The necessary transgressions of #MeToo

Drawing of three women in witches' hats © Zinzi Sánchez for Ojalá.

Books • Guiomar Rovira • October 4, 2024 • Leer en castellano

#MeToo, a wave of interconnected feminist uprising is a new book by researcher and activist Guiomar Rovira that became available in Latin America in August. First published in 2023 by Bellaterra Edicions in Barcelona, it was published in Mexico by Bajo Tierra Ediciones.

Expanding the reach of Rovira's work to Latin America is a smart move. She critically approaches the intense and sometimes contradictory #MeToo experience, which she calls “the largest campaign against sexual violence in workplaces and educational spaces in the world” which exploded in 2017.

We are sharing an excerpt in which Rovira, who is also a feminist hacktivism enthusiast, considers the lessons of #MeToo. [[-Eds.]]

#MeToo as digital direct action

“Direct action is that which launches the cry of protest, the initiator, that through which the great indifferent masses become aware oppression has become unbearable,” explained anarchist Voltairine De Cleyre at the beginning of the last century.

Direct action is characterized by putting aside institutional mechanisms to solve a problem. “Through direct action, social actors seek to achieve their objectives by overflowing, bypassing or violating the institutional channels of the social order for the processing of their demands,” explains Julián Rebón.

Undoubtedly, direct action is the Do It Yourself (DIY) of contentious politics, which are very much in tune with the hacker ethos: do what you can with what you have at your fingertips, without waiting for authorization. In the example of #MeToo, systemic sexual violence is oppossed through the tactical use of symbolic violence as self-defense. 

Public shaming is used a form of revenge by the weak, which becomes political because it modifies the field of respectability and the reputation of the alleged aggressor (overwhelmingly men with greater power than their victims), who suddenly appears as “pigs.” Those who had reserved the universal category of rational and moral “man” for themselves appear to others as “animals.” Their power is naked.

We could say that #MeToo brings a controversial repertoire of protest known as escrache to the digital sphere. Born in Argentina, escrache consists of going in groups to the home or workplace of alleged perpetrators of genocide crimes and displaying them, shouting at them, scratching their walls. 

According to Catalina Ruiz Navarro, escrache has been used by the feminist movement in recent years to denounce cases of harassment and abuse. “Of course there are alternatives to escrache such as criminal justice, gossip, direct and private complaints, and all of them are still legitimate and women are familiar with them. The question then is what are the limitations of these alternatives that make society resort collectively and en masse to escrache?” she asks.

#MeToo is a disconcerting form of direct action based on mass visibility. It has been critiqued for being a form of digital lynching, or a “witch hunt,” although it would be more accurate to speak of a hunt for inquisitors. As Silvia Federici's work shows, during the transition from the Middle Ages to capitalism, the execution of witches had a disciplining effect that allowed men exercise dominance over women. 

The disturbing thing about that difficult period of history is that anyone, by virtue of being a woman, could be branded a witch. #MeToo is its nemesis, reversing the idea that men are untouchable, according to one of the feminists interviewed for the book. Of course, #MeToo does not have the power of the Church or the State behind it, as the Inquisition did. Instead, it has collective force of a personal story amplified through digital networks.

This is how #MeToo shifts the focus of the spotlight. It becomes a flaw in the system. A hack, a crack, a bug in a technical apparatus captured by algorithms, business and the corporate control social networks like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. It is a clear expression of “enough is enough.”

Digital connectivity today is entirely profit-oriented. New technologies are weapons of mass data mining used to develop new forms of profit and slavery. As we have already seen—from the Snowden revelations to the Cambridge Analytica mass manipulation case—that large-scale surveillance is not only possible, but that it is used to destroy democratic processes. #MeToo interrupts digital communication spaces that are increasingly toxic for feminist activism. Between the initial emergence of #MeToo to 2022, digital gender-based violence has only increased.

As a repertoire of protest in digital space, #MeToo is not peaceful civil resistance. It is wrathful and demolishing, it has no patience. It does not focus on denouncing in courts to seek redress. It does not trust the justice system, instead it demonstrates its ineffectiveness and the need to transform it. It is not contained within respectibility politics, nor does it try to heal wounds behind closed doors, rather it expulses the damage into the public arena. 

Men exposed as aggressors are those who are targeted: they, too, experience a before and after being denounced, as in the before and after of all sexual aggression (which are in themselves incomparable facts). Even if the denunciation is baseless, the mark may remain. 

In many cases and in several countries the #MeToo has functioned as a manner of blacklisting men. #MeToo exhibits by overflow the ineffectiveness (social, cultural, legal) of access to justice for women victims of sexual harassment, abuse and rape. 

It is in itself a “monstrous” repertoire, not only because it disarranges the symbolic order and its patriarchal pillars, but also through its incivility. When the civil thing to do is to accept abuse, grit your teeth and stay quiet, MeToo is a rallying cry.