The limits of #feminism

All is not well with ‘hashtag feminism’ either. While acknowledging that one important way to alleviate victim shame is by creating forums — including online ones — where people can share their experiences and, as Tarana Burke put it, take comfort from the fact that ‘they’re not alone’, there are dangers. Empathy is a learned practice. As such, it raises six very different problems.

First, online feminism can privilege the individual over the systemically abused community. With the rise of young, highly paid, feminist ‘influencers’ on social media, competition rather than compassion is the norm. Stories of pain become ‘branded’ commodities, with ‘survivors’ vying for the highest number of ‘likes’. Disclosing stories of sexual abuse can become a form of neoliberal self-fashioning rather than a feminist strategy for social transformation. The political becomes personal.

Second, it ignores the fact that empathy is neither a predictable, nor even a common response to witnessing the pain of others. One study of 82 girls and women who shared their experiences of sexual abuse via #BeenRapedNeverReported found that nearly three-quarters had subsequently been trolled or received other negative responses to their posts. Another study revealed the astonishing fact that Twitter users who shamed victims and blamed them for their own violations were more likely to be retweeted than those who tweeted victim-supportive messages. 

Disturbingly, some feminists have turned to reverse-trolling. Acting as ‘digilantes’, they use digital technologies to punish boys and men who troll girls and women sharing their experiences of abuse or harassment online. 

Third, should we be worried about the potential isolation of social media activism? When MeToo was established by Tarana Burke, its purpose was to ensure that survivors knew that they were not alone: they belonged to a community that would — together — support healing and personal growth in the context of systemic oppressions. However, large swathes of the movement have taken an ‘individualist turn’. ‘Speaking out’ has become a ‘good in-and-of itself ’. It risks making victims once again responsible for their own healing.

Sociologist Alison Phipps is particularly eloquent in her critique of the commodification of ‘experience’. She argues that turning individual experiences into a form of ‘capital’ ends up ‘both reflect(ing) and perpetuat(ing) the neoliberal invisibility of structural dynamics: it situates all experiences as equal, and in the process fortifies existing inequalities.’

She warns that the turn to experience tends to ‘reify personal narratives as the origin of explanation’, therefore ‘dehistoricising it and essentialising identities’. If we take ‘experience as our starting point... we lose a focus on the historical conditions that shape and produce it and risk shoring up rather than contesting ideological systems’.

Fourth, it is important to return to questions of multiple, interlocking oppressions. Digital practices of ‘calling out’ sexual abusers might gratifyingly reverse ‘due process’ by giving weight to the testimony of survivors of sexual abuse, but it also has the potential to undermine alliances between anti-sexist and anti-racist activists. After all, the abusers of many Black and minoritised women are Black or minoritised men. This makes feminist scholar Ashwini Tambe anxious.

In her article entitled Reckoning with the Silences of MeToo (2018), she observes that ‘The primary instrument of redress in #MeToo is public shaming and criminalisation of the perpetrator. This is already too familiar a problem for Black men. We know the history of how Black men have been lynched based on unfounded allegations that they sexually violated white women. We know how many Black men are unjustly incarcerated. The dynamics of #MeToo, in which due process has been reversed — with accusers’ works taken more seriously than those of the accused — is a familiar problem in Black communities. Maybe some Black women want no part in this dynamic.

It is a point well made.

Fifth, hashtag feminism can encourage a false sense of community: because ‘we’ share the same hurts or harms, then ‘we’ can ‘know’ the Other person. This is always dangerous. Finally, online activism requires ‘off-line action’. This is Nanjala Nyabola’s point when writing about anti-rape initiatives in Kenya. She contends that ‘without the off-line platforms, it is difficult to push through policy-level change.’ The hashtag campaigns were successful because there were one or more activists or advocates in the background who went to the hospital to procure pictures, who met the victims at the airport and escorted them to a safe house, who made sure that the victim was available for court appearances.

In other words, hashtag feminism depends on on-the-ground feminists like Tarana Burke and Marai Larasi, working with their own communities to eradicate the shame, humiliation and fear that many victims are made to feel.
Acknowledging the shame that victims of sexual abuse experience is important if we are to effectively counter it. However, there are problems. Ironically, by emphasising the view that rape is worse than death, feminists could be making the shame worse. 

This is why shame needs to be turned on its head: shame belongs to those who inflict, not experience, harm. The insights of Tarana Burke are astute: sharing one’s experience of abuse with other like-minded girls, women and ‘queer folk’ can forge bonds of solidarity. If hashtag feminism is to mean anything, it is that ‘we are not alone.’

(Excerpted with permission from Joanna Bourke’s Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence published by Speaking Tiger.)