#MeToo Activism as Pragmatic Justice Seeking

Abstract

AbstractAs #MeToo activists took their testimonies of sexual harm outside the legal arena to seek justice, the #MeToo movement has commonly been framed as pitting informal justice-seeking against formal law. This article draws on interviews with Swedish #MeToo activists and focuses on their experiences of justice seeking. It asks the key question: what does justice look like for #MeToo participants? I demonstrate how a binary framework, with formal law on one side and informal community justice practices on the other, does not offer an understanding of the justice interests of activists. The interviews convey how acts of justice seeking are plural, spanning both legal and extra-legal terrains, as well as temporally long-lasting and contextually shifting. The justice-seeking emerges as pragmatic because the #MeToo moment is bound up with the promise that, at this rhetorical moment, the act of speaking out will finally be heard on a societal scale.