The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?

Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism—storytelling in the service of social change—elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: uniting millions of separate accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.

Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how “reading like a survivor” provides resources for activism.

Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. She reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism.

Preface
Introduction: The #MeToo Effect
Part I: Narrative Activism and Survivor Testimony
1. The #MeToo Effect: From “He Said/She Said” to Collective Witness
2. Buildup: Survivors in Public, Trump, and the Women’s March
3. Breakthrough: #MeToo Silence Breakers
4. Backdrop: Antirape Lineage from Harriet Jacobs to Tarana Burke
5. #MeToo Stress Test: The Kavanaugh Hearings
Part II: Narrative Justice and Survivor Reading
6. Reading Like a Survivor
7. #MeToo Storytelling
8. Consent Before and After #MeToo
Conclusion: Promising Young Women--What We Owe Survivors
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Do ‘ladies lie’? ‘Survivor reading’ and ‘narrative activism’ are Leigh Gilmore’s powerful replies to the age-old charge. She argues for a #MeToo effect that has furthered the healing and justice that courts have all too often failed to give. A readable, rigorous, and compelling book.

Gilmore draws on her peerless knowledge of women’s life writing and feminist theory to provide a stunningly original account that situates #MeToo in a long history of feminist narrative activism. This is a searing and ultimately hopeful analysis of how survivor testimony can change the world.

The #MeToo Effect is a powerful, persuasive, and truly comprehensive story about the moment when millions of victims of sexual assault came together and used their narrative power to change the world. This is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding how the #MeToo movement was born, its successes, and how it continues to shape our conversations and culture today.

I highly recommend reading this book to be challenged, to deepen one’s understanding, and to be inspired to do more. It’s a five out of five on the enJOYment scale.

This book offers a powerful, painful and profound vision of #MeToo as a form of narrative activism . Gilmore asks us to be alert to the ethical and political promise of #MeToo, how it builds on a long lineage of feminist activism and creates alternative pathways for justice. A necessary and vital book.

Leigh Gilmore writes with compelling authority about the sizable contribution that narrative expression makes to our understanding of justice. The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how victims and survivors have exposed the bias in traditional fact-finding processes, emphasizing that diverse trauma sufferers’ public storytelling is a longstanding tradition that pushes society closer to the truth.

A thoughtful and thorough consideration of a global movement.

Paying careful attention to gendered, racial, class, and sexual power hierarchies, Gilmore offers a compelling and deeply considered analysis—grounded in literary history and criticism, from Harriet Jacobs to Sophocles—of narrative activism, storytelling in service of social change, tracing its explosive trajectory before, during, and since the 2017 #MeToo peak. This is such a smart book that complicates and enriches an understanding of recent feminist movements and the literary and activist lineage on which they are built.