From the Whisper Network to #MeToo—Framing Gender, Gossip and Sexual Harassment

Abstract

There is a long-standing connection between gender and gossip in Western culture as the communication amongst women has been stigmatized as gossip. Long before #MeToo, women who had become victims of sexual abuse and who spoke out against sexual violence were pillorized through gossip and stigmatized as gossips in the public sphere. As a consequence, women have resorted to private forms of communication―so-called “whisper networks”―to warn each other about abuse and harassment. However, the #MeToo-movement has shifted this network from the private sector into that strange hybrid of private and public communication that is social media. The “mainstreaming” of feminist activism achieved through hashtag feminism has had repercussions for the representation of rape survivors and feminist activists in traditional, analog media. The particulars of these repercussions are what this essay seeks to analyze. The traditional public forum of the printed press started to represent these women as trustworthy witnesses―in a dramatic deviation from previous patterns of representation. While the connection between femininity and gossip thus seems to have been severed, this does not, however, mean that the representation of women in the media has been fundamentally altered. Through a semiotic analysis of the visual representations of women in print media around and after #MeToo, this essay will critically call into question the extent of the perceived paradigm shift in the context of #MeToo and the trial of Bill Cosby in 2017.