More than a Confessional Mo(ve)ment? #MeToo's Pedagogical Tensions

Abstract

In this article, I explore the pedagogical function of #MeToo, highlighting what it might teach about gender-based mistreatment and mainstreamed feminism. I begin by reviewing linkages between adult education and social movements, then trace the development of #MeToo, drawing on both media and scholarly texts. Next, I apply the concepts of feminist snap and neoliberal feminism, layered on top of Foucault's thoughts on confession, to examine how #MeToo has been shaped by the newer phenomena of neoliberalism and social media, and the older phenomena of feminism and social inequities. The role of confession in social ideals of the feminine, feminist activism, and neoliberalism becomes a steady consideration. My analysis illuminates tensions in globalized feminist activism, and possibly other types of equity-seeking movements, and the adult learning and education that it fosters.

As a field of practice and, increasingly, scholarship, adult education has a long history of attention to social transformation and action. Associated initiatives are often characterized as radical, inasmuch as they take aim at “the root” of a social problem by breaking with “dominant practice or experience” (Foley, 2001, p. 72). Radicals can be found across the sociopolitical spectrum, with an aim to equalize or to (further) limit privilege and status (Brookfield & Holst, 2011; Foley, 2001; Hall et al., 2012; Holst, 2018; Kluttz & Walter, 2018; Walker & Butterwick, 2021). Within the field of adult education, though, radical efforts have focused on advancing “critical and emancipatory education … about injustices and addressing … their fundamental causes, their deeper dynamics and determining factors” (Foley, 2001, p. 72) and working “to create and build democracy” (Brookfield & Holst, 2011, p. 1). Despite differences in topical focus, what ties radical adult educators together is a consistent attention to structures and processes that create social, material, and cultural inequalities and, increasingly, ecological harms. Often, this work is carried out beyond the classroom, notably in social movements. This is inherently difficult work, especially in this era of neoliberalism, “a dominant political rationality or normative form of reason that moves to and from the management of the state to the inner workings of the subject, recasting individuals as capital-enhancing agents” (Rottenberg, 2018, p. 7).

I focus here on the social movement called #MeToo, ¹ drawing on a combination of articles from The Guardian, one reputable, globally available media outlet known for its socially aware coverage, and scholarly publications. Dedicated to publicizing the commonality of sexual and gender-based abuse and unfairness, holding perpetrators to account, and ending sexist structures and processes, #MeToo has been recognized as pivotal in early twenty-first-century social movement developments (Walker & Butterwick, 2021). In their books on #MeToo, scholars have described it as a “growing roar” (Gieseler, 2019, p. 1), “nothing short of phenomenal” and “a moment of reckoning” (Fileborn & Loney-Howes, 2019, p. 3). Scholarly work has been bolstered by books written by journalists about #MeToo's history, rise, and impacts (see, for example, Doolittle, 2019; Farrow, 2019; Kantor & Twohey, 2019; Traister, 2018), as well as much media coverage—some of which I detail shortly. Although a number of contributing authors to this journal might self-identify as feminist, #MeToo has not (yet) established a presence in this publication.

Drawing on existing work and my own small study with colleagues (Jubas et al., 2020), I explore what #MeToo might teach members of global publics not only about the problem of gender-based discrimination and abuse but also about the role of confession in pursuit of structural and personal movement and change. In a discussion of the social practice of confession, it seems almost impossible to avoid referring to the work of Foucault (1978, 1980), and I layer his ideas with two more recent concepts from feminist scholarship: feminist snap (Ahmed, 2017) and neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2018). Consistent with the idea that social activism is a pedagogical and learning process, the term social movement learning captures ideas about how activism functions educationally; I offer a short explanation of social movements and social movement learning in the next section. Then, following an overview of the development of #MeToo and the role of so-called hashtag activism in its evolution, I introduce the concepts identified above and relate them to a confessional inclination. My analysis illuminates tensions within and around #MeToo and suggests what those tensions (might) teach activists as well as people who regard themselves as interested outsiders.

Social Movement (as) Learning in Action

Social movements—affiliations and efforts to educate about and right a wrong—have existed for centuries. In referring to “old” social movements, many adult education and other scholars have focused on how working class or poor people came together to counter socioeconomic class divides and struggles. Other movements, referred to as “new” social movements, have become especially common in recent decades and address an array of issues and identities (Dykstra & Law, 1994; Holford, 1995; Holst, 2018; Kluttz & Walter, 2018; Walker & Butterwick, 2021). In this journal alone, recent articles have dealt with problems ranging from environmental threats posed by extractive industries and climate change (Kluttz & Walter, 2018) to racism (Roumell et al., 2020).

Although common, those old and new descriptors overlook the history of movements such as abolitionism, which arose in the eighteenth century to oppose slavery (Jubas, 2008). Also overlooked by the old/new binary are the realities that so-called old movements such as labor unions now routinely take up rights claims of racial, gender, or sexual minorities and that social movements that emerged in recent decades often make visible the overlap between racialized or gender identity and class (Holst, 2018). Some have argued that the binary categories reflect a sexist inclination in mainstream Western scholarship, given that “the women's movement arguably predates the labor movement and there are direct connections between them” (Walker & Butterwick, 2021, p. 323; see also Holst, 2018). Perhaps a more accurate way of thinking about movement categories is not with regard to their age, but rather whether and how they affiliate with political parties (see Dykstra & Law, 1994) or other organized infrastructure (Holst, 2018). From that perspective, a movement such as environmentalism, aligned with new Green political parties, shares an important characteristic with an older workers’ movement aligned with labour parties: Both employ formal political power-seeking as part of their change-making strategies. On the whole, though, like so many other binaries, the straightforward old/new conceptual binary gives way to an understanding of social movements as much more conceptually and practically complicated spaces.

What remains important is the understanding that social movements are more than campaigns or organizations; they are “a cognitive territory … that is filled by a dynamic interaction between different groups and organizations” (Eyerman & Jamison, 1991, p. 55) with the intent to persuade decision-makers toward specific ends. Sociologists Eyerman and Jamison (1991) explained that social movements function “not merely as a challenge to established power, but also and more so as a socially constructive force, as a fundamental determinant of human knowledge” (p. 48). Social movements are always pedagogical, a realization behind the concept of social movement learning. In that way, social movements are sites of public pedagogy, “the educative work that occurs in extrainstitutional spaces” (Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019, p. 61) beyond the classroom.

In their model of social movement learning, adult education scholars Dykstra and Law (1994) outlined three fundamental markers of a social movement as an educational project: “vision, critical pedagogy, and pedagogy of mobilisation” (p. 123). ² Resultant learning occurs as activists develop their analyses and responses; as target audiences develop an understanding of demands for change in policy or practice; and as members of society-at-large become aware of issues and positions (Dykstra & Law, 1994; Eyerman & Jamison, 1991). That learning involves purposeful, planned sessions and activities, as well as on-the-ground, in-the-moment encounters and actions. The learning is technical, in answer to the question of “how to,” and strategic, in answer to the question of “what for.” Highly contextual and relational, social movement learning unfolds within individuals who come with different backgrounds, understandings, and skills and among individuals who might support or oppose movement commitments and positions (see also Holford, 1995; Kluttz & Walter, 2018; Walker & Butterwick, 2021). Moreover, social movement learning exemplifies the multidimensionality of learning—its affective, embodied, experiential, relational, spiritual, and even artistic dimensions along with its intellectual dimension (Dykstra & Law, 1994; Hall et al., 2012; Lawrence, 2012; Walker & Butterwick, 2021).

One of the tools available to today's social movements and pivotal in learning is social media. Its presence in everyday life extends possibilities for communication, recruitment, mobilization, and participation. Previously, movements relied on official stances and tactics circulated in a time and space to inspire people to gather together then and there. Using social media, today's movements can appeal to people both locally and globally and can welcome newcomers as they are ready to learn about, support, and join movement activities. As #MeToo illustrates, today's movements can obtain an audience of millions in hours and adjust to sociocultural norms and conditions as they grow, spread, and change. Clearly, one thing that sets #MeToo apart from earlier versions or “nodes” (Afzal & Wallace, 2019, p. 131) of feminism is the accessibility of social media and the rise of hashtag activism.

Hashtag Activism

Hashtag activism is the term (of unknown origin) used to refer to social movement and advocacy efforts that engage and educate people through social and other new media. Although online activism can involve much more than Twitter, that platform has become conspicuous in its popularity and importance. Hashtag activism can be associated with grassroots initiatives, but well-known movements, including #MeToo, often become associated with interventions by or support from famous people, a trend known as celebrity activism (see Gieseler, 2019).

As a trend, hashtag activism has garnered both praise and critique. It offers broad accessibility and the possibility that anyone can become not only present but also vocal in movement activities (Gieseler, 2019; Jeremic, 2019; Mendes & Ringrose, 2019; Peters & Besley, 2019). Citing several twentieth-century critical thinkers, Jeremic (2019) described online platforms as “digital public spheres” which, unlike older, more constrained public spheres, can “become sites of struggle in which ‘the people’ are generally able to participate with fewer barriers and in a multitude of ways” (p. 111). Drawing on Gramsci, Jeremic commented that those platforms can create “an updated public intellectual” (p. 113) as activist-educator. Peters and Besley (2019) described the rise of social media as the replacement of “an industrial broadcast model of the one to the many” with social media's model of “many to many and horizontal power relations” (p. 462).

Despite those advantages, hashtag activism is “often maligned as ineffectual or frivolous” (Gieseler, 2019, p. 8), with support measured in mere clicks and “Likes” and activism reduced to “clicking on an online petition or forwarding an email” (Walker & Butterwick, 2021, p. 326). For some, social media is a “form of communicative capitalism” and “surveillance capitalism” (Jeremic, 2019, p. 177), tied to the monitoring of users’ online comings and goings and sale of their information to marketers. That reality can replace the potential for meaningful change-making with further disempowerment. The potential for tweeters and posters on various social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, to remain anonymous through made-up usernames is a sort of double-edged sword: It produces a “freedom from consequences” and enables “a wider range of expression that can reveal more honest and hostile discourse than what is shared … in person” (Lanius, 2019, p. 416). All of these possibilities and ideas are present in and around #MeToo and have shaped it as an important, but complicated, addition to the feminist movement and the social movement landscape.

A Movement in Motion

According to the metoo website (https://metoomvmt.org/about/#history), the phrase “me too” was first used to refer to the common experience of sexual or gender-based abuse among girls and women in 2006 by New York-based feminist anti-racist community activist Tarana Burke. Especially concerned about racialized girls and women living in poverty, the ease with which they were targeted and abused, and the lack of recourse available to them, Burke was responding to a 13-year-old who had shared her experience of sexual assault, by attempting “to counter the shame of sexual assault and build empathic solidarities among African American girls and women” (Patel & Puri, 2021, p. 689). Burke's was a pre-Twitter, grassroots initiative that attracted little public attention.

Over a decade later, Hollywood-based actor Alyssa Milano inadvertently recalled Burke's me too phrase when, on October 15, 2017, she tweeted, “’If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write “me too” as a reply to this tweet’” (Sayej, 2017, para. 4). According to Sayej's interview-based article, Milano “woke up the next morning to 55,000 replies and the hashtag trending No 1 on Twitter” (para. 5). In that interview, Milano admitted to having experienced sexual harassment, but declined to share details and defended the right of survivors to choose the timing and extent of their own story-sharing. In the following six weeks, Burke's grassroots initiative was overtaken by high-profile celebrities’ accounts of assault by powerful men in their business, especially producer Harvey Weinstein. As it “spread like wildfire across social media” (Clark-Parsons, 2021, p. 362), the “viral force” (Tambe, 2018, p. 197) of #MeToo “spread to eighty-five countries with 1.7 million tweets within ten days … [and] expanded across other sites including Facebook, which released statistics that the ‘MeToo’ movement sparked over 12 million posts and comments in less than twenty-four hours” (Gieseler, 2019, p. 2; see also Lanius, 2019).

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, journalists at the New York Times credited with “breaking” the Weinstein story (Fileborn & Loney-Howes, 2019) and unearthing evidence about Donald Trump, attributed the successes of their own journalistic research and the uptake of #MeToo to two factors. First, in between Burke's community work and Milano's tweet, they were able to convince actor Rose McGowan, who started the hashtag “#WhyWomenDontReport” and had a “history of risking her own career prospects to call out sexism” (Kantor & Twohey, 2019, p. 7), to speak to them on the record. Second, the election of Trump, whose misogynistic behavior was confirmed by his own public and well-publicized statements, was “particularly galling [and] a trigger provoking the fury at the heart of #MeToo (Tambe, 2018, p. 198), moving many women beyond anger to action (see also Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019). Their investigation married reportage with critical adult education, as they set out not only to expose the wrongdoings of Weinstein and other powerful individuals in Hollywood, but also “to go behind individual wrongdoers and pin down the elements, the system, that kept sexual harassment so pervasive and hard to address” (Kantor & Twohey, 2019, p. 25).

Within two years, #Me Too's presence extended well beyond the film industry and the United States. The “slew of powerful cis-men” (Tambe, 2018, p. 197) forced to leave their media and entertainment jobs in the United States “expanded beyond the media to other industries where reputations matter: politics, music, architecture, and, somewhat belatedly, higher education” (p. 198). Media articles and documentaries followed accusations and court cases against, among others, blues musician R Kelly (Horton, 2020) and yoga developer and teacher Bikram Choudhury (Delaney, 2019). Women working in Mexico's arts and media industries added their accounts of “sexual harassment, physical attacks and psychological bullying in workplaces including newsrooms, publishing houses, literary fairs and debates” (Lakhani, 2019, para. 2). A three-day international conference held in Iceland involved politicians and political activists, artists and writers, representatives from the United Nations, and others in examining the spread and impacts of #MeToo; notable participants included “women with disabilities, care workers and migrant women whose voices have not typically been heard since the movement began as a hashtag” (Connolly, 2019, para. 2). In India, #MeToo was linked to higher education after “a crowdsourced list [appeared] on Facebook of Indian male academics who allegedly have harassed women” (Dey & Mendes, 2022, p. 205), a fact that points to the need for educators, whether in formal or informal educational settings, to take up abuse and harassment, as well as #MeToo, in their work(places). These are just a few examples of #MeToo's globalized invitation delivered via a hashtag.

#MeToo as a Particular Enactment of Hashtag Activism

Like many contemporary social movements, #MeToo has relied heavily on social media engagement, as well as celebrity activism, to become a form of “hashtag feminism” (Clark-Parsons, 2021, p. 362). I concur with the view of #MeToo “as an educational movement, showing how the celebrity cache of the movement, its online, viral nature, and its mission of uncovering and exposing truth all position it as an example of public pedagogy” (Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019, p. 55). Participants in my own modest interview study with female university students, conducted with colleagues in England at their university, agreed that celebrity involvement in #MeToo was pivotal in its worldwide circulation and appeal (Jubas et al., 2020). No ordinary example of hashtag activism, “#MeToo's diffusion … exponentially outpaced many of its predecessors” (p. 363). Burke was one of two co-recipients of the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize and, along with others who had driven #MeToo forward, was given the moniker “the silence breakers,” who were then named as Time magazine's 2017 “person of the year” (Davey, 2019).

In their study with 117 women who participated in #MeToo internationally, Mendes and Ringrose (2019) found that it had served as an example of “how the public creatively use digital technologies to build networks of feminist solidarity, support, and identity” (p. 40). Borrowing from the work of Chandra Mohanty, they characterized these networks as “counter-publics” (p. 41) where participants are heard and recognized. Evoking memories of second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups, they found evidence that #MeToo “has opened up new conversations … around sexual violence, consent, and rape culture” (pp. 46 & 47). Some have nicknamed #MeToo “’Consciousness-raising 2.0’” (Fileborn & Loney-Howes, 2019, p. 12). Others have written that, in #MeToo, “women have found a ready medium … that can be used to promote solidarity with one another in speaking out and speaking truth to power” (Peters & Besley, 2019, pp. 461–462). Given the physical risks involved in challenging a perpetrator in-person, the online space of #MeToo ”is anonymous enough to create a semblance of safety yet offers just enough exposure to allow for the formation of a meaningful community for many” (Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019, p. 57).

Still, there are those who are less enthusiastic about #MeToo's use of hashtag activism. One critique of the movement is that the very freedom for individuals to share their stories produces an absence of “moderation and verification” (Pipyrou, 2018, p. 418). Without such oversight, according to these critics, there is a risk of something resembling “mob rule,” “a vigilante movement dealing in publicity and shame” (p. 417) or what Gieseler (2019) and others have referred to as “trial by media” (p. 5). Pipyrou also noted the possibilities that #MeToo has produced “a new voyeurism, as if personal intimacy were subject to universal eavesdropping” (p. 418). All in all, according to Pipyrou, the “public scandals fashioned on social media platforms” (p. 416) might distract from a social change objective. Exacerbating these concerns is the observation that, at least in the country where it began, #MeToo “has largely served white, privileged, classed, hetero, ciswomen's voices” (Gieseler, 2019, p. 64; see also Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019; Dunne, 2020; Fileborn & Lowney-Howes, 2019; Kagal et al., 2019; Mendes & Ringrose, 2019; Patel & Puri, 2021; Rottenberg, 2017; Tambe, 2018). The assumption that a feeling of empathy can erase structures of discrimination continues to elevate the position of a few at a cost borne by others with the least (valued) cultural, social, and material capital.

In her analysis of tweets in the three months following Milano's tweet, Clark-Parsons (2021) outlined coinciding positive and negative feelings about becoming active in #MeToo. Posting to #MeToo could feel “‘brave’ and revolutionary’” (p. 368) and diminish “shameful alienation” (p. 371), even as it was accompanied by “a number of vulnerabilities” (p. 371) and asked “too much of survivors while doing too little to hold their assailants accountable” (p. 372). I explore these nuances of #MeToo, using the concepts of feminist snap (Ahmed, 2017) and neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2018), along with the role of confession, in making sense of the movement's development and impacts—both pedagogical and practical.

Lessons in/From/Around a Complicated Mo(ve)Ment

Like all moments and movements, #MeToo is replete with tensions and complications. On the one hand, sexual and gender-based inequities are recognized by activists and supporters as longstanding, widespread problems, and #MeToo opens avenues for engagement in developing counternarratives to anybody with access to technology and social media, across geographic and social boundaries. On the other hand, the neoliberal attribution of social disparities to individual choices deflects attention away from structurally rooted problems and comprehensive structural analysis (Patel & Puri, 2021; Rottenberg, 2017, 2018); as Patel and Puri noted, that analysis can extend to the ownership and operation of social media platforms, regardless of users’ intentions. Moreover, I take to heart critiques of #MeToo's association with the experiences and concerns of women who enjoy great social, cultural, and material privilege. Noting the election of Trump that followed the confirmation of his misogynistic behavior and abuses by mere months, Clarke-Vivier and Stearns (2019) summarized #MeToo's central tension this way:

On the one hand, it illustrates the ubiquity, emotional sequelae, and terror of sexual violence. On the other hand, it shows that, as a society, we can proceed largely undaunted, allowing extant power structures to continue, distributing punishment with the utmost inequity, and colluding in what could cynically be described as the illusion of a movement—one that elicits strong feelings of solidarity but results in very little by way of concrete transformation. (p. 67)

Tensions can be immediately apparent or can develop over time. In her critical discourse analysis of AskReddit discussion threads referring to #MeToo in the months following Milano's initial tweet, Lanius (2019) found that initial support for women posting on #MeToo gave way to ambivalence about the posts’ veracity and the movement's necessity. In all these ways, #MeToo illustrates that the politics and practices of this movement are far from straightforward. Any moment and many movements are complex and complicated; however, the complexities and complications of #MeToo are undoubtedly related to tensions arising from its central aspect: the willingness to bear testimony, to confess.

Pedagogies of Confession

Central to #MeToo is the role of testimonials, ”those verbal [or textual] acts in which a person bears witness to harm in a public forum” (Gilmore, 2017, p. 3). Testimonial has its own history in judicial, human rights, and literary narrative, and testimony is not always the same as confession; however, when testimony involves a deep, long-held secret accompanied by feelings of embarrassment and isolation, it assumes a confessional quality (Lanius, 2019). From the second-wave feminism of the 1960s onwards, much feminist activism has been premised on the notion that speaking out advances “a personal ethics of survival and resistance [as well as] … a politics of making visible those forms of power that had previously been concealed by ideologies of ‘the domestic’ or of privacy” (Ahmed & Stacey, 2001, p. 4). By extension, much feminist activism has involved “confessing often very painful personal experience, … taking a major risk of both retraumatization and ostracization via your confession, and, finally, getting into the details of the matter” (Mendes & Ringrose, 2019, p. 67). Indeed, #MeToo has been theorized as a “confessional discourse” developed through posts that

can be understood as a form of confession that attempts to empower rather than produce shame. … The very public nature of the #MeToo posts is also highly subversive, moving the confession from the diary and private conversations to a public and persistent online space. (Lanius, 2019, p. 418)

Confession might not be part of all social movements but, as Foucault (1978) advised, it has moved beyond religious and medical spaces and practices to become “one of the West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have … become a singularly confessing society” (p. 59), constantly teaching and learning about and through confession. As #MeToo and earlier sexual violence activism illustrate, though, confession is tricky. Foucault himself warned that the relief brought by confession can be offset by judgement. Confession can be enacted both by perpetrators and survivors; however, a patriarchal rape culture, “which normalizes sexual [and gender-based] violence and has a whole repertoire of discourses to blame victims” (Mendes & Ringrose, 2019, p. 41), results in having perpetrators and survivors alternatingly characterized as wrongdoers and wrong-done-to. That fact heightens confessing survivors’ vulnerability. Layering the concepts of feminist snap (Ahmed, 2017) and neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2018) with confession, I turn now to tensions apparent in #MeToo, as well as contemporary feminist activism and social movement learning more broadly.

Feminist Snap

Sara Ahmed (2017) introduced the term feminist snap to reconsider “breaking points” (p. 187) as opportunities rather than failures. As she explained, to snap can mean “to make a brisk, sharp, cracking sound; to break suddenly; … to suffer physical or mental breakdown…; to bite; … to speak abruptly or sharply; to move swiftly and smartly; … to sparkle” (p. 188). Mendes and Ringrose (2019) attached Ahmed's feminist snap to their research with women who engaged with #MeToo and their informal observations of their own acquaintances. They wrote about “a compulsion to respond, … [an] affective sense of an inability to remain silent—or an obligation to speak and join in” (p. 40). That articulation of compulsion resembles Foucault's point that “we must speak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess or discover the truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 93). Consistent with Ahmed's view about the suddenness of a snap, Mendes and Ringrose described participants’ posts as “temporally marked by a sense of urgency and immediacy” (p. 40).

It can be tempting to focus on the suddenness, the unexpectedness of the snap; however, as Ahmed further clarified, using the analogy of a stepped-on twig, that focus misses everything that led to that snap. In her words,

But a snap would only be the beginning insofar as we did not notice the pressure on the twig. … Can we describe the world from the twig's point of view, that is, from the point of view of those who are under pressure? … If a snap seems sharp or sudden, it might be because we do not experience the slower time of bearing or of holding up; the time in which we can bear the pressure, the time it has taken for things not to break. (Ahmed, 2017, p. 189)

What Ahmed called feminist snap is in line with what Freire (2004/2016) called “just ire,” “a right to feel anger … founded in … revulsion before the negation of the right to ‘be more,’ which is etched in the nature of human beings” (p. 59). Like feminist snap, just ire is a response to a history of injustice rather than to a moment of misfortune. The concerns and complaints about harassment, assault, and other forms of mistreatment, whether in the space of work, home or street, at the foundation of #MeToo are hardly new.

Even those concerned that #MeToo's online confessions might be producing a “new voyeurism” (Pipyrou, 2018, p. 418) overlook the history of voyeuristic inclinations around sex. Writing almost three decades ago, when women began to speak out about their experiences of sexual assault, incest, and other abuses, Alcoff and Gray (1993) described the impact of daytime television shows and other media forms that exploited “survivors for shock value and to pander to a sadistic voyeurism among viewers … [and] eroticize[d] depictions of survivors and of sexual violence to titillate and expand their audiences” (p. 262; see also Ahmed & Stacey, 2001). #MeToo transfers some of the control over confession from media conglomerates and often manipulative, ratings-focused hosts to survivors.

Feminist snap offers one way to understand #MeToo as more than a momentary eruption, but as a movement forward in the feminist struggle for justice and decency. Through this conceptual lens, #MeToo offers possibilities for personal and social transformation. On a personal level, those involved in #MeToo “engage in critical-dialectical discourse involving the assessment of assumptions and expectations” (Mezirow, 2003, p. 60) to produce “a range of changes in their everyday lives, actions, mindsets, and beliefs” (Mendes & Ringrose, 2019, p. 46). On a sociopolitical level, a feminist snap signals an end to patience for injustice, a refusal to continue accepting the unacceptable. Inasmuch as it has become a platform for social analysis and action, #MeToo positions activists not as individuals, more particularly women, who are acting out—out of control, out of their minds, out of line with a social ideal of feminine behavior—but as a collective who are educating through their public push-back against pressures to remain compliant and silent.

Many participants in #MeToo might share Ahmed's feminist analysis, which recognizes the increases in risk and oppression for people with other minoritized identities aside from that related to gender; however, there is no guarantee that all participants in the movement do. Furthermore, by their nature, movements and positions move, through time and across place; what people espouse today might be rather different tomorrow and both affects and is affected by other discourses that are circulating. I turn my attention now to one of those discourses.

Neoliberal Feminism

The concept of neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2018) offers an additional way or layer of understanding #MeToo. Neoliberal feminism, according to Catherine Rottenberg, has arisen in response to two major trends: concern about work-home life balance, especially for women who retain many home and family care responsibilities, and so-called gender mainstreaming, which inserts concerns about women's career-related opportunities and personal well-being into a public policy agenda. Accompanying gender mainstreaming has been a reclamation of feminism among not only politicians and policymakers, but also, as Rottenberg identified, high-profile women, such as pop music superstar Beyoncé, actor Emma Watson, Facebook Chief Operating Officer turned best-selling author Sheryl Sandberg, and model turned corporate leader turned White House senior advisor Ivanka Trump. The version of feminism that has emerged differs substantively from earlier versions, though.

In outlining neoliberal feminism, Rottenberg (2018) began by noting that, as it is being brought into mainstream discourse, “feminist discourse … is increasingly dovetailing with dominant ideologies and conservative forces across the globe, thus defanging it of any oppositional potential” (p. 12). Unlike prior versions of feminism, neoliberal feminism does not challenge mainstream political discourses or problematic social, material, and cultural conditions. Even liberal feminism, which Rottenberg recognized as the least radical of previous feminist stances, had the political goal of exposing “the gendered exclusions within liberal democracy's proclamation of universal equality” (p. 54). In contrast, neoliberal feminism “offers no critique … of neoliberalism or its rationality” (p. 55).

According to Rottenberg (2018), as it takes hold, neoliberal feminism does more than construct a new discourse; it constructs a new female subject. A newly imagined “national happiness project” (Slaughter, 2012 cited in Rottenberg, 2018) merges the language of feminist empowerment and fulfillment with neoliberal tenets of choice and well-being. That project holds out the path forward for the new subject, even as it is “predicated on the erasure or exclusion of the vast majority of women” (p. 41) because of its grounding in “blatant class and race biases” (p. 42). The neoliberal feminist subject—that is, the contemporary idealized Western(ized) woman—recognizes forms of gender-based and, perhaps, other forms of inequalities and “accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care” (p. 55). In so doing, she “is thus mobilized to convert continued gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual affair” (p. 55). Commenting specifically on #MeToo, Rottenberg (2017) noted that “it can easily become part of a neoliberal feminist discussion, which ultimately individualises and atomises each person who uses the hashtag while disavowing the socioeconomic and cultural structures shaping our lives” (para. 5).

In the neoliberal society, the confession is reworked into “neoconfessional” (Gilmore, 2017), a way to “promote individual life experiences as examples of a generic humanity [or, in the case of #MeToo, femininity] and eschew historical or political analysis or contextualization” (p. 93). At least in its early tendency to accentuate wealthy, famous, White ³ women, #MeToo recalls another concept: intersectionality. Developed by Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality captures the exponential increase in oppression for people who have multiple minoritized identities, because systems always favor the most privileged identities. Invoking feminist rhetoric, #MeToo's celebrity postings tended to reiterate a default image of woman as White and to maintain the ease with which White people ignore structural racism. Invoking neoliberal sensibility, the prominence of both celebrity survivors and perpetrators implied that wealth determines what merits attention and maintained the ease with which wealthy people ignore the harms done by capitalism. Seen through the lens of neoliberal feminism, then, #MeToo might delink “sexual violence from structural power inequalities stemming from patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and more and instead constructing violence as committed by a few ‘bad apples’ (Phipps, 2019), who, with the right support, may individually overcome their flaws” (Dey & Mendes, 2022, p. 210). Although those biases have been checked somewhat by critique and reflection about the omission of the most vulnerable women who are least able to command a ready audience and demand change, some have wondered whether the reflection is contrived (Dunne, 2020) and whether #MeToo has challenged or bolstered neoliberal feminism.

Moving On

Through this conceptually oriented analysis, I have suggested how #MeToo relates to adult education scholarship and practice. For scholars interested in theorizing adult learning and education, #MeToo manifests the assertion made by many feminist and other non-mainstream scholars that they are holistic processes, with affective and embodied, as well as intellectual, dimensions (Lawrence, 2012). For those interested in other lenses through which to examine non-formal adult learning and education, #MeToo can also be and has been analyzed as an example of critical public pedagogy, one of the “new resources for hope” (Hall et al., 2012, p. x), “a counternarrative to an era” (Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019, p. 55) that develops and circulates beyond the walls of the formal classroom, through engagement in everyday cultural practices (see also Peters & Besley, 2019). Together, feminist snap (Ahmed, 2017) and neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2017, 2018) can help educators and learners see and make sense of the complexities and uncertainties of #MeToo, and #MeToo can extend the personal-is-political logic, by illustrating that the conceptual is practical.

For adult educators interested in socially transformative education, whether in the formal learning context of the classroom or the informal learning context of the social movement, there are some instructive notes to take from #MeToo. First, in any social movement, collectivities and convergences coincide with intersectional diversities and divergences. How movement priorities and actions are set is linked to a combination of factors: timing, the case for urgency, a spokesperson that others find relatable or inspiring, cultural norms that are being challenged and confirmed, and social relations that evoke ideas about whose voice warrants prominence and realities of who forms an audience. Even if a movement such as #MeToo begins with an agreed-upon aim and desired outcome, as Ahmed and Stacey (2001) cautioned, the actual impacts of associated actions are unpredictable, because of the range of actors, actions, and priorities within and beyond the movement. Burke's initial aim might have included a balance of personal support and systemic analysis; however, as #MeToo has evolved, every intervention and posting has had the potential to reinforce, to curtail or to redirect those aims. As it has evolved, “#MeToo works first toward destigmatizing survivorship, then creating pathways for individual healing, and only then, for some, undergirding radical, political change” (Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019, p. 57). That observation signals the possibility that movement educators, activists, and audiences alike ultimately shift the focus from systemic overhaul to “extracting reforms from the system in what [Paula] Allman would call an acritical practice” (Holst, 2018, p. 88). Finally, as the election of Trump indicated, even powerful, fact-based confession and activism do not always lead to the systemic change envisioned and championed. Put simply, “there is only so much … that truth-telling can accomplish” (Clarke-Vivier & Stearns, 2019, p. 56). Snappy feminists must not only retain their just ire (Freire, 2004/2016), but also maintain a movement based on critical analysis and convictions despite and beyond this neoliberal feminist moment.

Following the near-eclipse of Burke's work by #MeToo's celebrity-driven hashtag activism, questions remain about the potential and limitations of this movement. While #MeToo has utilized personal confessions to expose the universality of sexual and gender-based mistreatment, often severe and sometimes illegal, the conditions and experiences that characterize and comprise women's lives are not universal. On that point, much educational and advocacy work remains to be done, both within and beyond #MeToo. As I noted above, critics of #MeToo have elaborated its continued centering of not only White, but relatively wealthy, privileged White women's experiences and complaints, especially in Western societies.

Whether or not they take up the concept of feminist snap, scholars and public intellectuals seeking and developing critiques of and alternatives to neoliberal feminism have looked to Ahmed (2017), Crenshaw (1989), and other critical race feminists. When applied to #MeToo, critical race feminism “offers important insights” (Tambe, 2018, p. 199) about who has been centered and who has been all-but-forgotten in this movement. In Western societies, the complex considerations that racialized women face in deciding whether to participate in #MeToo range from questions of believability, to loyalty to a marginalized community, to a legacy of criminalization of Black men “based on unfounded allegations that they sexually violated white women” (p. 200). Tambe pondered, “Maybe some black [sic.] women want no part of this dynamic” (p. 200) or of a movement that can, in some moments, appear to adopt a colorblind stance (Patel & Puri, 2021). Both the inclination and the disinclination to be part of #MeToo's activism exemplify coinciding feminist snaps that, if heard, will aid in movement toward a more just, more humane social life, beyond a neoliberal feminism that offers no vision of systemic change. How #MeToo works with potentially allied movements, such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and labor organizations—especially ones that represent large numbers of workers with racialized or otherwise minoritized identities—will influence #MeToo's continued development and function. These are pedagogical points relevant to all critically oriented adult educators—whether teachers, activists or journalists—about #MeToo's place in contemporary activist movements, learning, and education.