#MeToo

Following #MeToo, U of T law prof makes the case for a 'restorative and transformative model of justice'

geoff.vendeville — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:00:58 +0000

Following #MeToo, U of T law prof makes the case for a 'restorative and transformative model of justice'

geoff.vendeville Thu, 04/28/2022 - 12:00

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Brenda Cossman's new book, The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, revisits the sex wars of the 1970s and 80s and examines their impact on more recent debates around #MeToo (photo courtesy of Brenda Cossman)

Nina Haikara

Topic

Our Community

#MeToo

Sexual Harassment

Faculty of Law

Feminism

Before #MeToo called attention to the ubiquity of sexual assault and harassment, University of Toronto Professor Brenda Cossman was charting feminist debates around sex work, revenge porn and sexting, sexual harassment and sexual assault – particularly on college campuses.

“It unleashed a viral eruption of women coming forward globally and saying, ‘Yes, it happened to me too,’” says Cossman, a professor in the Faculty of Law. “Within a few days, Tarana Burke [an activist from the Bronx] was recognized as having started the ‘Me Too’ campaign in 2006 to support Black women and girls who were survivors of sexual violence.” But the movement “took on a life of its own, one that was in fact, quite distinct from Burke's Me Too.”

In her latest book, The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, Cossman revisits the feminist debates of the 1970s and ’80s and examines their influence on how we think about sexual harm now. Cossman examines tensions between the need for recognition and protection under the law, and what she says is the colossal and ongoing failure of that law to redress historic injustice. The #MeToo movements raises questions about whether justice can be served outside the courtroom, Cossman says.

The so-called sex wars of the 1970s and 80s were highly polarizing over women’s sexuality, especially in regards to porn, she says.

“On one side, you had radical feminists who insisted on sexuality as a site of women's oppression, that women were victims of sexual violence and eventually turned to law to protect women. On the other side were so-called ‘sex radicals’ who saw sexuality, not only as a site of danger, but also pleasure, who insisted that women have sexual agency and who fundamentally oppose the turn to law. These were fierce debates.”

While these debates simmered down by the late 1980s, she says the underlying disagreements have never been resolved – and the outpouring of #MeToo stories began to be met with pushback.

Critics of the movement across the political spectrum claimed “#MeToo was going too far – although what too far meant was really unclear,” Cossman says.

“But there was a very distinctive feminist voice – a feminist version of a critique that emerged first in whispers, then gained traction and eventually erupted into full-fledged feminist war.”

It intensified with the allegation of sexual misconduct leveled against actor-comedian Aziz Ansari by a 23-year-old woman who spoke to Babe.net under the pseudonym, “Grace.” She said Ansari repeatedly tried to pressure her into sex despite her apparent discomfort.

“The story that broke the feminist internet [the Babe.net story] resonated for many women, particularly, but not exclusively young women, while others denounced it as trivializing #MeToo, and #MeToo going too far,” Cossman says.

Soon afterwards, she says #MeToo was framed as “generational” in both the mainstream press and social media: millennial feminists versus second wave feminists.

“And it turned really nasty, really fast,” she adds. “But I saw the same fault lines around sexuality agency and the role of law that had been dividing feminists for decades.”

The law’s role in these debates is complex, notes Cossman.

“#MeToo did not emerge as a legal movement, with a legal agenda. In fact, if anything, #MeToo was a performance of law’s spectacular failure to address sexual violence,” she says, adding that on one side of the issue were people calling for better laws and enforcement, while others appeared more concerned with prosecutorial overreach and the abuse of state power.

Cossman’s book also addresses queer critiques of #MeToo and concludes by noting how we ought to think about these feminist debates – as side by side, rather than in opposition to one another.
“In the final chapters, I try to break out of what is the deep political ‘whiteness’ of #MeToo, and the new sex wars, by centering on the work of Black feminists, particularly abolition feminists, in their critique of the state and mass incarceration in the U.S. and argue for a reparative approach to regulating sexual harm – one that fundamentally de-centers criminal law.”

It is an approach that also re-centers Burke’s Me Too vision.

“I try to build a restorative and transformative model of justice that could do a better job of delivering and promoting accountability and repair,” Cossman says.

The underlying ideological and political divides about sexuality, about women's sexual agency and about the role of law have remained the same for far too long – and it’s time for a change, Cossman argues.

“The regulation of sexual harm means unsticking ourselves from the sex wars binary. It requires new skills, new forms of knowledge, new reading practices, strategies – previously unheeded – and giving the benefit of the doubt to feminists who see things differently by taking that ‘maybe she has a point’ stance and keeping that point in view,” she says.

“#MeToo may have created new space to speak about sexual violence – but its legacy remains in our hands.”

This is U of T: Judith Taylor, a 'difficult woman' who helps students grow

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 15:15:27 +0000

This is U of T: Judith Taylor, a 'difficult woman' who helps students grow Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 03/05/2020 - 10:15

Topic

Our Community

#MeToo

Faculty of Arts & Science

International Women's Day

Sociology

Women and Gender Studies

Judith Taylor doesn’t shy away from difficult topics in her classroom. In fact, she embraces them.

“I don’t care about keeping it all careful,” says Taylor, an associate professor in the department of sociology in the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Women and Gender Studies Institute. “We get into it and everyone is better for it.”

Taylor is a scholar of social movements whose research focuses on feminist activism, neighbourhood community organizing and social change-making within public institutions.

While the Brett Kavanaugh U.S. Supreme Court hearings were in progress, Taylor wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star about her experiment emulating white male privilege.

Her story was widely shared, inspiring many readers – and angering more than a few.

In her classes, she similarly encourages students to tackle controversial subjects head-on. Sometimes they’ll make mistakes or say something others don’t want to hear.

And that’s OK, she says, “Because that’s how you grow intellectually, that’s how you grow personally and that’s how you grow politically.”

U of T Talks: Anne Kingston and Jessica Johnson on the #MeToo movement (video)

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 05:00:00 +0000

U of T Talks: Anne Kingston and Jessica Johnson on the #MeToo movement (video) noreen.rasbach Mon, 11/25/2019 - 00:00

Topic

City & Culture

#MeToo

Global

University of St. Michael's College

University of Toronto students had the opportunity this fall to study the #MeToo social movement.

Anne Kingston, a senior writer and columnist for Maclean’s magazine, and Jessica Johnson, executive editor of The Walrus, are teaching #MeToo and the Media, a course at the University of St. Michael’s College that’s designed to help students develop an analytic understanding of the movement and the cultural shift associated with it.

The course looks at contemporary cases, including those of Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi and media mogul Harvey Weinstein, while also examining the movement’s origins, public conversations, controversies and evolution.

"#MeToo [as a hashtag] started with the Weinstein story, which was so explosive, but, in a way, what happened after Weinstein on social media and with the #MeToo hashtag really was the culmination of so many media stories that had gone back,” said Kingston.

In this video, Kingston and Johnson speak about #MeToo and its impact.

Read a U of T News story about the course

New U of T course to examine #MeToo and the media

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 17:01:30 +0000

New U of T course to examine #MeToo and the media

noreen.rasbach Mon, 08/12/2019 - 13:01

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South Korean demonstrators hold banners during a rally to mark International Women's Day 2018 as part of the country's #MeToo movement in Seoul (photo by Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images )

Topic

Undergraduate Students

University of St. Michael's College

In 2017, major media exposés of predatory sexual behaviour by powerful figures unleashed #MeToo, a hashtag now tweeted and shared more than 20 million times.

Using the hashtag, people all over the world began to share stories of their own experiences of abuse at the hands of people whose wealth and power had protected them from justice, and this public reckoning led to a major – and ongoing – cultural shift.

Now, two years after the publication of the reporting that launched #MeToo, two journalists who continue to advance and shape the public conversation around the issue in Canada are bringing their expertise into the classroom at the University of Toronto.

Beginning Sept. 5, Jessica Johnson, executive editor and creative director of The Walrus magazine, and Anne Kingston, senior writer and columnist for Maclean’s, will be co-teaching “#MeToo and the Media,” a course at the University of St. Michael's College designed to help students develop an analytic understanding of the social movement as it continues to evolve.

Kingston and Johnson plan to contextualize #MeToo in a larger media ecosystem. “This will be a class that looks at the way #MeToo informed the media, and also, about the way the media coverage of the movement has fuelled broader conversation in society,” says Johnson.

“This is a new class – new at St. Michael’s College, but also, we aren’t aware of any other one exactly like it anywhere,” she says. “Some of the themes of the public conversation surrounding #MeToo – privilege, the nature of consent, the workplace, dating, contemporary constructions of gender – are matters of ongoing concern to U of T students, which creates an opportunity for a special kind of dialogue in the classroom.”

Over the course of the semester, lectures, readings, social media investigation, videos, and guest speakers will examine #MeToo’s far-reaching consequences (and controversies), including the cultural biases, systemic inequities and endemic violence that #MeToo coverage exposed.

Kingston, who covered the trials of Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby and has done extensive reporting on #MeToo, acknowledges that the ongoing, dynamic nature of #MeToo creates unique challenges for the course, but sees the Book and Media Studies program as an ideal framework.

“St. Michael’s well-received ‘Trump and the Media’ course led the way in showing how an academic institution can instruct while interacting with real-time news,” says Kingston. And as former New York Times editor Sam Tanenhaus did with his class on Trump last fall, Kingston and Johnson will regularly incorporate breaking news into their curriculum.

Kingston points to the upcoming trial of Hedley’s Jacob Hoggard as one possible example.

“Book and Media Studies is a program that allows students to engage with some of the most pressing and complex situations created by our intensely mediated moment, and place them in contexts beyond 140 characters,” St. Michael’s Principal and Vice-President Randy Boyagoda says.

“A course like #MeToo and the Media, taught by two distinguished visiting professors, each a leading figure in contemporary Canadian media, makes it possible for students to explore one of the most vexed, active, and important situations in contemporary media, politics, and culture.”