“Vital acts of transfer”: Affective economies and embodied knowledge in #MeToo

Abstract

This book chapter situates the #MeToo movement as a live, ongoing performance within the digital media sphere. It argues that performance theory offers a unique means of grasping at the movement’s significance and on-going potential as well as its limitations. It reads the #MeToo movement and feminist hashtag activism more broadly as a virtual enactment of what Judith Butler calls performative assembly – mass gatherings that assert the right for marginalized bodies and voices to appear (2015). From this perspective the chapter considers what are the iterative gestures of the movement? What forms of affect and assembly does the movement and its practices allow for? What is promoted, lost, refused in the translation of embodied knowledge and lived experiences brought forward by the #MeToo hashtag? What forms of feminism are now visible on the world stage and how are they dialoging with each other through the movement?