Speaker: Sabine Sielke, North American Studies Program, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (University of Bonn)

Abstract: »Sexual harassment and sexual violence have been an issue of debate among social reformers and political activists long before the term feminism itself was coined. These serial discussions underscore how ubiquitous sexual violence remains in the power dynamic of human relations and social hierarchies and how, as a consequence, feminist critique has had to repeat its central arguments incessantly for centuries. The insistent return of the controversy also demonstrates, though, how feminist concerns mutate along with transforming social and cultural economies and media ecologies, which newly frame, channel, and absorb our attention. The recent rape & revenge movie, Emerald Fennell’s outstanding Promising Young Woman (2021), makes all of this blatantly evident. As an engaged provocative intervention into a debate with a long history under constant erasure, the film serves as a point of serial reference throughout my argument.
Making my case, I present this debate’s mutations and erasures as part of a revenge, practiced not by those subjected to sexual harassment and violence, but, as Fennell’s film insistently highlights, by cultures that protect and care about perpetrators more than about injured parties. In such cultures (and we know no others) feminist controversies, I argue, keep returning with a vengeance: In the course of the #MeToo disputes hierarchies of gender, race, and class that feminism meant to undo have been reaffirmed; aiming to break silences, the contentions have created new ones instead. Raising the question what the #MeToo movement has added to the conversation on sexual harassment and sexual violence, my talk examines the recursive moves these debates have recently made. As #MeToo targets – once again, yet by its own means and media formats – the systematic and systemic ‘nature’ of sexualized and sexual violence and readdresses central concerns and (still controversial and presumably dated) concepts of feminism, ranging from patriarchy to sexism and misogyny to “rape culture,” we may wonder: what’s new about #MeToo?
In order to answer this question, I make a three-part argument: Part one engages the so-called “rape crisis discourse” of the 1990s in order to highlight the (dis-)continuities between #MeToo and previous peaks of feminist intervention. Mapping the media ecology from which #MeToo emerged, part two aims to measure how digital modes and hashtag frame and (de-)limit the impact of the ‘movement.’ Part three shows how #MeToo manages to remember feminism forward while, like all memory practice, relying on forgetting and nurturing old silences. Accordingly, the courageous “promising young” protagonist of Fennell’s illuminating rape & revenge narrative knows that she has to trade in her life, literally, to break that silence and usher in justice, for a brief, fleeting, and soon disremembered moment in time.« (Source: Online Program)

Publication: Sielke, Sabine. »Return with a Vengeance? The Serial Debate on Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence, or: What’s New About #MeToo – and What Film Can (Still) Do.« Rape and Revenge: Rache-Kulturen und sexualisierte Gewalt in intermedialer Perspektive. Edited by Christine Künzel et al. Göttingen 2024: 211-231. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of the United States / History of the United States (2008–present) | Film: American rape and revenge films / Promising Young Woman | Law: Arbitrariness / Revenge | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in the United States