#MeToo and Literary Studies : Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature.

#MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world.

“"#MeToo is a powerful hashtag, rallying cry, and cudgel. But lasting change requires association, deep thinking, and nuance-and for that, we turn to literature. #MeToo and Literary Studies beautifully demonstrates how writers have been describing the realities of sexual violence for decades, and how literary analysis can help provoke meaningful transformation of rape culture.” —Jennifer Baumgardner, director of It Was Rape and co-author of Manifesta

“This collection of timely, wide-ranging, and diverse essays demonstrates the power of #MeToo to reframe prior debates and silences in literary studies. The editors make a compelling case for #MeToo storytelling as part of a long history of representing sexual violence in literature. The essays interweave literary studies, social activism, and pedagogy in generative new readings. #MeToo and Literary Studies is essential reading and invaluable equipment for scholars, teachers, and students engaging with rape culture, misogyny, and literature.” —Leigh Gilmore, Visiting Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA, and author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives

“The essays in this exciting collection by a diverse group of feminist scholars make the case that the study of literature is also a performance of activism. #MeToo and Literary Studies maps representations of rape culture across geographies both local and global, and wide-ranging texts from communities subjected to sexual violence. The book persuasively demonstrates how literature freshly analyzed through critically engaged writing and innovative pedagogies can lead to radical social change. A crucial anthology for our dark times. ” —Nancy K. Miller, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, The CUNY Graduate Center, USA and author of My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism

“Fighting rape culture starts with making it visible. #Metoo and Literary Studies does that and so much more. It uses literature to expose the cultural normalization of sexual violence and finds in pedagogy the building blocks necessary to produce a viable alternative. It is scholarly activism at its best.” —Carine Mardorossian, Professor of English and Global Gender Studies, University at Buffalo, NY, USA, and author of Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered

“Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett's #MeToo and Literary Studies is a tour de force, a groundbreaking gathering of feminist scholars who have committed themselves to exposing, contextualizing, and challenging the ongoing trauma of sexual violence in popular culture and literature. Spanning antiquity to our current age, this book maps how artists, activists, and academics have both grappled with the devastating reality of sexual assault, while also imagining beyond the trauma and giving us a collective way forward. #MeToo and Literary Studies is an urgent, transformative, and mandatory read.” —Salamishah Tillet, Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing, Rutgers University, Newark, USA, and author of In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece

“#MeToo and Literary Studies provides a crucial, fascinating, and truly comprehensive deep dive into the vexed relationship between rape culture and literary texts spanning over two thousand years, from Ovid to Jaquira Díaz. The breadth of perspectives canvassed-and interrogated-makes it a breathtaking feat, and a highly necessary volume, for any feminist thinker.” —Kate Manne, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University, USA, and author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020)

“#MeToo and Literary Studies seriously belongs in every English department in middle schools, high schools, and in higher education. But it should not just sit on a shelf. It should be read and discussed by English teachers in department meetings across the school year and every year. There are so many excellent entry points that the various authors in this collection offer from critical analyses of texts we actually teach in the classroom to suggestions of texts we should start including in our curricula; they offer pedagogical approaches for addressing content warnings to masculinities across cultures to restorative justice; they even offer ways we can prevent inflicting further harm in our reading and writing pedagogies. Wholly committed to intersectionality and dismantling systems of domination and power, each chapter offers starting points for addressing sexual violence, rape, and harassment in not only literature but also in our schools, universities, and communities. As a high school English teacher who has been in the classroom for nearly 25 years addressing sexual violence both pedagogically and institutionally, I wish I had had this book much sooner in my work as a feminist teacher-activist. I can keep fighting the good fight now that this book exists.” —Ileana Jiménez, founder of Feminist Teacher, @feministteacher