Overview
- Offers critical interrogation of 'toxic masculinity' in feminist scholarship
- Uniquely contextualizes #MeToo within the landscape of neoliberal gender politics
- Draws on sociology to examine the global impact of neoliberal political rationality on sexual violence policies
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
About this book
This book locates #MeToo’s traction among elites with “womenomics” theories that attribute feminized poverty, welfare dependency, and sexual violence to traditional femininity and toxic masculinity. Such neoliberal anti-sexual violence policies seek to empower women through paid work and reform men through fatherhood. This volume shows that men’s movements and conservative concerns about “fatherless families” developed toxic masculinity discourse before popular feminism incorporated it. It analyses how discourse on #MeToo issues in the workplace reveals a shift away from representations of women as traumatized victims in need of empowerment toward a focus on men as both problem and solution, setting new standards for masculine workplace conduct. However, this discourse reproduces a toxic/good men binary that serves to consolidate a new form of hegemonic masculinity. The book concludes that neoliberal sexual violence politics obscures how globalization fosters inequalities and sexualviolence by blaming these and other social ills on toxically masculine men.
This book will be of interest to scholars whose research focuses on sexual violence, feminist studies, masculinity studies, and neoliberalism.
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
Table of contents (5 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Reviews
“Neoliberal Gender Politics, #MeToo, and Toxic Masculinity provides a timely and insightful analysis of discourse on sexual violence and gender politics. Harrington traces shifts in constructions of masculinity, sexual violence and the #MeToo movement, demonstrating how superficially progressive shifts in representation nonetheless continue to reproduce neoliberal and essentialising discourse.” (Bianca Fileborn, University of Melbourne)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Carol Harrington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She researches sexual violence politics. She has published on sexual violence in international politics; peacekeeper sexual violence; sex work knowledge politics in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand; and social media narratives about sexual violence.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Neoliberal Sexual Violence Politics
Book Subtitle: Toxic Masculinity and #MeToo
Authors: Carol Harrington
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07088-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-07087-7Published: 01 July 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-07088-4Published: 30 June 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 111
Topics: Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Social Philosophy, Politics and Gender, Crime and Society