#MeToo and the Politics of Transnational Feminism

Join the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality for a book launch and discussion of #MeToo and the Politics of Transnational Feminism, with editors Chaitanya Lakkimsetti and Vanita Reddy.

The global context of a feminist movement

The #MeToo movement is most famous for the US celebrities it took to task for sexual crimes—Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer, to name a few. Mainstream representations of #MeToo frame it as a global feminist campaign that originated in the US and focused on high-profile American actors and executives. But the debates about gender-based violence that #MeToo catalyzed were felt worldwide. Despite the global uptick of the movement, there are very few feminist accounts of the transnational politics of #MeToo.

This anthology frames #MeToo as a movement with uneven itineraries, goals, and outcomes. The essays in this volume take a transnational and comparative feminist approach to #MeToo, focusing on the multiple ways that feminist voices from Argentina, Egypt, India, Pakistan, South Korea, the US, and the UK have pushed the boundaries of what counts as politics, justice, solidarity, violence, precarity, and vulnerability. In doing so, this volume shows how an engagement with #MeToo allows us to extend and sharpen the empirical, theoretical, and methodological parameters of transnational feminist thought. A blend of global activist and academic work, #MeToo and the Politics of Transnational Feminism offers a necessary transnational framing of the #MeToo movement.

Chaitanya Lakkimsetti (LEFT) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University, with a faculty affiliation in Women and Gender Studies. She is the author of Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India (NYU Press, 2020), and co-editor of the anthology #Metoo and the Politics of Transnational Feminism: An Anthology. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of gender, sexuality, law, and social movements. Her work at the intersections of gender, sexuality, law, and social movements also appeared in Feminist Formations, Sexualities, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, positions: asia critique, and Qualitative Sociology. She is currently working on two projects, the first, a co-written monograph\, Visual Economics of Sexual Violence (also with Vanita Reddy) which examines the intersections of gender-based violence, law, and visual art. The second project, tentatively titled, Demanding Death: Rape, Death Penalty, and Vigilante Violence in Contemporary India examines how sexuality becomes a site for the normalization and expansion of state’s juridical and extra juridical power.

Vanita Reddy (RIGHT) is Associate Professor of English and Core Faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas A&M. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in diasporic and transnational contexts. She has published widely on South Asian diasporic beauty and fashion cultures, and is the author of Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Temple University Press, 2016). She is coeditor of a special issue of the journal The Feminist and Scholar Online, “Queer and Feminist Afro-Asian Formations” (2018), and of a dossier on the transnational Metoo movement for the journal Feminist Formations (Winter 2021). Dr. Reddy has published articles in Contemporary Literature; Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; The Journal of Asian American Studies; The Minnesota Review; Verge: Studies in Global Asias; Feminist Formations; and The Scholar and Feminist Online. She is currently working on two book projects--a single authored book on cross-racial forms of political relationality between South Asian and other racialized populations from a queer and feminist perspective called Global Intimacies and a co-authored book (also with Chaitanya Lakkimsetti) on the intersections of gender-based violence, the law, and visual art called Visual Economies of Sexual Violence.

Copies of the book will be sold at the event. The talk will be followed by a catered reception and refreshments. 

NYU campus access guidelines: Registration is required. Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID. NYU guests must present their NYU ID.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms available. If you have any access needs, please email csgs@nyu.edu

RSVP HERE

IMAGE: On December 3, 2024, a group of 50 to 60 lawmakers, community organizers, community members, city and county officials, survivors of sexual violence, and their allies gathered to witness the unveiling of a 3x5-foot mosaic artwork called “Rise Above Stand Strong” (RASS) in the foyer of the Travis County District Attorney’s office (TCDA) in Austin, TX. The artwork, created by Austin-based, indigenous mosaic artist Dianne Sonnenberg, honors the fourteen plaintiffs who filed a class action lawsuit against the TCDA and the Austin Police Department (APD). Since 2018, their struggles to be believed as survivors of sexual violence led to this stunning piece of art, the creation of which emerged out of the lawsuit. RASS also included a border of small mosaic circles that 82 survivors and their allies created during a workshop organized by TCDA held in January 2024.