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 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.
