Professor Tanya Serisier's Inaugural Lecture: Speaking Out About Sexual Violence: Researching Public Survivors Before and After MeToo
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
In 2017, millions of women used the hashtag #MeToo to identify themselves as survivors of sexual violence and speak out about their experiences. These protests were inspired, in part, by the over twenty women who spoke during the 2016 election about sexual violence they had experienced from candidate Donald Trump. While much media coverage represented these events as simply unprecedented, in fact, they took part in an under-explored history of survivors coming forward publicly to advocate for social and legal change around sexual violence. This is a history I explore in my 2018 book, Speaking Out, which analyses the history of survivors ‘breaking the silence’ as a key feminist strategy in fighting sexual violence from the 1970s onwards. #MeToo erupted in my final months working on that book, and it and the 2016 election became its endpoints, exemplifying both the vast potential and the limitations of speaking out as a form of politics.
This talk draws on my ongoing research on public survivors to reflect on the legacies and ongoing dilemmas of survivor politics almost a decade later. Today, survivors continue to speak out against endemic levels of sexual violence in an era marked by political crises, including Donald Trump’s return to the White House. I ask about the future of survivor politics, and what it can tell us about feminist politics more broadly.
Biography
Tanya Serisier is a new Professor of Feminist Theory in the School of Social Sciences and Director of BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality). She completed her PhD in Cultural Studies in 2010 at Monash University in Australia and joined Birkbeck in 2016 after working at UNSW (Australia) and Queens University Belfast. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the cultural politics of sex, sexuality and sexual violence with a particular focus on the impacts of feminist and queer theory and activism. She has published widely in this area, including her 2018 monograph Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics and she is currently working on a book project arising from her 2023 Leverhulme Fellowship, ‘Surviving Rape in Public: The Affects and Effects of Public Survivors’. She currently sits on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies.
Contact name:
Chris Fray