Afterword: "Walking Alongside Many #MeToos"

The feverish mobilization around the Twitter hashtag #MeToo occurred relatively recently, in 2017, but events since then provoke a distanced vantage point from which to view the movement anew. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed and deepened social inequities, and the intensified Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 against police brutality and white supremacy, both offer parallel examples of networked upheavals. These more recent events, seismic in different ways, can push us toward a sharper delineation of #MeToo's contours and scope. This dossier on #MeToo offers just such an analysis, at a time that is ripe for accounting for the movement's erasures as well as its successes. In this afterword, I reflect on some major implications of the authors' analyses. Drawing on examples from the dossier and beyond, I argue for a robust reframing of the relationship between #MeToo in the United States and in other locations. I also stress the need for elasticity in our critiques of #MeToo to account for its heterogeneous expressions around the globe.

The editors of this dossier deliberately take a transnational tack, bringing together scholarship from multiple geographic sites, seeking to examine the connections between mobilizations across countries. Several contributors discuss the mechanics of how a common hashtag, #MeToo, generated distinct upheavals in each location. The singular achievement of this dossier is its decentering of the conventional account of #MeToo as a mobilization that began with a tweet by a Hollywood actress, Alyssa Milano, that was echoed around the globe. In its place, the authors in this dossier offer an account that not only rewrites its US origins by highlighting Tarana Burke's 2007 anti-sexual violence workshops for Black girls centered on the phrase "me too," but also examines how #MeToo as a Twitter hashtag built on extant activism in multiple countries.

Much scholarly writing has hitherto narrated #MeToo mobilizations from up close, in relation to specific locations. In a 2018 piece about the limits of the mobilization within the United States, I observed that #MeToo was not a US phenomenon alone, and had led to repercussions in countries around the globe (Tambe 2018). I have since then come to frame #MeToo not as a progenitor of a global upheaval, but rather as an intensification of an ongoing strain of digitally-driven activism about sexual violence in several countries. The very framing of #MeToo as a singular global movement, a digitally-driven conflagration linked to the 2017 hashtag, risks denying important antecedents in feminist organizing against sexual harassment and violence in multiple parts of the world.

The idea of a hashtag spreading like wildfire from a single spark is certainly appealing as a narrative. Many news articles about #MeToo note the almost immediate and widespread uptake of the hashtag in social media feeds around the globe in mid-October 2017. The hashtag certainly spread in ways that had been hitherto unprecedented, with a highly dense global network appearing almost overnight. Social media researcher Erin Gallagher (2021) notes that there were over 10,000 distinct communities formed using the hashtag between October 16–18, 2017, more than any she had ever seen, and "over 12 million posts, comments, and reactions on Facebook in less than 24 hours." Gallagher's digital visualization shows that the hashtag was used in several communities; the one centering on Milano was only one among several and not even the densest. While the hashtag may have originated in the United States, its instantaneous virality in multiple sites needs to be explained. When we look at graphic renditions of the uptake of the hashtag within the first twelve hours, we see it is not just in English-speaking parts of the world where it spread rapidly: nodes appeared in Japan, Argentina, Portugal, Sweden, Egypt, and Korea within the first twelve hours, in addition to India, South Africa, Australia, and the UK (Burke 2018). Such receptivity to the hashtag could be attributed, I suggest, to prior activism in those locations.

If we were to ask where around the world in the past decade sexual violence and harassment in public spaces has been a focus of activism, we...