Between the Desire for Law and the Law of Desire: #MeToo and the Cost of Telling the Truth Today

This article examines the kairotic beginnings of the #MeToo movement in order to understand what we are to make of this moment. It shows that commentaries about #MeToo unfold as a debate over the desire for law and the law of desire, ceding the contingent kairotic moment in which we might remake our contemporary political landscapes. As such, I argue that movements dedicated to ending sexual violence must reimagine the scene of address in which demands for justice might be spoken and their speech recognized as the truth. This project is complicated, however, by a post-truth era in which telling the truth matters little because truth itself has been devalued. Through this lens, we can see that the cost of telling the truth in the terms of the established debate is the creation of a form of identity politics that reinforces post-truth logics rather than intervening in them.