This edited collection on #MeToo activism challenges the overwhelming whiteness and straightness of #MeToo discourse and coverage. Using intersectional and decolonial frameworks and historical, archival, organizational and legal methods, these essays offer a rich exploration of #MeToo to understand how activism around sexualized violence reproduce and harm a wide variety of people. The swift and powerful arrival of #MeToo as a compilation of complaints about sexual misconduct (especially in the workplace) has created pressure to dive deeper into the history of sexual assault and abuse in the United States. #MeToo: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist answers the call for more complicated analyses of systemic sexual harassment and abuse with essays that are deeply concerned with the whiteness and heterosexuality of #MeToo coverage and media framing to understand how and why #MeToo began to capture the public’s attention in 2017 against the backdrop of Donald J. Trump’s presidential administration. These essays offer the first comprehensive study of the rhetorical politics of #MeToo. They tackle the complexities of sexual harassment, sexual violence and rape beyond white celebrity discourse to understand: how both violence and #MeToo activism affect transgender people; how #MeToo fails Black male victims of assault and rape; how Indian-American masculinity and comedy skirt sexual accountability; how the legal and affective precedent in the Supreme Court during the Kavanaugh hearings amplified concerns about sexual assault and rape; decolonial approaches to resisting sexualized violence from indigenous peoples; and narratives about assault from within the higher education community. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women's Studies in Communication.

This edited collection on #MeToo activism challenges the overwhelming whiteness and straightness of #MeToo discourse and coverage. Using intersectional and decolonial frameworks and historical, archival, organizational and legal methods, these essays offer a rich exploration of #MeToo to understand how activism around sexualized violence reproduce and harm a wide variety of people. The swift and powerful arrival of #MeToo as a compilation of complaints about sexual misconduct (especially in the workplace) has created pressure to dive deeper into the history of sexual assault and abuse in the United States. #MeToo: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist answers the call for more complicated analyses of systemic sexual harassment and abuse with essays that are deeply concerned with the whiteness and heterosexuality of #MeToo coverage and media framing to understand how and why #MeToo began to capture the public's attention in 2017 against the backdrop of Donald J. Trump's presidential administration. These essays offer the first comprehensive study of the rhetorical politics of #MeToo. They tackle the complexities of sexual harassment, sexual violence and rape beyond white celebrity discourse to understand: how both violence and #MeToo activism affect transgender people; how #MeToo fails Black male victims of assault and rape; how Indian-American masculinity and comedy skirt sexual accountability; how the legal and affective precedent in the Supreme Court during the Kavanaugh hearings amplified concerns about sexual assault and rape; decolonial approaches to resisting sexualized violence from indigenous peoples; and narratives about assault from within the higher education community. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women's Studies in Communication.

In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. Lisa M. Corrigan underscores how imprisonment - a site for both political and personal transformation - shaped movement leaders by influencing their political analysis and organizational strategies. Prison became the critical space for the transformation from civil rights to Black Power, especially as southern civil rights activists faced setbacks. Black Power activists produced autobiographical writings, essays, and letters about and from prison beginning with the early sit-in movement. Examining the iconic prison autobiographies of H. Rap Brown, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur, Corrigan conducts rhetorical analyses of these extremely popular though understudied accounts of the Black Power movement. She introduces the notion of the ""Black Power vernacular"" as a term for the prison memoirists' rhetorical innovations, to explain how the movement adapted to an increasingly hostile environment in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Through prison writings, these activists deployed narrative features supporting certain tenets of Black Power, pride in blackness, disavowal of nonviolence, identification with the Third World, and identity strategies focused on black masculinity. Corrigan fills gaps between Black Power historiography and prison studies by scrutinizing the rhetorical forms and strategies of the Black Power ideology that arose from prison politics. These discourses demonstrate how Black Power activism shifted its tactics to regenerate, even after the FBI sought to disrupt, discredit, and destroy the movement.

In the 1969 issue of Negro Digest, a young Black Arts Movement poet then-named Ameer (Amiri) Baraka published "We Are Our Feeling: The Black Aesthetic." Baraka's emphasis on the importance of feelings in black selfhood expressed a touchstone for how the black liberation movement grappled with emotions in response to the politics and racial violence of the era. In her latest book, award-winning author Lisa M. Corrigan suggests that Black Power provided a significant repository for negative feelings, largely black pessimism, to resist the constant physical violence against black activists and the psychological strain of political disappointment. Corrigan asserts the emergence of Black Power as a discourse of black emotional invention in opposition to Kennedy-era white hope. As integration became the prevailing discourse of racial liberalism shaping mid-century discursive structures, so too, did racial feelings mold the biopolitical order of postmodern life in America. By examining the discourses produced by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and other Black Power icons who were marshaling black feelings in the service of black political action, Corrigan traces how black liberation activists mobilized new emotional repertoires.

In the 1969 issue of Negro Digest, a young Black Arts Movement poet then-named Ameer (Amiri) Baraka published "We Are Our Feeling: The Black Aesthetic." Baraka's emphasis on the importance of feelings in black selfhood expressed a touchstone for how the black liberation movement grappled with emotions in response to the politics and racial violence of the era. In her latest book, award-winning author Lisa M. Corrigan suggests that Black Power provided a significant repository for negative feelings, largely black pessimism, to resist the constant physical violence against black activists and the psychological strain of political disappointment. Corrigan asserts the emergence of Black Power as a discourse of black emotional invention in opposition to Kennedy-era white hope. As integration became the prevailing discourse of racial liberalism shaping mid-century discursive structures, so too, did racial feelings mold the biopolitical order of postmodern life in America. By examining the discourses produced by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and other Black Power icons who were marshaling black feelings in the service of black political action, Corrigan traces how black liberation activists mobilized new emotional repertoires.

In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. Lisa M. Corrigan underscores how imprisonment-a site for both political and personal transformation-shaped movement leaders by influencing their political analysis and organizational strategies. Prison became the critical space for the transformation from civil rights to Black Power, especially as southern civil rights activists faced setbacks. Black Power activists produced autobiographical writings, essays, and letters about and from prison beginning with the early sit-in movement. Examining the iconic prison autobiographies of H. Rap Brown, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur, Corrigan conducts rhetorical analyses of these extremely popular though understudied accounts of the Black Power movement. She introduces the notion of the "Black Power vernacular" as a term for the prison memoirists' rhetorical innovations, to explain how the movement adapted to an increasingly hostile environment in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Through prison writings, these activists deployed narrative features supporting certain tenets of Black Power, pride in blackness, disavowal of nonviolence, identification with the Third World, and identity strategies focused on black masculinity. Corrigan fills gaps between Black Power historiography and prison studies by scrutinizing the rhetorical forms and strategies of the Black Power ideology that arose from prison politics. These discourses demonstrate how Black Power activism shifted its tactics to regenerate, even after the FBI sought to disrupt, discredit, and destroy the movement.