ABSTRACT
This chapter explores debates pertaining to women's public speech about gendered violence and trauma, specifically in an Anglo-American context and in the wake of #MeToo. On the one hand, the chapter considers the profound problems that ensue from “speaking out” through the communicative architectures of late capitalist media culture – with their powerful logics of co-optation, depoliticisation, spectacularisation and commodification. However, it argues that we must also critique and resist a countervailing argument – that which assumes that any kind of “traumatised voice” that speaks through these communicative architectures is complicit in neoliberal hegemony and the undermining of collective voice. It problematises some of the critiques of #MeToo which imply that it is a movement motivated and driven by forms of ressentiment and vengeful anger, and which suggest that personally-experienced trauma, woundedness and rage have no place in movements for justice and radical liberation. The chapter then turns to analyse mediations of disclosures of sexual abuse by the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the comedian Hannah Gadsby. It considers how these two women have been accused – from both the political right and left – of emotionally manipulating their audiences, exploiting their trauma for personal gain, and thus of helping to foreclose the possibility of more radical democratic futures and social solidarity. It argues that such suggestions of complicity and culpability constitute structural silencing – an insidious form of what I term “communicative injustice”.
