Whose &quot;Me Too&quot; Matters? Investigating the Origins of Individual Responsibility in American Political Activism

"So then one question arises: who truly is legitimate to say “me too” in any social movement. As it does so, it interrogates: is there truly a way to know who is or isn’t to be the advocate of a cause. In this is the idea that there exists by opposition individuals who are considered to hold a justified role in defending a cause and are drawn as referents and entitled to a responsibility. Perhaps getting at the root of such interrogations then implies understanding how do those individuals define the origin of their responsibility in situations of social unrest. How to pinpoint such ‘responsible’ individuals is a question of first order. Responsibility entails putting something at stake in order to carry charge for a given issue. Its origin, however, is tricky to untangle as it emerges from an idiosyncratic balance between a personal sense of duty and a specific context which thrusts individuals into their engagement with hardly distinguishable degrees of influence.10 Because of how...Show more"So then one question arises: who truly is legitimate to say “me too” in any social movement. As it does so, it interrogates: is there truly a way to know who is or isn’t to be the advocate of a cause. In this is the idea that there exists by opposition individuals who are considered to hold a justified role in defending a cause and are drawn as referents and entitled to a responsibility. Perhaps getting at the root of such interrogations then implies understanding how do those individuals define the origin of their responsibility in situations of social unrest. How to pinpoint such ‘responsible’ individuals is a question of first order. Responsibility entails putting something at stake in order to carry charge for a given issue. Its origin, however, is tricky to untangle as it emerges from an idiosyncratic balance between a personal sense of duty and a specific context which thrusts individuals into their engagement with hardly distinguishable degrees of influence.10 Because of how unfathomable this distinction can seem, a time-based comparison of ‘responsible’ agents in different settings yet with similar objectives would allow one to retrace whether beyond specific contexts, intrinsic features unite the process guiding their political involvement. (...) As gathering evidence is a tricky task in social movement analysis, this study cannot avoid stumbling upon its shortfalls if it is to ascertain a metaphysical truth about the origins of individual responsibility in politics. It can, nevertheless, couple representative data with observations made throughout the history of thought to hint at its general teneur and how it sheds light on the perception of legitimate participants of political action. In this attempt, the present work will study whether the mechanisms which trigger individual responsibility in politics can be identified through a time-based comparison of feminist activism in the United-States looking at the movements represented by Angela Davis and #MeToo.Show less

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Whose "Me Too" Matters? Investigating the Origins of Individual Responsibility in American Political Activism