From Madwomen to Whistleblowers: MeToo in South Korea as an Institutional Critique

MeToo and its Global Travels: Challenging the False Universality of the United States

What does it mean when we say, "Me Too?" Consisting of only two words, this statement, along with the movement based on it, has become a transnational phenomenon, providing a way to reveal and speak out against sexual and gender-based violence. Crossing the national borders of the United States, the form that MeToo has taken and what it has come to signify have diverged further, depending on local and national contexts. In some places, MeToo has emerged as a campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace, while in others, it has become a call for women's autonomy and the free expression of sexuality. While the dominant means of transmission for MeToo has undoubtedly been social media, mainstream media such as television, and even sticky notes (Kim 2021) played an important role in its spread as well.

What enabled such heterogeneity in the way that MeToo traversed national borders is its ambiguity and openness. As a colloquial and mundane expression, MeToo simply states that the speaker affirms the listener based on a shared experience, without specifying what the experience is or on what basis the affirmation is taking place. When Alyssa Milano on Twitter in 2017 called on women collectively to share their experiences of being "sexually harassed or assaulted," it enabled many women to share a broad range of experiences of victimization. Yet, in the context of Hollywood actresses speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, MeToo in the United States has since been narrowly interpreted in the workplace as well as public naming of abusers. This is a different version of MeToo from the one initiated by Tarana Burke, for whom the utterance of MeToo was an affirmation of a shared experience of sexual victimhood, particularly among marginalized women of color (Burke and Adetiba 2018). As such, the polyvocality within MeToo is salient in that it can operate simultaneously in multiple senses. In one sense it is a call to solidarity for women victims, placing it within the legacy of radical feminism. In the other, it is a means of affirmation and solidarity among women of color deriving from intersectional feminism, even within the national borders of the United States. This opens up the analytic and political possibilities of MeToo, which reveal the social and cultural conditions of its travels.

While acknowledging the significance of the momentum that MeToo brings to feminist mobilizations, feminist scholars have engaged in a cautionary critique, which identifies MeToo's limitations as arising from centering white women's pain (Tambe 2018), an inability to address workplace abuse as a structural issue along with class politics (Berg 2020), and a narrow focus on individual perpetrators rather than the social relations of power and systemic change (Gill and Orgad 2019). Often, these discussions are framed and understood as a universal discourse on MeToo despite their limited empirical basis to the case of the United States and to a lesser extent Europe, without considering how MeToo took place in most parts of the world in heterogenous ways. A critical yet nuanced discussion of MeToo, which examines its significance and limitations, needs to challenge the false presumption of universality based on a few national cases. Such a discussion should instead seriously consider how MeToo has been shaped in the social and political contexts of its global travels, where gender is situated in different entanglements with race, class, and other structures of inequality.

In this article, I draw on the case of South Korea, where MeToo has come to signify women's collective attempts to speak out publicly against sexual violence as a systemic abuse of power and authority. Articulations of MeToo in South Korea thus run counter to its dominant form in the US case since it goes beyond individual perpetrators to instead address structures of power within social institutions that enable such abuse. I delve into the tension over how to translate the English expression "MeToo" into Korean, as a contested site where feminists reckoned with the polyvocality of MeToo in order to situate it...