Public pedagogy on sexual violence: A feminist discourse analysis of YouTube vlogs after #MeToo

Abstract

In this article, we report findings from a feminist discourse analysis of YouTube vlogs in which women and girls discuss and narrate their experiences of sexual violence. The analysis yielded three discourses and three counterdiscourses: the refusal discourse and the complicating consent counterdiscourse; the deviant perpetrator discourse and the community problem counterdiscourse; and the not that bad discourse and truth telling counterdiscourse. Our findings indicate that the YouTube vloggers simultaneously reproduce and resist dominant sexual violence discourses; they use both dominant and counterdiscourses to understand, situate, and make sense of their experiences of sexual violence. Counterdiscourses were constituted when vloggers resisted dominant discourses by pointing out their inconsistencies and fundamental flaws and presented alternative patterns of meaning. The #MeToo movement and YouTube’s nature as a narrative platform allowed the women and girls in our study to locate their stories of sexual violence within broader contexts and connect them to a continuum of experiences and a complex cultural problem. In a post-#MeToo world, the vloggers’ narratives evidenced their development of a digital networked feminist consciousness. Situated within feminist understandings of sexual violence and prevention education, as well as the emerging research on the #MeToo movement, this study contributes to the literature on public sexual violence pedagogy.