#MeToo or "Me Too"?: Defining Our Terms

Abstract

How we talk about misogyny and sexual violence in literary texts matters—to our students, to our colleagues, and to the future of the humanities and of higher education—and the “Me Too” movement has revived with new urgency debates about how to do that. In this essay, I explore the ethical implications of invoking the “Me Too” movement in the classroom, and I offer a model for designing a course that does not simply present women’s narratives as objects of study but rather uses those narratives to give students opportunities and tools to participate in the “Me Too” movement themselves. To re-think eighteenth-century women’s writing in light of “Me Too,” I contend, is to participate in the movement, and so in our teaching we must engage with the ethics of the movement as well as the subject matter.

Keywords

• #metoo
• women's writing
• pedagogy
• eighteenth century