Book Review: MeToo: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media by Meenakshi Gigi Durham

“A feminist ear can be how you hear what is not being heard” (Ahmed 2017: 203). This quote is how Meenakshi Gigi Durham prefaces her latest book MeToo: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media. For years, I have admired Durham’s work and the ways she too has used her feminist ears to hear what is not being heard, particularly around the topic of rape culture. In her latest book, Durham takes readers through a beautifully written, accessible, and highly considerate investigation using the #MeToo movement as an entry point to discuss rape culture, sexual violence, and crucially, its relationship with the media. The media is a key focal point because, as she notes, they “are not only the physical sites of rape culture in the workplace, they are also an active discursive site of interrogation about rape and the cultures that produce it, sustain it, and conceal it” (p. 4). In this sense, while #MeToo may have been a catalyst or even a “hook” for this book, it is in fact much more of an investigation of rape culture and the media. Completed three years after #MeToo went viral, the book is broken down into five chapters. The introduction brings readers up-to-date on the history of the 2017 #MeToo movement that went viral, but also the original MeToo movement founded over a decade earlier by African-American community organizer Tarana Burke. It also familiarizes readers with important theoretical concepts such as rape culture, rape myths, and sexual scripts. While this information may not be new to some readers, it never-the-less sets up important and useful context for the rest of the book. It is then broken down into three chapters focusing on different elements of the media, before finishing with concluding thoughts about what it will take to end rape culture and how to bring into play new models enabling this. The first chapter takes an institutional look at media organizations, exploring ways they are themselves sites of violence. Durham explores how high-powered individuals such as Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, and many more used their power within media organizations to commit acts of sexual violence and harassment at work, and the subsequent institutional processes and structures that covered them up. For example, Durham spends time discussing the common practice of using non-disclosure Book Review