Speaking Truth to Power in a Digital Age: #MeToo as Parrhesia

Abstract

In October 2017, #MeToo quickly became a global phenomenon: shared over 12 million times on social media in the first twenty-four hours, reaching over eighty-five countries, there would be a “before” and an “after.” As a polyphonic global cry against the prevalence of sexual violations, #MeToo is hard to apprehend or theorize within traditional frameworks. Neither a social movement as such nor an organized, coordinated campaign, #MeToo has no leaders, structures, defined aims, or specific goals behind it. Hence, what exactly is #MeToo, and how can we understand it in all its contradictions, nuances, and complexities? This article argues that #MeToo can best be understood as a contemporary form of parrhesia, a practice from Ancient Greece that, as Michel Foucault writes, consists of speaking dangerous truth to power and taking risks in doing so out of a sense of duty to improve a situation for oneself and others. Seeing it in this way allows us to complicate our understanding of both #MeToo and parrhesia as a collective, polyphonic, and decentralized praxis that opened up new ways of being and doing (justice) in relation to sexual violations. It is the collective character of #MeToo and parrhesia on social media that led some dominant truths about sexual violations to be challenged while others remained intact. Hence, for feminist scholars and activists, seeing #MeToo as parrhesia and parrhesia as #MeToo provides avenues to capitalize on what courageous truth speaking on social media can achieve without exaggerating its reach, thus doing justice to the millions of voices that spoke out against sexual violations without ignoring the limitations of #MeToo and parrhesia.

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