Me too, #MeToo: countering cruelty with empathy
Abstract
Critical and cultural studies scholars have long debated the promise and perils of pressing empathy, the sensation of shared feelings and experiences, into toppling systems of oppression and its attendant cruelty.1 The aim of this essay is not to discuss the contours of these debates in the abstract. Instead, I consider how Tarana Burke's “Me Too” movement, which seeks “empowerment through empathy,” counters the cruelty of sexual harassment and assault, both of which Donald Trump has been accused of committing. The cruelty with which Trump forges policy and references women constitutes “public cruelty” that Judith Shklar theorizes as “the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible.”2 Public cruelty, furthermore, is “made possible by differences in public power, and it is almost always built into the system of coercion upon which all governments have to rely to fulfill their essential functions.”3 The following essay considers how Burke's Me Too and its contributions to liberation via #MeToo and Times Up challenge the very systems of power that underlie harassment, discrimination, and assault by promoting empathy from the ground up (among individuals and in our political-economic system).
Abstract
Critical and cultural studies scholars have long debated the promise and perils of pressing empathy, the sensation of shared feelings and experiences, into toppling systems of oppression and its attendant cruelty.1 The aim of this essay is not to discuss the contours of these debates in the abstract. Instead, I consider how Tarana Burke's “Me Too” movement, which seeks “empowerment through empathy,” counters the cruelty of sexual harassment and assault, both of which Donald Trump has been accused of committing. The cruelty with which Trump forges policy and references women constitutes “public cruelty” that Judith Shklar theorizes as “the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible.”2 Public cruelty, furthermore, is “made possible by differences in public power, and it is almost always built into the system of coercion upon which all governments have to rely to fulfill their essential functions.”3 The following essay considers how Burke's Me Too and its contributions to liberation via #MeToo and Times Up challenge the very systems of power that underlie harassment, discrimination, and assault by promoting empathy from the ground up (among individuals and in our political-economic system).
