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Construction: #MeToo Media and Representations of Believability

"It's different now. The road is paved in MeToo landmines."

Anatomy of a Scandal, 2022

"That feeling of futility is what ultimately kept me from going to the police."

Bowman, 2014

On September 13, 2019, a limited-run series called Unbelievable premiered on Netflix. Based on real events, Unbelievable tells the story of a young woman named Marie who is raped by a masked intruder at her US home in Lynwood, Washington, one night in August 2008. While many women never speak to anyone about incidents of sexual assault - least of all law enforcement - Marie makes the decision the following morning to confide in her friends and former foster parents about the attack and to report it to the local police. At first, Marie's story is taken seriously - a police investigation is opened, her friends and foster parents are caring and supportive. But then, things start to go wrong. Small details of Marie's story change between the multiple retellings of the traumatic events of that night demanded of her by police. Was she tied up, then blindfolded? Or blindfolded, then tied up? Her opaque behavior in the days following her assault starts to make her foster parents uneasy. Why would she call all her friends to tell them about the rape? Why doesn't she seem traumatized? Could she just be looking for attention? Slowly, slowly, seeds of doubt are planted, until even Marie starts to question whether she really was raped at all. Under the pressure of disbelief (her own and that of those around her, including the police officers to whom she reports), Marie retracts her police statement and is charged with false reporting. She loses her job and her accommodation, her friends shun her, she even contemplates suicide. Meanwhile, a predatory rapist is left unfettered to assault a string of other women in a similar manner over the next three years.

An instant hit for Netflix, Unbelievable has become a pop-culture allegory for the #MeToo era. However, it is far from alone. Rather, it forms part of a burgeoning genre of entertainment media. One-off episodes that tackle sexual violence stories - for example, "He said, she said" (2019) in the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or "The one about the recent troubles" (2017) in The Good Fight - are important elements in the genre (see Kornfield and Jones, 2021). However, its backbone comprises a growing number of series and film productions specifically and explicitly dedicated to stories about sexual violence, many of which hinge their narrative (and much of their dramatic tension) on the question of believability. Some, such as Netflix's Anatomy of a Scandal (quoted above), mention the #MeToo movement explicitly in their script. All, however, locate themselves - both within the world of the show, and beyond it as media products - within a post-#MeToo cultural landscape in implicit ways. As Emily Nussbaum writes in an article titled "TV's reckoning with #MeToo," there has been a "deluge of TV series that feel like a direct response to the #MeToo movement, touching on third-rail themes that are meant not merely to comfort or inspire but to unsettle" (2019, para. 2). This "reckoning" has been reflected, too, in journalistic media, where a growing number of in-depth investigations, podcasts, and documentary productions have similarly emphasized the routine disbelief of women and others harmed by powerful men (both cultural and institutional) as a key issue for contemporary politics.

This chapter approaches these media productions not just as sites for the representation of "unbelievability" but also as sites for the explication of the kinds of labor involved in becoming believable in an economy of believability structured by gender, race, and money. We analyze the way women are made to work in order to establish the believability of sexual assault, not only as a historical fact (something that "really" happened) but more fundamentally as a moral fact (something that was/is "really" violent and harmful). We locate these labors within a post-#MeToo cultural context, wherein the subjective dimension of believability (that is, the question of who ought to be believed) is unsettled and destabilized, while the work of believability (that is, the more performative question of what believability "looks like") is being increasingly reconfigured in, through, and by media as the sites of many, if not most, public struggles over the truth of sexual violence. To explicate these labors, we situate them within a broader mediated economy of believability that manifests in mainstream fictional television and film, investigative journalism and documentaries, and social media campaigns. In different ways, these media productions help illuminate the relationship between believability and gendered and racialized subjectivity as enduringly crucial in allegations of sexual assault.

An exhaustive list of media productions that engage with (and so, are engaged by) an economy of believability in the context of gendered violence is impracticable, as the list grows longer by the day. Here, however, we engage with a selection of television series, films, news reports, and documentaries that have as their central focus gendered violence and that were produced at approximately the same cultural moment as the post-2017 iteration of the #MeToo movement. Our argument in this chapter is that the co-emergence of these various representations of (un)believability in popular media within a very short period of time is both analytically significant and politically revealing - especially given their conjunctural cohabitation with a crisis of public epistemology that many have called the post-truth moment. As discussed in the Introduction, this is a "crisis" routinely characterized by not only growing disagreement about what can or should count as "truth" in public life (including the types of evidence that support truthfulness), but also by a vanishing importance of something called "truth" itself in the operations of modern politics and in the formation of political identities and communities, especially through digital media.

Struggles for believability take place within a cultural marketplace that is characterized by specific relations of trust and recognition (i.e., by subjectivity) and different conceptualizations of "evidence" (i.e., by performance). These, in turn, are sedimented through patterns of commodification and (re)investment. In this chapter, we argue that this marketplace is also necessarily informed by discourses of sexual violence; as Karen Boyle (2019) has pointed out in her study of the #MeToo movement, there is often a cultural blurring of the boundaries between a movement and its representation. Following Boyle (2019, p. 7), in this chapter we theorize the cultural formation of sexual violence and its believability as a discourse that emerges from a specific conjuncture. We also position the discourses of sexual violence explicitly within media culture as "an active discursive site of interrogation about rape and the cultures that produce it, sustain it, and conceal it" (Durham, 2021, p. 4). Media representations, along with media activism, can be a catalyst for breaking silence regarding accusations, and so for renegotiating believability. As has been foregrounded by much scholarship on the #MeToo movement, social media campaigns hold particular promise: through the wide visibility and circulation of hashtag activism, "digital counterpublics" can intervene in widespread public discourse about the ubiquity of sexual violence (Jackson et al., 2020) and cultivate digital networks of solidarity and care (Gjika and Marganski, 2020).

Yet, however much promise and possibility the media offer for disrupting the unbelievability of women and other marginalized subjects, we find that for many of the fictional media products and texts analyzed here, futility was more of a driving thematic force. A standard dictionary definition of futility is not only the quality of being futile or ineffective, but also a trifle or frivolity, as in "the large collection of futilities that clutter our minds" (dictionary.com). Both of these definitions help position the many media contemporary productions about sexual violence. These productions are, in the first instance, representations of accusations against powerful men and the "sticky" (Ahmed, 2007) language that frames them ("liar," "he said/she said," "no proof," "she asked for it," "she's crazy," "gold-digger," "benefit of the doubt"). However, they are also artifacts that "clutter" public conversations about the politics of sexual violence, often crowding out the stories of those most vulnerable to sexual violence and most marginalized by an economy of believability that hinges (increasingly) on the spectacular visibility of media culture: racialized women, criminalized women, migrant women, queer and trans folk of all genders, and women living in poverty.

In this chapter, we take popular entertainment seriously as an interlocutor in public negotiations about the believability of sexual violence in order to move beyond the frames...