#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture

Description

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature. #MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world. Cover Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Literary Studies as Literary Activism Heather Hewett and Mary K. Holland PART I: Critical Practices 1 “Dismissed, trivialized, misread”: Re-examining the Reception of Women’s Literature through the #MeToo Movement Janet Badia 2 Reading Survivor Narratives: Literary Criticism as Feminist Solidarity Tanya Serisier 3 Evoking the Specter of White Feminism in the #MeToo Movement: Publishing Memoirs and the Cultural Memory of American Feminism Amanda Spallacci 4 Pricing Black Girl Pain: The Cost of Black Girlhood in Street Lit Jacinta R. Saffold 5 From #MMIW to #NotInvisible: Indigenous Women in the #MeToo Era Kasey Jones-Matrona 6 Credibility and Doubt in the Age of #MeToo Namrata Mitra and Katherine Conner 7 Quite Possibly the Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace Mary K. Holland PART II: Re-readings 8 Philomela’s Tapestry and #MeToo: Reading Ovid in an Indian Feminist Classroom Aditi Joshi, Anushka Srivastava, Katyayani, Mahwash Akhter, Prasanta Bani Ekka, Shivangi Tiwary, Shweta, and Zahanat 9 “Beware of the delusions of fancy!”: Silencing and Rape Culture in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette Hannah Herndon 10 “Fearful of being pursued, yet determined to persevere”: Northanger Abbey and the #MeToo Movement Douglas Murray 11 The Limits of #MeToo in India: Re-reading Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Deepa Mehta’s Earth Nidhi Shrivastava 12 Intimate Violence and Sexual Assault in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut: Carving Spaces of Feminist Liberation in Post-Apartheid South African Literature Nafeesa T. Nichols 13 The Other Men of #MeToo: Male Rape in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Sapphire’s The Kid, and Amber Tamblyn’s Any Man Robin E. Field 14 Reading Junot Díaz after Me Too and #MeToo Ann Marie Alfonso Short PART III: Pedagogy: Practices and Methods 15 Beyond Safe Spaces: Working toward Access and Accountability Using Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Maureen McDonnell 16 Trigger Warnings: An Ethics for Tutoring #MeToo Content and Rape Narratives in Writing Centers Beth Walker 17 From Sympathy to Detoxification: Pedagogical Approaches for Dismantling Rape Culture Jeremy Posadas 18 Theorizing “Toxic” Masculinity across Cultures and Nations: The Case of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Heather Hewett 19 “I said nothing”: Teaching Corregidora and Black Women’s Relationship to Consent Carlyn Ferrari 20 “Teach as if you aren’t afraid of getting fired”: A Queer Survivor’s Use of Restorative Justice Circles to Embrace Vulnerability in the Classroom Sarah Goldbort 21 Praxis of Empowerment: Latina Decolonial Feminist Pedagogy and Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls Roberta Hurtado PART IV: Pedagogy: Classroom Contexts 22 Teaching the #MeToo Memoir: Creating Empathy in the First-Year College Classroom Elif S. Armbruster 23 Teaching Courtly Love in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Desire, Consent, and the #MeToo Movement Sara V. Torres and Rebecca F. McNamara 24 Centering Black Women in the Classroom: Teaching Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl after #MeToo Linda Chavers 25 Lessons in Credibility and Complicity in Two Modern Dramas Amy B. Hagenrater-Gooding 26 An Impulse toward Agency: Teaching Scenes of Sexual Violence in Afro-Latina/o/x Literature Ethan Madarieta 27 New Approaches to Short Fiction and Nonfiction in the Classroom: Challenging Violence from Queer and Straight Perspectives Zoë Brigley Thompson 28 Recruiting Warriors: Using Literature in College Classrooms to Fight and Win “The Longest War” Candice L. Pipes Notes on Contributors Index