#Hashtag: How Selected Texts of Popular Culture Engaged With Sexual Assault In the Context of the Me Too Movement in 2019
Abstract
The paper seeks to explore recent shifts within the popular culture with regard to oppression involving gender, class, race, and ethnicity that can be traced back to the #MeToo movement which was revived as a social media hashtag in October 2017 and has since spread all over the world. The paper starts with a brief overview of Western popular culture that “has recently been seen as a champion for feminism . . . with many high-profile female musicians and actresses visibly promoting the movement in their work” (Woodacre 2018, 21). Next, the paper discusses the origins of the Me Too Movement and the way it approaches the meaning of gendered oppressions as well as individualized and collective experiences of survivors of sexual abuse. This is later explored in the examination of the impact of the hashtag-led movement on three works of popular culture: Amazon’s TV series Lorena (2019), Nancy Schwartzman’s documentary Roll Red Roll (2019), and We Believe: the Best Men Can Be (2019) advertisement by Gillette. The entire case study is informed primarily by feminist theory understood as inseparable from feminist activism, following bell hooks’ Feminist theory from margin to center (1984).
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Films
Lorena. 2019. Directed by Joshua Rofé. Amazon. TV Series.
Roll Red Roll. 2019. Directed by Nancy Schwartzman. Multitude Films, Sunset Park Pictures. Film.
We Believe: The Best Men Can Be. 2019. Directed by Kim Gehrig 2019. Gillette. Short film.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/nh.2020.5.208-217
Date of publication: 2020-09-04 12:41:44
Date of submission: 2020-02-09 22:52:15
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