#MeToo and the Politics of Transnational Feminism

The global context of a feminist movement

The #MeToo movement is most famous for the US celebrities it took to task for sexual crimes—Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer, to name a few. Mainstream representations of #MeToo frame it as a global feminist campaign that originated in the US and focused on high-profile American actors and executives. But the debates about gender-based violence that #MeToo catalyzed were felt worldwide. Despite the global uptick of the movement, there are very few feminist accounts of the transnational politics of #MeToo.

This anthology frames #MeToo as a movement with uneven itineraries, goals, and outcomes. The essays in this volume take a transnational and comparative feminist approach to #MeToo, focusing on the multiple ways that feminist voices from Argentina, Egypt, India, Pakistan, South Korea, the US, and the UK have pushed the boundaries of what counts as politics, justice, solidarity, violence, precarity, and vulnerability. In doing so, this volume shows how an engagement with #MeToo allows us to extend and sharpen the empirical, theoretical, and methodological parameters of transnational feminist thought. A blend of global activist and academic work, #MeToo and the Politics of Transnational Feminism offers a necessary transnational framing of the #MeToo movement.