Introduction: #(No)SeAcabó/it is (not) over: The Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss and the growth of a culture of concern

Abstract

The 25th of August 2023 saw the birth of a new hashtag, in Spanish: ‘#SeAcabó’, or ‘it’s over’, to add to the many others that have accumulated following #MeToo. The hashtag arose out a protest following the medal ceremony for the Women’s Football World Cup during which Luis Rubiales inflicted a non-consensual kiss upon player Jenni Hermoso. In this introduction to the cultural commons special section, we prepare the way for our contributors’ contextualisation of the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss by introducing the notion of a culture of concern. In this special issue, contributors chart how concern can be said to manifest as a rise in vigilance (Fowler) and in calls for accountability (Moro) both of which can be contrasted with a more typical culture of complacency and letting be. What is specific to this case study is the fuelling of concern by pre-existing debates around consent (Cefai) and visual representation (Zecchi), as well as the specificities of context such as the Spanish one (Fernández Romero and Núñez Puente) and the fight for equality for women in sport (Crabill).

The 25th of August 2023 saw the birth of a new hashtag, in Spanish: ‘#SeAcabó’, or ‘it’s over’, to add to the many others that have accumulated following #MeToo. The hashtag arose out of a specific event: the aftermath of the medal ceremony for the Women’s Football World Cup, won by the Spanish team, where the then Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) president Luis Rubiales kissed one of the players, Jenni Hermoso, without her consent. #SeAcabó was first used in a tweet by Spanish football player Alexia Putellas as an expression of solidarity with Hermoso and a denunciation of Rubiales’ actions. #SeAcabó can be seen not simply as a demand for Rubiales to admit his guilt, but also as a judgement upon the Spanish football management, calling out years of sexism, misogyny and abusive behaviour. The hashtag joins slogans like ‘We are all Jenni’ (Hernández-Morales, 2023) as part of a campaign which eventually succeeded in forcing Rubiales to resign from the RFEF and fuelled a public outcry which culminated in a trial (Kassam, 2024). Rubiales’ resignation and the subsequent legal proceedings may have brought an end to his reign, but the volume of discourse, discussion and debate stirred up by the kiss also suggests the beginning of something. In this special issue of Cultural Commons we contemplate how the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss can be used to reveal some of the contradictory responses to sexual violence that #MeToo has unsettled rather than resolved over its 6 years of existence.

For the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss, discussion and debate as to the nature of Rubiales’ actions evolved on two levels: visually and discursively. First, there was a kind of forensic fascination with the audio-visual footage of the kiss. Second, there was a discursive negotiation, as descriptions of the kiss on social and news media were increasingly modified until its abusive nature was unambiguously agreed upon. It is important to pause to examine the timeline for how reactions to the kiss unfolded because, by doing so, we are able to establish one of the unambiguous gains of the rise in consciousness about sexual violence and abuse produced by #MeToo: the growth of a culture of ‘concern’. In this special issue contributors chart how concern can be said to manifest as a rise in vigilance (Fowler) and in calls for accountability (Moro) both of which can be contrasted with a more typical culture of complacency and letting be. What is specific to this case study is the fuelling of concern by pre-existing debates around consent (Cefai) and visual representation (Zecchi), as well as the specificities of context such as the Spanish one (Fernández Romero and Núñez Puente) and the fight for equality for women in sport (Crabill).

Concerns around naming the incident

We can get a sense of how the Rubiales/Hermoso kiss was fuelled by a culture of concern by examining shifts in language in the first 3 days. Public commentary and analysis began instants after it happened, with concern about its nature – as inappropriate – immediately communicated. While the official ceremony proceeded with its scripted business of prize giving, with no space for reflecting upon Rubiales’ excessive actions, on Twitter a tweet referred to: ‘a kiss on the mouth’ (@A__Velazquez, 20 August 2023, our emphasis). The implication that this was something worth commenting upon and responding to is encouraging, since it points immediately to a recognition that there are different kinds of kisses and all are not equal. More specifically, this tweet associates the act with romantic – read reciprocal – kisses. The question of whether or not the kiss was reciprocal hung in the air for only a short time, before commentators passed judgement. For example, Panamanian sports journalist Claudya Carolina tweeted ‘He planted a kiss on Jenni Hermoso’s mouth . . .’ (@ClaudyaCarolina, 20 August 2023, our emphasis). While less politically motivated commentators reverted to terms such as ‘peck’, ‘smacker’, ‘snog’ and ‘smooch’, Carolina’s use of ‘planted’ cuts through the romantic idealisation of kisses. The force implied in Carolina’s carefully chosen words connects the Rubiales/Hermoso kiss with other fictional examples in mainstream cinema and beyond explored in this issue by Barbara Zecchi. Zecchi outlines a pattern through which initial resistance from the woman provokes forceful kissing by the man, without consent. The direct connections of this entrenched myth to sexual assault are indicated by Carolina’s use of ‘planted’, which conjures an image of penetration that reminds us of how the kiss is a synecdoche for other intimate sexual acts.

Of interest for this special issue is the fact that, having quickly drawn concern from commentators and viewers, the kiss was soon framed in relation to pre-existing discourses around sexism and misogyny. The first statement issued by the Spanish football federation on the 20th of August was intended to silence Hermoso – falsely claiming to be her response – by insisting upon her consent to the kiss as ‘a mutual gesture’. Yet ironically, the federation’s knee-jerk reaction spread the unrest beyond the kiss per se to Spanish football more generally. One day after the kiss an unsigned article in the Spanish newspaper El País wrote that it was ‘shocking’, in light of the sport’s long-standing allegations of sexual misconduct by male soccer presidents and coaches against female players on national teams (The Associated Press, 2023). With the kiss thus contextualised as in tune with a problematic sporting culture, the focus returned to Rubiales, with more certainty as to his guilt and Hermoso’s innocence. This strengthening clarity was inevitably bolstered in the Spanish context by a law on sexual freedom focusing on consent. No doubt El País journalist Isabel Valdés had this in mind when she insisted that Rubiales ‘forcibly kissed’ Hermoso, repeating that he ‘planted one’ on her and named it as a ‘non-consensual act’ (Valdés, 2023). On the same day broadcasters, including international news outlet like CNN (2023), reported upon the act as ‘an unwanted kiss on the lips’; while on the 23^rd of August the Acting Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, called out Rubiales’ behaviour as ‘unacceptable’ (Kassam, 2023).

What these debates around the naming of the incident reveal is the ways in which concern is mediated through visual representations of kisses as well as cultural understandings of sexism and misogyny. Concern, then, builds on discursive resources readily available through media framing of other issues, such as sexism in sport or Spanish legal reforms around sexual consent. Reference to these pre-existing media framings of feminist issues also indicates a degree of media literacy stemming from ‘digitally mediated consciousness raising’ (Mendes et al., 2018). Naming violence has long been a concern for feminist activists and theorists (see for instance Alcoff, 2018; Boyle, 2019b; Kelly, 1987) and the swift reframing of Rubiales’ kiss as non-consensual and as sexual assault shows the pedagogical function of digital media platforms in disseminating feminist politics and, in the process, contributing to the ways in which the event was represented in mainstream media nationally and internationally.

Despite the affordances of digital media platforms for feminist activism, the struggle over the meaning of the kiss – from denial to minimisation by Rubiales and his supporters – is a reminder of how the media has always been thought of ‘as a site of possibility – and concern – for feminists’ (Boyle, 2019a: 2). As Hannah Hamad and Helen Wood (2024) note in their reflection on the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss in relation to Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Banet-Weiser and Higgins, 2023), ‘the believability struggle is nowhere near won’ (p. 271) and feminist analysis of sexual violence needs to ‘articulate the way in which the cultural and the material are entwined’ (p. 273). The contributors to this Cultural Commons special issue theorise the cultural shifts that bolster ‘concern’ first as the dominant register around the non-consensual kiss Rubiales inflicted upon Hermoso and second in terms of the lucrativeness of concern over sex and sexual violence as media spectacles. Concern is salient in the build-up of pressure (Fowler) and visual reframings (Zecchi) that arise when women athletes challenge sexism in their sport (Crabill). Concern also undergirds the transformative and collective rage channelled in the Spanish context from other high-profile rape trials (Fernández Romero and Núñez Puente). Even as concern marks a shift from complacency to action, it can also be a currency in a media economy that trades in viral content and polarisation, as exemplified in the hierarchies of value captured by ‘he said / she said’ (Cefai) and the difficulty of conceptualising feminist politics of accountability that moves beyond the singular and the spectacular (Moro).

Our editorial concerns around the ‘hot take’

It is worth noting that the idea for this special issue emerged in the aftermath of the non-consensual kiss Rubiales inflicted upon Hermoso, and we were adamant that we wanted to put a response together while the kiss was still in the news cycle. We could sense that the non-consensual kiss triggered ongoing anxieties around consent, cancel culture and the status of images as evidence of violence, and as such it could become another ‘feminist flashpoint’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018; see also Moro, this issue) in the digital footsteps of #MeToo. Because the case was still unfolding at the time of writing, we were mindful of not reproducing another version of a ‘hot take’, which often simplifies complex issues even as it attempts to shed light on them. To avoid this pitfall, we asked contributors to provide contextual elements so as to locate the kiss within a broader history of patriarchal violence and thereby reinscribe the outcry in an equally long legacy of feminist activism. Thus, the essays in this Cultural Commentary section foreground the complexities of power in a variety of ways. Taken together, these scholarly responses offer new angles and vantage points from which to look upon the non-consensual kiss and the viral responses it triggered. To continue Banet-Weiser’s pyrological metaphor, the contributions avoid looking only at the flames and instead examine what remains from the ashes to offer a critical understanding of those discourses which kindled the flame. It is our hope that the special issue demonstrates the value of the ‘hot take’ for feminism ‘when it supports a more sustained, nuanced form of feminist politics’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018: para. 12).

In conclusion, we would like to point out how the modes of critical analysis espoused by the contributors in this issue share much in common with the notion of ‘continuum thinking’, as conceptualised by Karen Boyle (2019a). She builds on Liz Kelly’s (1987) concept of a ‘continuum of violence’ which locates different forms of violence in relation to each other, yet resists creating a hierarchy by inviting an analysis of violence centred around the experiential as a mode of knowledge production. In mainstream media coverage of #MeToo, however, the notion of ‘continuum’ has, paradoxically, been mobilised to support claims that the movement has created moral panics around sex and consent (Boyle, 2019a). This distortion of continuum thinking also applies to the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss, whereby the banality of a kiss is used to minimise Rubiales’ actions and support the antifeminist backlash around the claims that #MeToo has gone too far. Our task therefore has been to apply continuum thinking so as to draw connections between distinct feminist flashpoints, while retaining their specificities. As Boyle (2019a) argues, ‘the value of continuum thinking is to see connections not equivalences, and so, to insist on the importance of distinctions’ (p. 21).

In various ways, each of our contributors applies continuum thinking through an epistemological turn to relationality. Relationality is induced by adopting a number of different manoeuvres. Eleanor Crabill examines some of the contradictory discourses of women’s empowerment in the reporting of the Women’s Football World Cup, while Diana Fernández Romero and Sonia Núñez Puente focus upon the effects of the build-up of hashtagged rage in Spain. Barbara Zecchi offers a video essay in the form of a critical supercut while Catherine Fowler pushes pressure points and takes up the position of feminist lookout to closely analyse the footage of the kiss. Finally, Sarah Cefai attends to the particular forms of gender injustice captured by the narrative device ‘he said, she said’, which Sabrina Moro further explores in her interrogation of the temporality of feminist flashpoints to conceptualise a feminist practice of accountability. These essays analyse the continuities between sexism, misogyny and sexual violence in detailed and nuanced ways. Hence, by gathering around this case study, we have had the opportunity to identify and consider the widening effects of a culture of concern, which suggests the accomplishments as well as the ongoing need for feminist activism 6 years after #MeToo.