The #MeToo narrative: Reconstructing the cultural intelligibility of female subjects

Abstract

The globally sensational #MeToo movement has offered feminists a feasible model of woman's personal narrative, namely the #MeToo narrative. The #MeToo narrative, founded on women's awakening self-awareness and demand to reconstruct subjectivity, is a narrative that accumulates power by connecting female individuals for a concerted force to improve their living conditions. Supported by social media, female victims report their experience of sexual abuse and consequent trauma to the public. A woman re-renders the scene of sexual violence, details the process of how her docile body is constructed discursively in a patriarchal context, and thus reconstructs herself as a resisting subject. This paper, with the support of postmodern feminism and Stephen Greenblatt's theory of discursive circulation, establishes a theoretical framework for women's interference in the subjection process facilitated by the #MeToo narrative, and explores its impact on the cultural intelligibility generated in the circulation of phallocentric discourses. The power relations involving women of color, women of various classes, and LGBTQ women will be investigated to study how women of various backgrounds can utilize the #MeToo narrative to become speaking subjects and seek to change their subordinate position. What underlies female subjects' inferiority is the preconceived notion that recognizable femininity is associated with lack, incompleteness, and fragmentation. This femininity intersects with ethnic, class, and gender discourses, adding to the complexity of female subjects' cultural intelligibility. The inclusivity of the #MeToo narrative lies in female subjects' awareness that cultural intelligibility is generated by normative forces and their common appeal for changing the way femininity is recognized. Female subjects' self-esteem will be reestablished if they gain the knowledge of the phantasmatic nature of cultural intelligibility. Moreover, the parodic nature of #MeToo's repetition of phallocentric norms denotes the limited capacity as well as the delaying effect of the narrative, which is inspiring in that female subjects should pursue an even more subversive future of gender politics.