Abstract
In this chapter, Loney-Howes traces the historical trajectory between early feminist efforts to highlight the prevalence of sexual violence in the 1970s and the emergence of #MeToo in October 2017. In doing so, she places the #MeToo movement in dialogue with previous forms of anti-rape activism demonstrating the complex relationship between the personal and the political across the history of anti-rape activism. Loney-Howes concludes by reflecting on this tension in relation to some of the institutional responses to #MeToo to discuss the ongoing challenges making the personal political creates for fostering an agenda for social change.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I use the terms rape and sexual violence interchangeably. I acknowledge that legally rape refers to the very specific act of forced penetration of the vagina or anus, whereas sexual violence refers to a range of behaviours and experiences that are not necessarily penetrative but are nonetheless sexual and equally harmful. The literature describes the “anti-rape movement” as encompassing a broad spectrum of sexually violent experiences (see Bevacqua 2000).
- 2.
Scholars have questioned whether the #MeToo movement meets the criteria of a true social movement (see Rosewarne, this collection). For simplicity, I refer to the ‘#MeToo movement’ throughout this chapter, although I acknowledge that this approach is uncritical and problematic. I also acknowledge that the relationship between ‘feminism’ and #MeToo is highly complex and nuanced—something that I do not specifically address in this chapter.
- 3.
Broadly speaking, ‘rape culture’ refers to social attitudes, policies and laws that normalize and trivialize sexual violence or blame women for their own sexual victimization (see Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 1993).
- 4.
This is a more nuanced argument than that posed by Susan Brownmiller (1975), who famously (and controversially) stated, ‘When men discovered they could rape, they proceeded to do it’.
- 5.
‘Date rape’ became a popular term in the late 1980s and 1990s following the publication of a study undertaken by Mary Koss and her colleagues (1987) about incidences of sexual assault on college campuses in the United States. Their findings revealed that one in four women had experienced sexual violence and that young men they were on dates with predominantly perpetrated these assaults—hence the term ‘date rape’.
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Loney-Howes, R. (2019). The Politics of the Personal: The Evolution of Anti-rape Activism From Second-Wave Feminism to #MeToo. In: Fileborn, B., Loney-Howes, R. (eds) #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_2
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