#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett Julie Anne Taddeo #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture. Ed. by Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. xiii+ 415 pp. £90 (pbk £24.99). ISBN 978–1–5013–7274–2 (pbk 978–1–5013–7273–5). Twice a year, students on my university campus participate in the Clothesline Project using T-shirts to reveal, perhaps for the first time, their own experiences as [End Page 601] sexual assault survivors. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff walk by, some stopping to read and photograph the shirts, and perhaps recognize themselves in these brief accounts from mostly young women, but also some men, about what happened to them as children and/or young adults. The Clothesline Project was created in 1990 by the Cape Cod Women's Defense Agenda; its website explains that 'during the same time 58,000 soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War, 51,000 U.S. women were killed by the men who claimed to love them' ( [accessed 20 January 2023]). More than three decades later, it remains an example of what Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett propose in their Introduction to this edited collection: that we use literature in its varied forms—whether it is a medieval text, digital hashtags, or brief stories on T-shirts—to critique rape culture and act to end it. As Holland and Hewett remind us in their Introduction, #MeToo began in 2006 with Tarana Burke's revelation on MySpace of her own sexual assault, but it took the star power of actors such as Alyssa Milano and Ashley Judd to make the hashtag go viral in 2017, in the aftermath of the arrest of Harvey Weinstein. Since 2017, academic scholarship has responded with special journal issues and monographs that largely re-examine canonical works through the lens of #MeToo. Holland and Hewett's edited collection, however, stands out not only for its intersectional and international approach to texts that span two thousand years—from Ovid to Roxane Gay, from medieval England to postcolonial India—but also for the book's second half, which offers readers pedagogical approaches and practices, with examples of both successful and unsuccessful classroom instruction. In such a brief review, it is difficult to single out any particular chapter among the twenty-eight contributions, but all of them highlight the potential for literary studies to effect change in and beyond the university classroom. Holland and Hewett observe that hashtag activism 'has its roots in over two centuries of activism, advocacy work, and writing about sexual violence' (p. 3). Likewise, hashtag activism invites scholars and students to engage in new interpretations of old texts; one such example is described in Chapter 8, in which twenty-first-century Indian college students, responding to high-profile rape and 'slut-shaming' cases, use Ovid's Philomela to understand how girls and women are still routinely silenced. Second-wave feminism, though often faulted for its lack of intersectionalism, taught us to read literary representations of rape 'literally, not just 'as a trope for something else' (p. 5). Yet even current anti-rape activism, Holland and Hewett rightly contend, has shortcomings, often privileging the experiences and voices of cisgender, white, heterosexual women. In response, this collection covers the relationship between colonialism, slavery, racism, and sexual violence in far-ranging texts, from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, to Black street lit. Furthermore, several chapters discuss contemporary texts by and/or about sexual violence against trans and non-binary people of colour and Indigenous women. While most of the collection focuses on literature about the more pervasive experience of male violence [End Page 602] against women, stories of male rape (perpetrated by both men and women) are also under analysis in this volume. Contributor Kasey Jones-Matrona summarizes one of the collection's unifying themes, that 'literature and all forms of storytelling, including oral traditions, are all...