CASS Public Lecture with Tina Kristensen

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Speaker: Tina Kristensen

Date and time: 25 February, 1-2.15pm

Location: David Goldman 232, St Peter's Campus and online (online link will be sent the day before the lecture)

‘#metoo was started by a black woman, @Tarana Burke!!! Give credit where it’s due! <3’ (Marqueza, 2017): The discursive strategies used to discuss race in the #MeToo movement on Twitter.

This paper will look at how people use language to discuss and centralize race in the #MeToo movement on Twitter, using data from 2017, around the inception of the movement, and 2022, around the fifth anniversary. The #MeToo movement became an international phenomenon in 2017, however, many people did not know that years prior an offline ‘me too’ movement was started by Black activist Tarana Burke. As a result, Burke was initially overlooked, and Alyssa Milano was claimed as the founder of the movement. Despite the millions of tweets using the #MeToo hashtag Trott’s (2020) research found that only 432 of their collected tweets mentioned race. This information calls into question who is visible within the international #MeToo movement, and what efforts were taken to mitigate the lack of visibility. To investigate this, this paper will analyse tweets and comments from 2017 and 2022. This paper will show the discursive strategies and intersectional lens through which Black women discuss their experiences of sexual violence in addition to how prevailing stereotypes hurt and diminish them and their experiences. As this paper is looking at two timepoints it will allow for suggestions to be made about how any offline events, such as the 2020 resurgence of the BlackLivesMatter movement following the M**der of George Floyd, might have affected the discursive strategies used. By looking at the discourse in the international #MeToo movement on Twitter we can see the complex inequalities and harms done to Black women.

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Host or Publisher University of Sunderland