WeToo

WeToo:A Convening erin Khuê Ninh (bio) and Shireen Roshanravan (bio) "How I cherish this collection of cables, esoesses, conjurations and fusil missiles. Its motive force. Its gathering-us-in-ness. Its midwifery of mutually wise understandings. Its promise of autonomy and community. And its pledge of an abundant life for us all. On time. That is to say—overdue, given the times." —Toni Cade Bambara, "Foreword, 1981," This Bridge Called My Back It's easy for new, green things to get buried in the deluge of a pandemic. In the early days of March 2020, we'd just sent our contributors the first round of pings: Hello, we're here if you need us. Feel free to send drafts or schedule conversations. Whatever helps you to get to the finish line of May 1. Rapidly it became clear that the world had lost sight of its future—and very unclear what to do with a college reader on sexual violence, only two or three pieces of which had been so much as drafted. We decided to continue, yes, but the introduction you're reading isn't an essay triumphantly swathed in hindsight. As we send this gathering of writings to the journal—precious as eggs just laid—it is June, mass uprisings against state violence are setting cities ablaze across the globe, and the calendar remains impossible to read beyond a few weeks out. That in these past few months, our writers have bent to the task of excavating their mind's sores and their flesh's memories is generous beyond measure. Which makes #WeToo: A Reader an act of commitment, of mustering up to the other things in our lives that continue to harm us and those around us. Far from being put on hold, sexual and domestic violence as well as child abuse are some of the few crimes that have spiked since we have been ordered to stay "safer at home."1 And even as mass protests [End Page 1] to rethink policing in America gain momentum, it becomes increasingly urgent to grapple with the ways we enact and enable the conditions for pervasive interpersonal violence within our own communities. At the same time, #WeToo: A Reader is an act of optimism, convened by a willed belief that the words we write will reemerge in a future we can continue to plot. But before #WeToo was a reader, it was a conference panel (for the April 2020 Association for Asian American Studies), and before a conference panel (that did not happen), it was a challenge issued by erin in the collection Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics (2018), edited by Shireen and Lynn Fujiwara.2 Written before #MeToo ignited public discourse on sexual assault, the essay admitted to fearing a backlash for what it was about to say: 1) That Asian American feminism had given no time of day to rape or harassment in lives deemed "model minority"—because how could it? In Asian American studies "we do not concern ourselves that the model minority can be raped," that essay charged, because according to our press releases, "the model minority does not exist." That people seeming to fit the description of a myth line the halls of higher education and professional or corporate life is inconvenient and generally elided. Meanwhile, sexual defaults foster rape culture even at Harvard, and for Asian Americans who have made it to the elite institutions of their communities' fixations there are "added stakes" to crying assault, when the "bright futures" thereby jeopardized are foremost their own.3 2) That so long as progressive feminism permits only the discussion of (male) perpetrators as agentic subjects in rape culture, it dooms us to a hell of half-truths. The orthodox feminist position on this—that the victim is to be not only "innocent, blameless" but "free of problems (before the abuse)" (Lamb 1999, 108, emphasis added)—comes with a dubious corollary: that rape culture produces masculinity, but not femininity; tops, but no bottoms.4 How can the immensity of what we know regarding gender formation—the ways that patriarchal societies raise not only boys to conquer but girls to internalize

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