In 2018, as a feminist in a Delhi newsroom, I experienced the #MeToo moment in India as an outpouring of rage breaking in real time. In the years following, we had a pandemic, the arrival of LLMs, and seismic geopolitical developments. And yet, I can still feel the immediacy of those days. This is because the after-effects of #MeToo, which broke on our screens, and in our lives, that electrifying October eight years ago, linger.

#MeToo in India is widely agreed to have begun with a crowd-sourced list of Indian men in academia who’d been accused of sexual harassment. This list was published on Facebook by a law student called Raya Sarkar in October 2017. A few days earlier, in the United States, investigative reports on decades of sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein were published in The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

For us, the next milestone in the #MeToo moment came in September 2018, when Hindi film actor Tanushree Dutta accused her former co-star and actor, Nana Patekar, of sexual harassment. The next month in October, Priya Ramani accused the-then Minister of State for External Affairs, MJ Akbar, of sexual harassment. Akbar resigned from his post as minister, and his subsequent criminal defamation case against Ramani became a crucial benchmark for #MeToo in India.

An innumerable number of accusations surfaced online against prominent men, and sometimes against the institutions they represented. As #MeToo spread to offline spaces, it was effective in making institutional violence visible. But the visibility was limited. Violence against Dalit and queer women was omitted or minimised in the public conversation. Unlike in previous waves of feminist anger, activists could not build a broad-based coalition. Perhaps they did not try. In the years since, Indian feminists have been reimagining mechanisms for institutional safety at the workplace, rebuilding feminist solidarities, and supporting survivors in their fight for justice in courts. No long-term legislative reform has emerged. Akbar’s case against Ramani failed in trial court and on first appeal. Other women, many young and unaffiliated with power, have been less fortunate.

The #MeToo wave has receded. But the work lies in the debris that was thrown up.

Intimacy and Injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa edited by Nicky Falkof, Shilpa Phadke, and Srila Roy is an attempt at furthering that work. The anthology maps resistances to gender-based violence in India and South Africa in the aftermath of #MeToo. It argues that looking at #MeToo as a “transformational moment of global feminist solidarity threatens to violently obscure the work and histories of feminist organising in our parts of the world.” However, the way #MeToo played out in “a postcolonial India and post-apartheid South Africa raise locally specific as well as globally resonant questions.” In this essay, I will contextualise these globally resonant questions especially for a post-2018 generation who’s encountering the workplace for the first time — and increasingly coming up against the limited imaginations and impact of #MeToo.

Hokkolorob and SWEAT’s #SayHerName

#MeToo was not born in isolation. The Hokkolorob student movement in 2014 in Jadavpur University in India, and the 2016 Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT)’s #SayHerName campaign in South Africa were essential pre-histories that foretold the conflicts of #MeToo globally.

The Hokkolorob movement, meaning “let there be clamour,” was a reaction to police brutality on protestors demanding justice for a sexual assault survivor in September 2014, that gathered momentum online. The survivor posted about her assault on social media; her testimony was then amplified by other women, who were summarily dismissed as “cyberfeminists.” Years later, at the peak of #MeToo, this pushback was deployed to dismiss the credibility of individual complainants, too.

In South Africa, the NGO SWEAT, which advocates for the rights of adult, consenting sex workers, launched the #SayHerName campaign in 2016 to commemorate women sex workers lost to fatal violence. The campaign sought to humanise sex workers and draw attention to the violence of a socio-legal context where “the sex worker, client and anyone living off the earnings of a sex worker are considered criminals.” The campaign’s data collection on the deaths of sex workers found that they are at a greater risk of intimate partner violence. It pre-figures one of the most resonant truths to emerge from the #MeToo conversation, the experience of the transformation of the most intimate space becoming the most violent. Like former SWEAT Human Rights and Lobbying Officer Nosipha Vidima said while reflecting on the connections between #MeToo and #SayHerName,

“…it starts at intimacy. The men are the same men that #MeToo speaks about. It’s men who are close to us. It’s men who are intimate with us. It’s men who society sees as upstanding. There is not a certain kind of client, just like there is no kind of perpetrator of rape.”

Away from urban India, where’s the support?

While urban, educated, upper class, and upper-caste women were the most visible during the #MeToo movement, how did the hashtag travel to workplaces that exist far away from the cities? India is full of workplaces where a public call-out of sexual harassment has inherent dangers of privacy violation, immediate threats of violence, and lack of institutional support. This is the argument that Disha Mullick, co-founder of Chambal Media that hosts Khabar Lahariya – a feminist media organisation for rural India – makes in her essay. Most reporters at Khabar Lahariya are rural women who report on their lived social reality without any structural protections. When the Khabar Lahariya team was stalked over phone calls for months in 2015, the police harassed and blamed the reporters for choosing a profession that puts them in the public sphere. Mulick writes:

“As women who had painstakingly established themselves as professional journalists in the public domain for over a decade, the process of accessing justice was humiliating, both locally and to the larger public with which they shared their testimony.”

For women in what Mullick writes of as “the hinterland,” #MeToo offered little protection against the social and cultural consequences of naming their perpetrators of sexual harassment.

Reported missing: Dalit, queer, and male voices

#MeToo’s participants did not organise with long-term institutional impact in mind. One of the outcomes of this was the erasure of Dalit and queer voices in India, and male victims of sexual violence in South Africa.

In her essay, Rupali Bansode, writes of the 2015 case of 50-year-old Satyabhama, a Dalit victim of caste-based sexual violence from Latur in Maharashtra. Juxtaposing Satyabhama’s fight for justice with the discourse around #MeToo, Bansode argues that for those women whose material reality excludes them from online spaces of community and solidarity, the law is what they turn to. She writes, “However frustrating and imperfect, the law is the only mechanism that promises to protect Dalits, and Dalits have no other recourse.”

Looking at #MeToo through a queer feminist lens throws up many uncomfortable truths. Jaya Sharma cites a respondent in her essay to highlight how the #MeToo moment in India had a limited understanding of power:

“There is the absoluteness of patriarchal power and its use and abuse; but there is also the fact that in sexual interactions the play of power is not absolute, linear and unidimensional.”

This complexity of how power plays out become clear when looking at the absence of male victims of sexual violence in the South African #MeToo moment. In the anthology, Louise du Toit examines the colonial trope of “unruly Black male sexuality” and the consequences of it in the understanding of sexual violence. She argues how experiences of male victims, especially of prison rape, show “how the unequal distribution of sexual vulnerability is a function of social and political arrangements,” and that including these experiences in feminist movements “can actually serve feminist political ends.”

These erasures force us to reexamine the operation of power in the context of sexual harassment. This will lead to more depth in the way that we build mechanisms institutionally, especially for workplaces which are diverse.

A final report card

It’s tempting to assess the aftermath of #MeToo in absolutes. But the reality is messy. Each essay in Intimacy and Injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa acknowledges how #MeToo was undeniably a moment that has — and continues to — shape the way we speak about sexual harassment. The formidable task in front of us is now to listen to voices which were ignored, and to do the hard work of translating a viral moment into institutional change which will stand the test of time.

We owe this to ourselves, and to generations of young women who are yet to enter the workplace.