Whatever happened to the girl in #MeToo?

Abstract

Through #MeToo social media feminist digital grassroot activism, in tweets, threads, and groups, in petitions and in the intermedial debates following the hashtag, a girl took shape. This girl was constructed as vulnerable, ambitious, naïve, or duped and was central for bringing on feminist social change in policy and practice in the 2010’s. The figure faced intra-feminist critical questions about whiteness, heteronormativity, cis femininity, class, ability, and Western-ness. A few years later, this girl has magically disappeared from public debate. This article poses the question; Who was she, and what does her disappearance mean for future feminist activist struggles against sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape, other discrimination and bullying in the workplace? The girl is analysed by considering the Swedish #MeToo petition #NärMusikenTystnar (#WhenThe MusicStops), a petition and hashtag that gathered narratives of sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape on social media and presented them in the daily press in 2017. The article draws out both strengths and weaknesses of the girl as a figure for feminist digital activism. In the conclusion the case of the missing girl in 2023, and the possible impacts her disappearance may have on feminist digital activism, is discussed.

Introduction

In the feminist digital grassroot activism known as #MeToo, a particular girl took shape. Through narratives shared on social media in tweets, threads, and groups, in petitions and in the intermedial debates following the hashtag, this girl was constructed as vulnerable, ambitious, naïve, or duped. While the girl was not the only subjectivity represented in #MeToo she received much attention, and above all, she appeared as a girl brutalised by a man who (now, later) told the world of her trauma. This figure was, I will argue, central for bringing on feminist social change in policy and practice in the 2010s. While the girl of #MeToo was a symbol discursively created by many stories, she also appeared as a material physical witness who stirred up affective embodied engagement among publics. The girl of #MeToo was simultaneously pitied, cheered for, and later on, shamed when the debates became increasingly politically polarised. The figure faced intra-feminist critical questions about Whiteness, heteronormativity, cis femininity, class, ability, and western-ness. Indeed, despite many different femininities contributing to #MeToo activism, the figure was often represented in the media as a particular type of western pretty White girl. While the girl in #MeToo was not perfect, (or maybe just because of her flaws) she symbolically fuelled the digital feminist #MeToo activism of 2017, and her function above all was to be the figure who brought on affective outrage to challenge sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape (hereafter SSSR) in life and work.

Despite all this, a few years later, this girl has magically disappeared from public debate. Who was she, and what does her disappearance mean for future activist struggles against SSSR, other discrimination, and bullying in the workplace? In this article, I aim to answer the question by considering the Swedish #MeToo petition #NärMusikenTystnar (#WhenThe MusicStops), a petition and hashtag that gathered narratives of SSSR on social media and presented them in the daily press in 2017. To that end, I draw out both strengths and weaknesses of the girl as a figure for feminist digital activism. Now, six year later, I discuss the case of the missing girl and the possible impacts her disappearance may have on the fight against SSSR, other discrimination, and bullying in the workplace.

#MeToo as digital feminist activism

The #MeToo movement was initiated by Black US feminist activist Tarana Burke in 2006, and became known worldwide when the hashtag spread on X (formerly Twitter) due to the fame and impact of US celebrities in 2017. At this time, the #MeToo feminist digital activism went viral. As such it was a continuation of an ongoing development of feminist digital activism’s practices of ‘call-out culture’ on social media (Mendes et al., 2018: 236). According to researchers (Mendes et al., 2018), call-out culture was a practice where feminist activists called out SSSR by employing social media, websites, comment functions, memes, and so on. ¹ Leaning on digital media, this form of activism could also be manifested in ‘in-real-life’ activist groups focusing on online interventions and arranging on-site activist manifestations (Mendes et al., 2019). While the type of digital feminist activism performed in the #MeToo movement was not new (see also Baer, 2016), the hashtag feminisms of the #MeToo movement (Clark-Parsons, 2021) and the intermedial discussion and texts (articles, books, films, mini-series, and so on) that followed were diverse, with strengths and shortcomings as feminist strategies for driving political change (Clark-Parsons, 2021). Importantly, #MeToo activism did not end after 2017, there are still organised and spontaneous online and offline #MeToo activists pursuing the goal of ending SSSR. ² In Sweden, the hashtag feminism of #MeToo was in 2017 and 2018 transformed into multiple petitions from different professions (from singers to hotel and restaurant staff). These were often published in the daily press where narratives of SSSR were accompanied by lists of signatories and manifests pointing out problems and suggestions for how workplaces should change to prevent SSSR. The local feminist infrastructures (Hansson et al., 2023) and previous forms of feminist activist practice – like the remediated feminist petition – were integral for #MeToo activism in Sweden. Even though the growing practices of digital feminist activism in the 2010s were global, their forms and organisation varied across contexts. As in the United States, workers from the creative industries of film, performing arts, music, and the arts set the tone in Sweden, and the petitions that gained the most public attention came from this sector. In the narratives of previously experienced workplace SSSR, the protagonist was most often constructed as a particular type of girl.

The girl in #MeToo – A feminist figure

The idea of feminist figures has been conceptualised as resting on the conditions of oppression while at the same time containing possibilities for change. For Donna Haraway figures (like the cyborg and the oncomouse) are not mere representations but ‘material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another’ (Haraway, 2008: 4). In a similar vein, Rosi Braidotti (2002: 13, 2003: 48) uses figuration (for example in the nomadic subject), or alternative figurations of the subject, as a term for that which embodies a subject position that moves away from phallocentric premises. For both scholars, a (feminist) figure/ation is symbolic, in representation, and material, in the flesh an feelings of actual bodies and can be drawn on for furthering feminist politics and resistance in regard to several issues (see also Dahl, 2017). The girl in #MeToo can, at her best, function as such a figure constructed in narratives, by the technological affordances of the social and digital media she appeared though and the bodily experiences and responses of the feminist publics she appealed to. The figure of the girl was central for what the #MeToo movement could achieve politically by stirring up affect through the narratives of SSSR (Nau et al., 2022). The figure of the girl in #MeToo is here used as a lens, an idea to think with, by me to highlight affective subjectivities in feminist digital media activism and the feminist political change these can bring. And to argue that, maybe, she should have been allowed to stick around.

One example of how the figure of the girl in #MeToo appeared can be found in the Swedish music industry’s #MeToo petition. In November 2017, the petition titled #NärMusikenTystnar was published in the largest Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter with narratives of SSSR and demands for the music industry to change. In the petition’s narratives, told in first person, the protagonist was almost always constructed a young feminine subject: a girl. The petition was one of the first out of many published in Sweden and it received much media attention. ³ Likely because of the celebrity status of some of the signatories (Robyn and Zara Larsson for example, known worldwide) that were also depicted with photos in the newspaper article. While the media coverage of music industry #MeToo activism was (for example in the case of the Australian #meNOmore) feminist and supportive, the focus was on ‘white, attractive female music superstars’ (Baker et al., 2020: 202). This accurately describes the Swedish reception of the petition.

I came across the girl in #MeToo when I was examining the 62 narratives of personal experiences of SSSR in the music industries from the petition #NärMusikenTystnar archived by the Swedish Performing Arts Agency and/or printed in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. ⁴ It is unclear how many narratives originally were published in the closed Facebook group where the petition first came about. The administrators claimed hundreds, and more than 2000 people signed the petition. In the petition’s stories, protagonists of the narratives were implicitly gendered female. Not by using pronouns – indeed, all stories were told in first person, rather by how they were described and treated by others. Mentions of their clothes, bodies, names they were called, and how they were treated (badly) constructed them as female, and heterosexually attractive. Also, importantly, the narratives were contextualised by images of famous women: artists working in the Swedish popular music industries. This gendered the narratives of SSSR female even though we cannot know what story (if any) was told by which famous woman. Age, on the contrary, often featured explicitly in the narratives. Either as numbers (‘I was 17 when I got an internship at the cool record company’), life stage (being in school, living with parents) or in experience (‘I had not started drinking coffee yet’, or ‘it was my first stage performance’). Girlhood is here constructed symbolically in discourse as gendered and temporal, a feminine youth. The category ‘girl’ is shaped by ideas about gender, sexuality, and age (Driscoll, 2002) through discourse on adolescence. But the end of girlhood is not marked by age in a straightforward way, even though youth and naiveté are traits of girls, grown women can be referred to as girls – have ‘girlfriends’ (in the meaning a close friend that identifies as a woman), be told ‘you go, girl’, or even be ‘golden girls’ until old age. The girl who emerged in the narratives of the music industry #MeToo petition was treated badly by men (who were gendered explicitly with pronouns). She was groped, talked down to, excluded from professional networks, sexually harassed, exposed to sexual violence of different kinds, and raped. This happened in private homes, hotels, offices, backstage, and even on stage. The poor treatment of the girl by men also helped constructing her as young and feminine, since young feminine subjects often face disrespect from grown men. Only once in the narratives was there a mention of the sexuality of the girl. One protagonist claimed to be gay (but was not gay) to evade a man sexually harassing her. Thus, young age explicitly and gender/sexuality (female/heterosexual) implicitly constructed the girl in line with previous discursive ideas about what a girl is. A young woman with an ongoing heterosexual awakening – albeit here not a positive one. Furthermore, there were no mentions of racism, transphobia, homophobia, or any discrimination not based on gender in the narratives – despite the signatories being a diverse group with differences of generation, sexuality, class, ethnicity, race, and so on: the girl in the petition was constructed in a homogenising way.

When the girl in #MeToo was constructed as a young heterosexual White-by-omission cis woman in the narratives the discursive effect of the stories shaped her as vulnerable, ambitious, naïve, duped, or all the above. She was, furthermore, hurt by the SSSR men subjected her to and often she chose to tell no one. She was a victim rather than a survivor in the collective representation presented by the narratives because the stories fixed her subjectivity in the moment of the SSSR (that had happened in the past). The girl rarely acted like a hero, she did not fight or talk back, she was weak, abused, and ashamed. The signatories of the petition constituted a different sort of feminine figure of #MeToo activism, a postfeminist subject of different ages, generations, sexualities, races/ethnicities, and class. This figure was overcoming trauma and becoming one of the women signing and fighting to prevent SSSR in the music industries. By the implication that the stories were from the past, the girl was often symbolically constructed as no-longer-here, but she also appeared as material physical witness in some media coverage, and her discursive effect prompted embodied affective engagement among allies on social media and in physical demonstrations. In this engagement, her figuration became more than symbolic. The girl was pitied, cheered for, and later when the debates became polarised, she was shamed. I argue that the girl, in the example of this petition, functions as the figure driving the arguments for change raised by the signatories in the manifesto of the petition. It stated that music industry bosses should take responsibility, that perpetrators should be fired, and that the conversation should keep on going. In the demands made, the other feminist figure was the speaker – a grown-up angry woman and feminist. The conversation referred to in the petition was inviting all women in the music industries to participate, and the demands claimed to be aimed at preventing SSSR for all women/girls/feminine subjects in music industries’ professions.

It is well established that while admirable and claiming to speak for all women, the mediatised #MeToo movement with global spread was mostly represented by White, middle-class, western, and straight cis celebrities (Baker et al., 2020). As such, it received critique for claiming to represent all, while representing a minority of women identified persons (Halberstam, 2021; Haraldsdóttir, 2021; Kagal et al., 2019; Onwuachi-Willig, 2018). Problematisations of #MeToo’s universalist claims should not be perceived as (simply) identity politics. Instead they point to a familiar epistemological problem with (pseudo) universalism as the foundation of feminist claims. While SSSR might affect all feminine subjectivities, it does so in different ways requiring different research and political solutions. Scholars argued for a risk of erasure of local dynamics of intersecting power trajectories in #MeToo activism (Yin and Sun, 2021: 1179) affecting the impact of knowledge production and policy change being pursued by digital feminist activism. This critique of universalism also featured in the public debate following the #MeToo petitions of 2017 and an erasure of racist dimensions of SSSR in Swedish creative industries was put forward as a risk of #MeToo. Still, the protagonist of the SSSR narratives affected the public, not only feminist activists already engaged in political struggle, but also the everyday person who was touched by the girl in #MeToo.

The affective girl

The political change the girl in #MeToo ignited, policy changes in the workplaces of Swedish performing arts, film, and music, for example, was driven by the affective feminist publics rallying around her on social media (Papacharissi, 2015; Sundén and Paasonen, 2020). Feminist discussions on affect and feminist change focus how bodies and emotions take part of shaping power in culture and society, and how these processes interact with political dimensions of the world. Lauren Berlant (2008: 1–2) defines affects as the active presence of the body in connection to the intensities of the present: affects entrench subjects within historical fields. Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie (2010) define affect broadly as the power to affect and be affected.

Figures are always already affective by being networked/rhizomatic, material and emotional, as well as symbolic (Braidotti, 2003). Affective dimensions of figuration includes the bodily dimensions of her, and the intensities she spreads. The girl in #MeToo was a bodily and emotional figure in herself, her body was violated and central to the stories, her feelings of shame, anger, and depressions were described. She, furthermore, existed in both narratives, pre-existing discourse, networked social media and the bodies and emotions of those sharing her experiences. More importantly, she came to function as a figuration that affected the public, not only in terms of opinion; she mobilised practical engagement in manifestations and work to change workplace policy and culture on SSSR across professions in the Swedish context through affective intensities. Especially in the performing arts, where processes and policies for change were initiated on a national level by the minister of culture, expressing emotional responses to #MeToo. Furthermore, perpetrators were both fired and sent to jail. In the #MeToo movement affect was therefore the driving force of the narratives and for the (feminist) publics pursuing feminist change regarding SSSR (Nau et al., 2022). Affect was also here co-created with the spreadable social possibilities of digital media technology in contemporary culture. That is to say, this particular girl was constituted through the viral spread affective messages rendered on social media, affect and technology were at the centre of how the figuration came about.

How did the girl in #MeToo construct embodiment and intensities to achieve such large affective publics to gather around her? The hurt bodies of the girl in the narratives were described in simple wording, her trauma was relatable and the basic short narratives were present everywhere in the autumn of 2017. She was relatable through vernacular language, and the quantity of representation reproduced her pain over and over. There was little else talked about during this period, and artists in film, music, and theatre were at the centre of the storm and given media attention. The public was moved by the girl’s experiences of abuse as told in the narratives because of the simplicity and the networked force of the (many many) affective stories. I have here argued that the figure of the girl in #MeToo was constructed as a subjectivity rooted in femininity, heterosexuality, and youth and furthermore, that the demands for change were put forward with her pain as the argument driving affective publics to insist on the necessity of change. Her one-dimensional character warranted critique, but it was rhetorically effective and gave feminist digital activism a figure to gather around, an issue to agree upon.

Where did she go?

In 2023, I am collecting material in a project investigating what happened in the Swedish performing arts after #MeToo. ⁵ Our findings indicate that much did happen, both in discourse, policy, and everyday workplace practices. But when interviewing the leaders and workers (on-stage and off-stage) of public performing arts institutions, the figure of the girl rarely makes an appearance in their descriptions of SSSR, their work, and experiences. The subjectivities constructed are often feminine, but rarely helpless victims like the girl. It seems that everyone working in the performing arts now are subjects equally implied by the policy changes around SSSR, flattening the differences between subject positions and professions in the workplace. In 2023, the girl in #MeToo is also largely missing in Swedish media narratives. I have argued that she, despite her problems, managed to rally feminist activism in material-semiotic ways that promoted the change in the Swedish cultural industries that I am currently investigating. What will happen now to the ongoing work against SSSR, other forms of discrimination, violence, and bullying, when she is gone?

The #MeToo movement did not begin in 2017 and is not over. There are regularly narratives, petitions, and media stories articulating activism in a #MeToo vein and demands for countering SSSR are made in different parts of the world. The work within organisations to answer the calling-out of perpetrators and cultures of silence has also continued. But the figure of the girl as a feminist affective subject position in all her imperfectness is largely absent. And when she pops up there are no affective feminist publics of many rallying around her to change workplaces, punish perpetrators, keep the discussion going, and prevent SSSR. The music artist Jocelyn (played by Lily-Rose Depp) of The Idol has recently been discussed in similar terms as the girl in #MeToo, because her portrayed relationship with the music industries expose her to SSSR. ⁶ The term ‘post-MeToo’ has been coined to describe the fatigue with narratives of SSSR in the cultural industries. Post-MeToo describes when the #MeToo movement and demands are reckoned with, for example, when the sexism and sleaziness of the racialised male character Tedros (played by Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye) is acknowledged in The Idol. After this, the narrative continues to centre him as a protagonist, as if nothing had happened. In a post-MeToo culture, protest does occur but seems to amount to little or nothing, we already know who is ‘sleazy’ and this knowledge neither creates affect or political change. Liberated Britney, and still-not free Kesha, are also ambivalently reported on in the media with no clear feminist supportive structural critique of their experiences (anymore). In 2023, the girl in #MeToo cannot beat self-sufficient postfeminist figurations of Barbies in popularity, neither as a narrative or embodied material practice. Good riddance you might say – to a girl figuration built on traits from White celebrity cis women victims who (unrightfully) became the poster girl for all digital feminist activism. Still, is it worth sitting with the thought that what she did was good feminist work, more important than what she was, an imperfect figure. Can a figure we dislike still promote the social change we want? And: can feminist change be thought without a clear figuration driving it? One that (many) feminists may be affected and driven by? Without the girl – will the work against SSSR, other forms of discrimination, harassment, violence, and bullying in the workplace disintegrate as it has done before?