When Normative Intimacy Goes Wrong: Social Media As a Vehicle for Social Change

Perhaps it is when people get normative intimacy 'wrong' that there are nascent possibilities and generative spaces opened up for questioning the underlying values of such. We suggest, in short, the importance of making space in debates about "oversharing" and social media excesses to critically question what counts as normative intimacy and what does not, and the politics of this.  (Dobson, Carah and Robards, 2018).

When is the sharing of personally relevant information, or self-disclosure, an act of oversharing?

What is the choice not to share personally relevant information an act of self-silencing?

How conscious are we of our choices?

How does this change and shape how we interact in the digital sphere, and in the offline world?

 

Those questions posed in the opening blog in this series, began for me in the seat opposite this one, on a silent meditation retreat in a convent in Tullow in 2016.

We'd been in silence for a number of days by that point, and I was having flashbacks to sexual trauma I honestly hadn't thought about in years

                                                                 

 I needed a break from the silence.

The man who sat in this seat was a man I respected, an advocate for social justice and LGBTQ rights. He was someone "like me", someone I felt comfortable about opening up to in relation to struggles with trauma showing up in silent mindfulness practice.

He advised me to be present with my body and to "step up and lead", be more vulnerable in sharing my own trauma publicly to make others take trauma seriously.

He wasn't hearing the extent of how unusual this experience was for me, and I knew it. He wasn't ready to hear the disclosure I needed to make.

Over the next days and weeks, my flashbacks worsened. On my return home, I shared my experiences more explicitly - naming rape and childhood sexual abuse, as we had been invited to do - with his fellow Course Director, seeking support, and she passed it to him to action.

I received no response. Weeks later, frustrated and feeling foolish and ashamed for ever having raised it, I requested a meeting to discuss my disclosure, as it was critical I spoke to someone about it to enable me to complete this €18,000 course I was already struggling to afford.

In a tense meeting with male faculty heads in Dublin I was pressured to resolve the issue quickly, or face an "investigation" which it was made clear to me was unlikely to go in my favour. I panicked, apologizing endlessly for causing inconvenience. Despite my high GPA, it was made clear to me the best option for me would be to leave the course.

I didn't need to be told twice.

Cast out, my digital journey began.

After years of considering myself a "good" and "competent" professional on a fairly ordinary but smooth trajectory in work and life, I felt psychologically shattered by the experience.

I went home and tried to put it out of my mind, get on with things, but as my mood and wellbeing tanked over the following months, I knew I would have to do something.

I made some tentative efforts to make polite contact with the staff to see if there was some sort of way of resolving it informally, to no avail. At two separate conferences in the Summer, I had a horrendous experience where members of the faculty shunned me publicly, one shielding her face not to have to look at me. And so, just before the #MeToo movement, I wrote a blog about the sense I was making of these experiences in Art Therapy that went "small" viral (viewed 54,000 times in three days).

In response, the Dean of Graduate Students secured for me a facilitated meeting with the faculty which, unfortunately, led to no acknowledgement of what had happened. Some of the staff showed extreme distress in response to the Head of School making moves to apologise, and, as a result, the meeting ended prematurely, without addressing my concerns. "I'm sorry for you as a human, but this is how institutions must go", the Head of School shrugged.

#OperationTeacosy

In 2018, four months later, with the Mindfulness Teachers Association of Ireland AGM looming, I shared the blog in the closed Mindfulness Teacher's group - I named no names, gave minimal details, simply highlighting what I saw as a pressing need to address trauma-sensitive mindfulness practice (an emerging "hot topic" in the field). I said I would be outside the event with information for anyone who wanted a chat and a cup of tea to talk trauma - which I hashtagged #OperationTeacosy. It was firm, fair, not at all forceful and framed warmly. I said I didn't think it was right it had never been spoken about, but that was the extent of the criticism.

The day itself was bittersweet. I'd missed out on graduation, and it was a lovely chance to see my friends who were positive and encouraging. Many of my course comrades dropped by for chats, for hugs.

Towards the end of the day, that man who had sat in the pink chair two years before dropped by, looking a bit sheepish. He let me waffle on at him about trauma sensitive mindfulness for a few moments, nodding tentatively. I made a joke it was the most painfully middle class protest in the history of the world, and we laughed. 

In that moment, for a short while, the world felt right: put back together. Whole.

The Affordances of Social Media (Part 1)

There's no doubt in my mind that my decision to share, and the nature of #OperationTeacosy would never have happened without the #MeToo Movement.

On October 15^th 2017, in the wake of revelations of abuses by Director Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted to ask followers to write ‘me too” on her timeline if they’d been sexually harassed or assaulted.  The response was unprecedented.  By the following day, the platform had hosted 300,000 personal stories (Caputi et al, 2019).  The hashtag had been used at least 19 million times by September 30^th of the following year (Anderson & Toor, 2018).

Longtime activists in the field, notably organiser Tarana Burke who used the phrase ‘me too’ as a call to support survivors of colour in 2006, expressed reservations around the potential for psychological harm to victim-survivors after declaring #MeToo. Was the 2017 hashtag explosion a “watershed moment in contemporary feminism”,  about getting resources to survivors and helping them heal she wondered, or was it simply outing perpetrators in a collective moment of rage? It wasn’t as she envisioned it.  (Jaffe, 2018).  

Indeed, wondered Pellegrini (2018) what if the virality of #MeToo was really something else entirely, American white women with privilege engaging in a “facilitative displacement” of the rage and terror felt at the rise and success of Trump, “using the same social media platforms and viral tactics that fueled Trump’s own rise” (p. 263)?

After all, what can hashtag feminism actually do in the face of wicked social problems like sexualised violence? Isn’t it merely “slactivism”,  providing a momentary rush and feel of “doing something” relatively risk-free, without lasting impact?  

Clark-Parson (2018) points out that, while there almost certainly was performative “virtue signalling” with respect to the #MeToo movement by some, individual decisions to share personal testimony in a hostile and unpredictable social media landscape were a risky leap of faith into the unknown for most. To disclose on Twitter and other social media, victim-survivors had to make a personal decision to embrace this risk – once those words “me too” were out there, they could not be taken back.

The choice to “press send”, argue Loney-Howes et al (2020) was it itself a marker of a shift in focus from an individualised account of a personal tragedy to a more intersectional collective memory: rooted in, facilitated and maintained by the affordances of social media. Digital sharing changed the function of telling the story. In online spaces, women who shared publicly could only partially be said to be doing so for themselves. It was a performance of feminist identity. Women were performing “ethical witnessing” – for themselves, and for women everywhere.

On the way home that evening from Dublin to Cork, this was how it felt for me. I felt the power of memes that had moved me - "Embrace your Voice", "Believe Women”. I felt like myself again. It felt over. I felt like I was a part of something beyond myself.

But was I, really? And where would it lead me? I was about to find out...

References

Anderson, M., & Toor, S. (2018). How social media users have discussed sexual harassment since #MeToo went viral. Pew Research Center. Retrieved October 10, 2023, from https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/10/11/how-social-media-users-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/

Caputi, T. L., Nobles, A. L., & Ayers, J. W. (2019). Internet searches for sexual harassment and assault, reporting, and training since the# MeToo movement. JAMA internal medicine, 179(2), 258-259.

Clark-Parsons, R. (2021). “I see you, I believe you, I stand with you”:# MeToo and the performance of networked feminist visibility. Feminist Media Studies, 21(3), 362-380.

Gleeson, J., Turner, B. (2019). Online Feminist Activism as Performative Consciousness-Raising: A #MeToo Case Study. In: Fileborn, B., Loney-Howes, R. (eds) #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15213-0_4

Jaffe, S. (2018). The collective power of# MeToo. Dissent, 65(2), 80-87

Loney-Howes, R., Mendes, K., Fernández Romero, D., Fileborn, B., & Núñez Puente, S. (2022). Digital footprints of# MeToo. Feminist Media Studies, 22(6), 1345-1362.

Noetzel, S., Mussalem Gentile, M. F., Lowery, G., Zemanova, S., Lecheler, S., & Peter, C. (2023). Social campaigns to social change? Sexual violence framing in US news before and after# metoo. Journalism, 24(6), 1232-1262.

O'Neill, F. (2019, April 6th). Hope. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved October 10, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbwsCZt2BOY

Pellegrini, A. (2018). # MeToo: Before and after. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 19(4), 262-264.

Quan-Haase, A., Mendes, K., Ho, D., Lake, O., Nau, C., & Pieber, D. (2021). Mapping #metoo: A synthesis review of digital feminist research across social media platforms. New Media & Society, 23(6), 1700-1720. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820984457

Royal, K. (2019). Journalist guidelines and media reporting in the wake of# MeToo. # MeToo and the politics of social change, 217-234.