Christine Hume, Focus Editor I will never forget where I was when the Senate voted to confirm a twisted, white, rapist to the highest court in our nation. On October 6, 2018, my “#MeToo as Literary Form” panel at the &Now Festival of Innovative Writing assembled to address the very brand of predation epitomized on the national stage. #MeToo started by using the power of language, narrative, and performance to force a large-scale public reckoning with patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Its forms — the recounting, the call-out, the report, the social media post, testimony, the denial, the she said/he said, the gaslighting, the non-apology, the fake apology, the rant, the comeback — take on the cultural coercions of sexism. Taken together, these forms coalesce in a fatigued mythology that participates in oral traditions as well as critical analysis. The story itself is ancient: men activate female suffering. Separately, each form is contingent on self-enforcing cultural supremacies (i.e. the credibility of men), and women who attempt to rewrite the narrative become themselves its subjects, scrutinized and patronized. If a woman’s account of gender-based violence focuses on her individual sadness and injury, and not on the injustice or the systemic nature of the problem, she is more likely to be heard. By fixating on the isolated traumatic event, we turn our backs on the “crisis ordinariness” of the present. This vision of authorship, which privileges the subjective and the tragic — female pain — underpins a baseline gendered skepticism. No one needs to say that women are forgetful, opportunistic, slutty, drunk, crazy, attention-seeking, or prone to fantasies. We already know it. Running under and through these voicings is a silent swallowing of far more stories of sexual predation. Who among us has just one? For most of my life I’ve carried with me the feeling that I had too many similar stories — boring in both the Freudian and pedestrian sense — which meant I have written them, or at least cast myself in their predetermined roles. Patriarchy reduces us to the same plots; over and over, it dashes us against those rocks. One of its most breath-taking costs is the way it inhibits our imaginations. That way, if we accept a social invitation from a male mentor, no matter what happens, we have seen this movie before. Whatever cocktail of defiance and self-doubt, of shame and exceptionalism the scene provokes, it’s always been our chemistry, nearly naturalized if not for the alchemy of the movement. As #MeToo has consolidated, so has its language. When we insist on “consent,” we make clear who has agency. When we write “believe women” and “time’s up,” we sound the shallows of formulaic slogans as much as we insist on paradigm-shifting empowerment. A whiff of the counterproductive “girl power” hangs in the air despite gender identity coming into increasingly complex conversations with biology and cultural construction. It is impossible for me to write this, for instance, without immediately feeling dissatisfied with my capacity to lean on the calcified shorthand of the movement. Impossible to index all the problems of working with an inflected tool, a language riddled with discrimination. All of this matters because our rhetoric is easily detourned into the patriarchal language of rape culture that it was coined to fight, turned back on us with vindictive satisfaction and anger. Witness Lindsey Graham, petulant at a meeting the day after the Kavanaugh hearing: “I’m a single white male from South Carolina, and I’m told that I should just shut up, but I will not shut up.” Witness Kanye West: “Russell Simmons wanna pray for me too / Imma pray for him ‘cause he got Me Too’d.” Witness, in the silent wake of Joe Biden’s cluelessness, former DNC Chair Ed Rendell going full-Kavanaugh: “We have to draw a line on this #MeToo...The vast majority of the American people are sick of this stuff. They know what’s real and what isn’t real. This isn’t real.” If you weren’t there, let me tell you how real it got. I handpicked the “#MeToo As Literary Form” panel and wrote the description. I included men on the panel because sexual harassment and abuse in not limited to binary categories; it is a shared institutional and cultural problem. The panel was all my idea, except for the convergence of time and place that juiced our context. The week had already been eaten alive by the hearings, and we arrived exhausted, edgy, and heartbroken, continually reminded of our own situations of ignored refusals and compromised consent. I checked into the conference on the one-year anniversary of #MeToo, fully aware of the irony of its setting this time — Notre Dame University — with its unrelenting Catholicism: a crucifix in every hotel room, a posturing Christ looming larger-thanlife around unexpected corners, and its football season on full volume. Who could forget its starring role in the embattled 2015 movie about campus rape, The Hunting Ground? As the Senate voted to confirm — on the very day and hour they voted 50-48 — my panel played out the problem incarnate. It only took one panelist and one audience member to sabotage what should have been a moment of delirious replenishment. The saboteur panelist “corrected” and mansplained; he went on and on, not especially prepared, using

中文翻译：

---

Focus 简介：#MeToo

Christine Hume，焦点编辑 我永远不会忘记，当参议院投票通过在我们国家的最高法院确认一名扭曲的白人强奸犯时，我在哪里。2018 年 10 月 6 日，我在 &Now 创新写作节上的“#MeToo 作为文学形式”小组聚集在一起，以解决在国家舞台上集中体现的掠夺品牌。#MeToo 一开始就利用语言、叙事和表演的力量，迫使公众对父权制和有毒的男性气质进行大规模的清算。它的形式——重述、呼吁、报告、社交媒体帖子、证词、否认、她说/他说的、煤气灯、不道歉、假道歉、咆哮、卷土重来——采取关于性别歧视的文化胁迫。综合起来，这些形式融合在一个疲惫的神话中，参与口头传统和批判性分析。这个故事本身很古老：男人激活女人的痛苦。分别地，每一种形式都取决于自我强化的文化霸权（即男性的可信度），而试图改写叙事的女性成为其主体，受到审查和光顾。如果女性对基于性别的暴力的描述侧重于她个人的悲伤和伤害，而不是问题的不公正或系统性，那么她更有可能被听到。通过专注于孤立的创伤事件，我们背弃了当下的“危机平凡”。这种将主观和悲剧（女性痛苦）置于优先地位的作者身份观支撑了基本的性别怀疑论。不用说女人健忘，投机取巧、放荡、醉酒、疯狂、寻求关注或容易产生幻想。我们已经知道了。在这些声音之下并通过这些声音是对更多性掠夺故事的无声吞咽。我们中间谁只有一个？在我生命的大部分时间里，我一直觉得我有太多类似的故事——弗洛伊德和普通人的感觉都很无聊——这意味着我写了它们，或者至少让我自己扮演他们预定的角色。父权制使我们陷入同样的​​情节；一遍又一遍，它把我们撞在那些岩石上。它最令人叹为观止的代价之一是它抑制了我们的想象力。这样，如果我们接受男性导师的社交邀请，无论发生什么，我们之前都看过这部电影。无论这个场景引发了怎样的蔑视和自我怀疑、羞耻和例外主义，这一直是我们的化学反应，如果不是因为运动的炼金术，几乎已经归化了。随着#MeToo 的巩固，它的语言也得到了巩固。当我们坚持“同意”时，我们就明确了谁拥有代理权。当我们写“相信女性”和“时间到了”时，我们听上去是公式化口号的肤浅，就像我们坚持范式转换赋权一样。尽管性别认同与生物学和文化建设的对话越来越复杂，但空气中仍然弥漫着适得其反的“女孩力量”的气息。例如，如果我不立即对我依靠运动钙化速记的能力感到不满意，我就不可能写下这篇文章。无法索引使用变形工具（一种充满歧视的语言）工作的所有问题。所有这一切都很重要，因为我们的言辞很容易转向强奸文化的父权制语言，它被创造出来与之抗争，带着报复性的满足和愤怒转回我们身上。目击者林赛格雷厄姆在卡瓦诺听证会后的第二天在一次会议上脾气暴躁：“我是来自南卡罗来纳州的单身白人男性，我被告知我应该闭嘴，但我不会闭嘴。” 见证 Kanye West：“Russell Simmons 也想为我祈祷 / Imma 为他祈祷，因为他让 Me Too'd。” 目击者，在乔拜登无能为力的沉默之后，前民主党全国委员会主席埃德伦德尔完全支持卡瓦诺：“我们必须在这个#MeToo 上划清界限......绝大多数美国人民都厌倦了这些东西。他们知道什么是真实的，什么是不真实的。这不是真的。” 如果你不在那里，让我告诉你它有多真实。我精心挑选了“#MeToo As Literary Form”面板并写下了描述。我在小组中包括男性，因为性骚扰和虐待不仅限于二元类别；这是一个共同的体制和文化问题。小组是我的全部想法，除了时间和地点的融合使我们的背景变得生动。一周已经被听证会活活吃掉了，我们到达时筋疲力尽，情绪急躁，心碎，不断提醒我们自己被忽视拒绝和妥协同意的情况。我在#MeToo 一周年之际参加了会议，完全意识到这次会议的讽刺之处——圣母大学——其无情的天主教：每个酒店房间都有一个十字架，一个比生命更伟大的基督摆姿势若隐若现意想不到的角落，以及它的足球赛季满负荷运转。谁能忘记它在 2015 年四面楚歌的校园强奸电影《猎场》中的主演角色？当参议院投票确认时——就在他们以 50 票对 48 票投票的当天和小时——我的小组解决了这个问题的化身。只需要一名小组成员和一名观众就破坏了本来应该是精神错乱的补充时刻。破坏者小组成员“纠正”并进行了人为诽谤；他继续说下去，没有特别准备，使用