#HerToo? Academic Exclusion in the Age of #MeToo

This article began life as an essay about the difficulties and dangers women face at academic conferences. It was inspired by my own and my fellow female delegates' experiences of being threatened, followed, and groped in the neighborhood near our conference venue—classic #MeToo territory—and also by the realization that safety at conferences should be conceptualized in more capacious terms. Acutely aware of my own oversights and shortcomings when I had organized conferences in the past, the essay argued that safety should encompass issues like accessibility for disabled and neuro-diverse delegates; it stressed the need for pronoun badges for all delegates and restroom access that matches gender identity; it argued for sliding fees that reflect the pay gaps that exist not just between men and women but also between white women and women of color. But when I pitched the essay to four online higher education sites, two rejected the essay outright, one suggested it could be published if I focused on the sexual harassment that women faced (the implication being that I should not consider separately the issues of accessibility that different women experience depending on the intersection of their identities), and one published the article after removing all references to the impact of racial discrimination, transphobia, ableism, and poverty on conference-going women. The academy's apparent unwillingness to confront the ways in which it disadvantages certain women—even in this climate of increased awareness of pervasive sexism and sexual violence—inspired the piece published here. The point of this essay is that the academy is a hostile place for women, but it is more difficult for women who are not white, cis, and heterosexual.

The Me Too movement was founded thirteen years ago by Tarana Burke to support survivors of sexual violence. The women with whom she worked were primarily young black women and women of color living in low-wealth communities, and Me Too was intended to validate their experiences, promote healing, and provide survivors and allies with resources appropriate to their communities. But in the process of its transformation into the viral #MeToo hashtag, the traumas of black and marginalized women that underpin this movement were quickly forgotten. Burke voiced her dismay in a letter extracted in Essence Magazine:

I was pained to watch Black women, yet again, being erased from the narrative … I started doing this work because there were so few resources and recourses for us, which is why it cuts deep to hear sisters, who are largely responsible for my visibility, saying the current iteration of the #MeToo movement isn't for them.¹

#MeToo has now been co-opted by the academy, where the extent of sexual abuse, harassment, and bullying is coming to light in articles, blogs, and crowdsourced documents. Despite its potential to unite survivors, hold perpetrators accountable, and change abusive norms in higher education, there is a real risk that the academic iteration will become another tool of exclusion that erases the unique experiences of black and minority ethnic women, trans women, poor women, and disabled women—just as Burke herself was nearly erased from the movement she created when Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo in 2017.

If we in the academy choose to invoke #MeToo, we must remember that this movement has always been both educational and intersectional, with Burke developing a

culturally-informed curriculum to discuss sexual violence within the Black community and in society at large. Similarly, the 'me too' movement seeks to support folks working within their communities to attend to the specific needs of their community/communities, i.e. supporting disabled trans survivors of color working to lead and craft events/toolkits/etc. with other disabled trans survivors.²

#MeToo makes it possible to imagine real transformation within the academy by unifying survivors. However, we must not allow it to become a tool that only or primarily helps white, cis women by treating women as a monolith and failing to create adequate space for consideration of the unique ways in which women of color, trans women and nonbinary people, disabled women, and poor women experience abuses of power...