Eine affekttheoretische Betrachtung der #MeToo-Bewegung

Abstract

In October 2017 the US-American actress Alyssa Milano called upon all women around the world with a Twitter statement to speak out about their experience with sexual violence. The #Me-Too movement followed, an incisive event in the feminist movement to start a wide public discourse about sexual violence. However, building identification with a movement on the basis of pain that is assumed to be collective, creates certain problems, which are analyzed in this paper from a perspective of affect theory. I argue that the instrumentalization of the affect “pain” led to three problems: a blurring of power imbalances between the women affected, a blurring between sexism and sexual violence, and gendered generalizations. Therefore, reference to collective pain as a basis for building and identification with a (feminist) movement as well as instrumentalizing affects to build social movements should be problematized.