a mode of reading and how that underpins our relationship to women's voice (this could have been a great opportunity to engage with the notion of skepticism that marks a lot of philosophy and questions of epistemology). Instead, it was brushed aside in two paragraphs to rehash narratives we have heard so many times before.
Not necessary a bad book per se, just a very safe and unoriginal one.
Overall, I found myself disappointed in this book. It treads very well-established ground both on the side of the history of anti-rape activism, and the literary theory aspect of it. In addition to the actual facts and events being repetitive, I think the most interesting concepts were given a surface-level treatment and never really unpacked with the thoroughness they deserved. For instance, Gilmore introduces the concept of "reading like a survivor" as a strategy for engaging with stories of sexual violence, but she never makes the distinction between reading survivor's stories and reading literature more broadly. Nor does she probe or problematize the notion of reading or the ethics of asking art and readers to do the work of repair.
In fact, I thought she was going in a very thought-provoking directions by bringing up the hermeneutics of suspicion as a mode of reading and how that underpins our relationship to women's voice (this could have been a great opportunity to engage with the notion of skepticism that marks a lot of philosophy and questions of epistemology). Instead, it was brushed aside in two paragraphs to rehash narratives we have heard so many times before.
Not necessary a bad book per se, just a very safe and unoriginal one.