#MeToo, but First: The Question of Analytic Priority in Identity Politics

Abstract

Since 2017 when the Me Too Movement started to be foregrounded in public consciousness, feminism has increasingly gained hypervisibility. While situated within a long tradition of the struggle for women’s rights, the proliferation of discourses on feminism at present forms a decisive moment. All the same, the Me Too Movement has been critiqued. The so-called whitening of the campaign highlights the heterogeneity of women’s experience and the power relations within feminism along other categories of identity, specifically race and class. This chapter explores these tensions and the question of analytic priority in identity politics through an engagement with intersectionality, a paradigm that analyzes the complex and diverse vectors that constitute identity and social relations. It inquires into the theoretical assumptions and main arguments of this emergent paradigm toward harnessing it as a resource in addressing the limitations of and charting possible trajectories for feminist theory and practice.