Shame, Trauma, and the Body After #MeToo: The Year in Australia

Maguire, Emma

Abstract

Since the #MeToo hashtag exploded in 2017, there has been a wave of women's personal narratives of sexual trauma in published forms, and this trend shows no signs of slowing. In Australia, Kathryn Heyman's Fury (2021) tells the story of failed justice and unresolved trauma after rape. Gemma Carey's No Matter Our Wreckage (2020) explores online grooming and grief. Ellena Savage's essay collection Blueberries (2021) offers experimental and intellectual reflections on girlhood, womanhood, and various personal and political traumas, and Veronica Gorrie's Black and Blue (2021) traces how structural traumas of race and gender have a compounding effect that must be acknowledged in the context of Aboriginal experiences of self and identity in a racist settler colony. These texts are striking examples of women's personal storytelling, and they each—for better or worse—use lived experience to reach outwards to important social problems, and in doing so, include or consider lives beyond the writer's own. Importantly, they point to a shift in #MeToo discourse: seeing the issue of sexual violence problematized and elaborated beyond the initial surge of women publicly raising their hands to illuminate the horrifying scale of the problem. Many worried that the wildfire of #MeToo would burn out quickly, leaving no lasting effects, but the continuation of these stories in forms such as memoir shows that women are using personal storytelling to capitalize on the urgency of the hashtag moment to draw out and push forward discourse around sexual violence. These texts serve to sustain public attention and increase popular understanding of this complex form of gendered violence, and they also reflect a continued public interest in women's testimony.

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Biography

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1529-1456

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University of Hawaii Press

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DOI

10.1353/bio.2023.a917314