#MeToo under Colonialism: Conceptualising Responsibility for Sexual Violence in Australia

Abstract

One of the most provocative and productive applications of Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘the implicated subject’ is the way it provides a framework to think through #MeToo intersectionally. The ‘implicated subject’ provides a way to think responsibility for sexual violence laterally—beyond the limited figures of victim, perpetrator and bystander; and also temporally—connecting the contemporary sexual harms with the legacies of colonialism and slavery. The concept of the ‘implicated subject’ opens up a field of nuanced responsibility: ‘it both draws attention to responsibilities for violence and injustice greater than most of us want to embrace and shifts questions of accountability from a discourse of guilt to a less legally and emotionally charged terrain of historical and political responsibility’. This is a very rich concept to use as we develop schemas of responsibility in relation to #MeToo, especially for those who may be interpellated by #MeToo as survivors of sexual violence, but who may be implicated by other structural and historical processes—including colonialism, historical slavery, and other processes of structural racism.<br/ >Keywords: Michael Rothberg, implicated subject, #MeToo, sexual violence, Indigenous women, Indigenous justice, state violence, intersectionality