ABSTRACT
#MeToo has reshaped curricula in English literary studies. While feminist literary scholars have analysed texts about sexual violence and rape culture since feminist interventions into literary studies, these efforts have expanded and grown more complex in recent years and in particular, since Tarana Burke's 2006 “Me Too” movement went viral and global as #MeToo in 2017. At the same time, an outpouring of contemporary literature of all genres, particularly memoir and life writing, offers new narratives about sexual violence, testimony, trauma and healing. Literary scholars have more material to teach, to place in conversation with the decades of writing before it, and to consider in the context of the continuing power imbalances that mark public spaces and institutions everywhere.
This chapter surveys the major themes that have emerged in response to #MeToo over the last five years: re-readings of canonical texts, the development of embodied pedagogies, rethinking literary genres and canons, increasing efforts to place literature and media studies in conversation with each other, and a re-energised approach to activism in and through literary studies. The renewed efforts of scholars, paired with the abundance of writing in response to #MeToo, suggest that literature continues to play an important role in feminist activism. While social media has the potential to reinvigorate existing justice movements and spark new ones, literature remains a powerful site for social change and the feminist project of ending sexual violence.
