Rape Narratives That Paved the Way for #MeToo: The Crack in the Wall

This book examines a decade of rape memoirs produced by English-speaking women around the emergence of #MeToo as a global phenomenon. It argues that their auto/biographical praxis opened a crack in the long-standing wall of silence that the 2017 online campaign and its echoes, still resonating today, are systematically eroding. Jana Leo, Joanna Connors, Roxane Gay, Myriam Gurba, Chanel Miller, Jeannie Vanasco, Eve Ensler, Thordis Elva, and other survivors helped set and reaffirm the bases for the current zeitgeist around sexual violence, characterized by a tsunami of stories in circulation and a growing audience that is more ready than ever to listen to the victims ethically and empathically. This volume offers an in-depth analysis of a literary corpus that contributes to the conversation about the narrative politics of the fourth wave of feminism and some of its key preoccupations, such as consent, accountability, and justice. Of particular value for academics and activists working on/against sexual violence, as well as for life writing and gender studies scholars, it can also be useful to specialists in the fields of ethics, affect theory, trauma studies, memory studies, cultural studies, phenomenology, victimology, or ethnic and minority studies.