Beyond #MeToo: Ushering Women’s Era or Just Noise?

#MeToo, since its inception, has been a sensation. But did the movement die an inconsequential death? Contrary to popular belief, India has strong legal protections in place for women. However, gender is consistently secondary to class, caste and survival. Therefore, India can’t afford—neither socially nor economically—a non-existent future of #MeToo. Beyond #MeToo: Ushering Women’s Era or Just Noise? brings together accounts and analyses from around the world, exploring the movement against the broader backdrop of feminism and gender. With its in-depth research, case studies, survivor accounts and expert opinions, this book sheds light on the implication of the movement in the post #MeToo era. Does it truly usher in ‘women’s era’ or do they merely create noise? What are these backlashes against #MeToo and should we be prepared for it? The book proves that gender post #MeToo is a matter of life and death.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Dr Pritam Pal Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Towards the Culture of Belief The Fight Before The Cost India vs Bharat The C Word After MeToo: The Evolution The All or Nothing Game The Real Risk The Path Forward

About the Author :
Tanushree Ghosh (PhD, Cornell University; alumna, IIT Kanpur and Presidency College, Kolkata) works in the technology sector in the USA. She is also a social activist and author. Her blog posts, op-eds, poems and stories are in effort to provoke thoughts, especially towards issues concerning women and social justice. She is a contributor (past and present) to several publications, including The Huffington Post, USA; The Logical Indian; Youth Ki Awaaz; The Tribune, India; Women’s Web; Thrive Global; and Cafe Dissensus (where she hosted her own segment on social satire titled ‘Black Light’). Her literary resume includes poems and stories featured in national and international magazines (Words, Pauses and Noises—UK; Tuck; The Pangolin Review; and Glimmer Train’s Honorable Mention) as well as inclusion in nine anthologies such as Defiant Dreams (Oprah 2016 reading list placeholder) and The Best Asian Short Stories, 2017 (Kitaab, Singapore). Her first single-author work is From An-Other Land (December 2018, Readomania Publishing). She is the founder and director of Her Rights Inc., a 501(3)c non-profit committed to furthering the cause of gender equality. She frequently speaks on gender rights, social justice, and diversity and inclusion in corporate and non-profit events. She is a member of corporate diversity equity and inclusion management committees and an advisory board member of organizations representing minority voices.

Review :
Although a lot has been written on the topic since the 2018 revelations by Tanushree Dutta, Vinta Nanda and several others, non-fiction books on the topic are hard to find. More importantly, this book goes beyond MeToo and deep into gender today in India. Through an apt mix of interviews, articles and references to Indian culture, delineating the nuances of a woman’s status in the Indian society and the patriarchal system, the book delivers excellent scholarship in a narrative tone which is easy to grasp and hard to put down. Each chapter takes up an important, relevant piece of the puzzle while the chapters, conceptualized in an orderly manner, deliver a seamless denouement. It is one of the most comprehensive and contemporary reads on women’s issues that are out there. Tanushree Ghosh has given us a remarkable book. At one level, it is a reasoned analysis of how the MeToo moment that grew into a movement has worked out (or not) in India. We see so clearly from her book how all the ways people have created to make themselves different in India—religion, class, caste and tradition (read patriarchy) have made it easy for violence against women to flourish. How difficult it then becomes for women just to be recognized as human beings! At another level, Beyond #MeToo pinpoints the similarities and differences between Indian and worldwide #MeToo movements. The book brings to life a social movement for justice through its gripping stories of courageous women. The issue of gender has been ever-pertinent and becomes more so with every passing day for India. A lens that covers the world and time travels into the past, present and future and yet does so in a language that resonates with the everyday reader, distilling academic nuances into simple, summarized facts, is what we desperately need. This book provides that. It is a non-fiction book on such a heavy matter that reads like a can’t-put-down commercial fiction. It is a much-needed must-read. Tanushree Ghosh’s work is a monumental exercise in reframing the debate around and beyond #MeToo in India as well as America from her vantage point of being familiar with both the cultures. Ghosh gives a masterly account of the movement, its achievements, aspirations and future. It fills a much-needed gap in the scholarship around the subject with women’s voices and experiences from the ground. With a much-needed incisive look at the impact of the #MeToo movement in India, Beyond #MeToo is an important book that analyses the global movement, the upheaval it created in India and the post-#MeToo world. It is brutally honest; I am unable to stop crying. The author deals with this complicated topic with clinical precision—presenting facts and viewpoints of experts in the field to substantiate her argument. The book is structured well. Each chapter takes up an important point of the issue, as she goes on to explain it. The chapters have been conceptualized in an orderly manner, moving linearly towards denouement. The author keeps on giving hints about what is to follow and rarely digresses from the thread that is being presented to the reader. There is a nice mix of interviews, articles and references to the Indian culture, delineating the nuances of a woman’s status in the Indian society and how the patriarchal system creates hurdles for the victims wanting a ‘fair deal’. The author has a firm grip on the moral ethos of India as well as that of the Western world and uses this expertise well to portray how these change the equation for women. There are enough evidences of thorough research that the writer has done to understand this complicated situation, and more or less she maintains objectivity in her argument. It is an academic and analytical work, which has some valuable insights on the issue of sexual vulnerability of women in society in general and at workplace in particular. It throws light on certain areas that need to be dealt with if #MeToo has to have a significant impact after it loses the ‘shock and awe’ effect.