#MeToo: Dominant Feminism and A Cry from the Left in Response to its White Patriarchal Project

Historiography Connections

Black Feminist Studies, Labor History, History of Sexuality

Key Critiques

• • Racial exclusion within the MeToo movement, which benefits white women disproportionately in its representation of the workplace struggle with sexual assault.
  • The perpetuation of capitalism, a systematically racist economic structure, through the movement.
  • The exclusion of other minority groups of women such as sex workers and immigrants.

Citation for First Edition/Printing of Berg’s Article

Press Release

Heather Berg, a professor of Labor Studies and Gender Studies at UCLA published her groundbreaking essay ¹⁰ on the restrictive movement of the #MeToo project which risks projecting rather than rejecting a framework of racial and patriarchal capitalism and, subsequently, class and race-based exclusion. Her essay, titled “Left of #MeToo” was published in Feminist Studies ¹¹, the first scholarly journal in women’s studies, founded in 1972, and calls for a far more radical and leftist approach to the feminist approach to the #MeToo movement. Berg draws from her writing and activism about labor, sexuality, and social struggle. Roughly three years after the boom of the #MeToo movement across social media and, subsequently, the globe, Heather Berg’s essay rejects the lens of bourgeois and white feminism, disguised in sex positivity and collective womanhood, that dominated the conversation about what was to be done to counteract and dismantle workplace sexual violence.

Content

Berg is blatantly critical of the conflation of sex with workplace value, and the way that the conflation is used as a means to uplift all workplace systems of domination over others within a capitalist, white male-dominated, imperialistic work-worker struggle. Berg relates bourgeois feminism with dominant feminism in relation to #MeToo’s limited capacity to enforce “redistributive justice” for those “left behind” by the movement. The article moves through three major movements, which are Berg’s three main issues with viewing #MeToo as a truly feminist, inclusive, and politically productive movement: racial capitalism, the exclusion of sex work from the collective “workplace”, and #MeToo’s failure in relying on the state rather than the people to organize and defend. Berg argues that #MeToo is a “political project” which “serves its constituents by seeking gender equality for some while keeping the privilege of racial capitalism in place.”

Berg draws upon sex work feminism for its intersection in class, gender, and race struggle in order to call to light the “dead ends” of the #MeToo movement, which comes from the exclusion of “domestic workers and others left out of the masculinist, full-time worker model”. Because #MeToo relies on a trust of the state for protection from which many are excluded, the project relies on temporary relief and monetary shifts so as not to disrupt established power and domination dynamics in the workplace. In regard to sex work and power dynamics, Berg argues that bourgeois feminism’s exclusion of sex work as “legitimate” work gatekeeps tools for movements within workplace hierarchies and therefore undermines rather than amplifies a woman’s capacity for autonomy and sexual negotiation. Berg continues to critique the emphasis on sexual workplace power dynamics over any other attention to the multiple layers of oppression in the capitalist structure which puts Black women, queer people, and those underrepresented in workplace legislature at an amplified risk for violence, exclusion, and discrimination.

Methods

Berg primarily works within the vein of (Black) Marxism and Black Feminism to challenge scholars’ application of white, Euro-centric feminism to movements like #MeToo. Berg draws upon her work in the history of sexuality, especially sex work labor studies, in order to provide a more fitting lens to analyze the historical feminist context with which other scholars look at the #MeToo movement. In doing so, she proposes a much more radical, anti-imperialist approach to understand the historical significance of the movement. To demonstrate how quickly the mobilization of dominant feminism operates to defend the present power imbalance in the workplace, she draws upon the way Tarana Burke’s movement was appropriated to exclude the marginalized communities that Burke sought to give representation ¹².

Intersectionality Concerns Continued

Other Feminist critics have contributed to critique of the movement on behalf of those who are “left out”. Ashwini Tambe, in her article “Reckoning with the Silences of #MeToo” in Feminist Studies, acknowledges that, of course, “sexual violence and harassment are not white women’s problem alone”. Moreover, the mobilization achieved by the hashtag’s viral nature, meaning it was able to reach across the world, “makes clear that sexual violence is not only a US white women’s issue”. Tambe goes on to emphasize an interesting contention with the discrepancies between sex as a transaction, and sexual transactions carrying a level of assumption of coercion. She is concerned with the saturation of coercion in workplaces, even outside of sexual exchange, and draws connections to the conflation of sex and selfhood, “a mandate connected to norms of middle-class respectability”, which she refers to as one of many factors that generate “cis-male dominance” alongside “historical wage discrimination, childcare policies, and the way skills are defined and valued in masculinist ways” ¹³. Again, we see the possibility of class discrepancy in the movement and the particular workplace issues tackled by #MeToo activists.

10. Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. “Professor Heather Berg’s ‘Left of #MeToo,’ Is the Winner of the Claire Goldberg Moses Award.” Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, June 15, 2021. https://wgss.wustl.edu/news/professor-heather-bergs-left-metoo-winner-claire-goldberg-moses-award.

11. Feminist Studies Issue 46.2 (2020). Feminist Studies. https://www.feministstudies.org/issues/vol-40-49/46-2.html.

12. Adetiba, Elizabeth. “Tarana Burke Says #MeToo Should Center Marginalized Communities.” The Nation, November 17, 2017. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tarana-burke-says-metoo-isnt-just-for-white-people/.

13. Ashwini Tambe. (2018). Reckoning with the Silences of #MeToo. Feminist Studies, 44(1), 197–203. https://doi.org/10.15767/feministstudies.44.1.0197