‘Natalie Wood Day’: sexual violence and celebrity remembrance in the #MeToo Era

ABSTRACT

This article inquires after the ethics of posthumous outing and networked forms of remembrance connected to public figures accused of, or having admitted to, sexual violence and domestic abuse. Focusing on the obituary politics surrounding the 2020 deaths of Kirk Douglas, Kobe Bryant, and Sean Connery, it explores the forms that a feminist ethics of disclosure and memorialisation might take in the #MeToo era. Contra the popular tendency of othering sex offenders as exceptional ‘monsters,’ #MeToo’s affective and discursive force lies in framing sexual violence as unextraordinary, banal, and ubiquitous. In what follows, we make a case for forms of remembrance acknowledging that a person can simultaneously be an accomplished professional, a loving parent, and a rapist, so that one aspect of one’s being and actions need not require silence over others. Reflecting on what it means to remember public figures in their totality, we flag the importance of attending to the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts that have contributed to the prominence, and subsequent remembrance of individuals. We argue that such a contextual move makes it possible to see the individual public figure within the social networks and hierarchies that have allowed, or disallowed, patterns of behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• #MeToo
• rape
• obituaries
• famous men
• ethics
• social media networks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. #MeToo is the hashtag activist event that emerged in autumn 2017 with white Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano’s tweet inviting women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted to write ‘Me Too’ as a status on their social media. However, MeToo as a social movement was originated by Black feminist activist Tarana Burke in 2006 in order to acknowledge the importance of an intersectional approach in supporting girls and women of colour who have experienced sexual abuse. See Boyle (2019) for further discussion of the complexities of this distinction.

2. Holes and Jensen were co-hosts of the popular The Murder Squad podcast. However, as this essay went to press, the podcast was discontinued following allegations of sexual misconduct against Jensen. See Ehrlich and Marks (2022).

3. Bryant made a statement to the court in which he apologised to the woman for his behaviour and said: ‘Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident in the same way .. I now understand how sincerely she feels she did not consent to this encounter’ (cited in Stern 2016).

4. In his important analysis of the media coverage of the rape charges against Bryant in the context of his death, Patrick Walters (2021) suggests that the phrase ‘complicated legacy’ sometimes became shorthand for addressing the rape charges without actually fully engaging with their implications.

5. See the comments beneath Marc Stein’s New York Times obituary, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/sports/kobe-bryantobituary.html#commentsContainer

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland [327391, 352520].

Notes on contributors

Susanna Paasonen

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku and the author of e.g. Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Jenny Sundén, MIT Press 2020) and Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP 2021).

Tanya Horeck

Tanya Horeck is a Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University and the author of e.g. Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (Routledge, 2004) and Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era (Wayne State University Press, 2019).