Abstract
#MeToo has been firmly embraced by the vast majority of ‘woke’ intellectuals, including in the legal academy. Scholars who understand themselves to be progressive and leftist are contributing to the mainstream public discourse around celebrity sexual violence allegations. However, this discourse leaves little room for reflective inquiry into larger questions of structure and agency, guilt and shame, punishment and forgiveness, power and desire, reckoning and accountability. This chapter considers how otherwise critical scholars have ceded the territory of sex and sexuality to liberals and conservatives in the context of #MeToo and argues that we must reckon with the concept of sexual consent as a legal fiction. We must seek to articulate what is left unsaid—and rendered therefore somehow unsayable—about the danger/pleasure spectrum in mainstream #MeToo narratives.
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Matthews, H. (2019). #MeToo as Sex Panic. In: Fileborn, B., Loney-Howes, R. (eds) #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_17
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