Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

With the momentum created with the #MeToo movement via online media, women are coming forward with their own experiences of sexual misconduct organizing for change. When in 1991, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, Anita Hill was grilled by an all male panel of congressmen on national TV, the reaction was very gendered. Women tended to believe her and it spawned a campaign supporting her. Twenty-six years later, there has been a paradigm shift. Now women are not only acknowledging that they believe the victims, but are coming forward with their own experiences of sexual misconduct. These situations have been exposed at all levels of society from famous people (starting with President Trump and other politicians) to the lay person. Thus, the element of public shaming has rightfully shifted from the victims to the predators. Technology has supported this movement via the immediacy of the media, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapshot, etc. - and the hashtag #MeToo. For this study, we sampled images and texts culled from the Internet, predominantly from Facebook and Twitter. We adopted the conceptual framework of critical discourse analysis (CDC) to look at the form and function of these messages – in particular the language used to describe the sexual misconduct, the accompanying images of the messages, as well as the gender of the “MeTooers.”