Photo by Rob Kall | CC BY 2.0
On January 1, 2018, some of Hollywood’s most prominent women, including Reese Witherspoon, Shonda Rhimes, and Natalie Portman, launched an initiative called Time’s Upto address “sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace.” This commendable initiative intends to financially subsidize legal support for women and men who lack resources. White celebrity women brought women leaders (all women of color with the exception of Billie Jean King) to the Golden Globes on January 8, 2018 to promote Time’s Up and important activist causes. But is this feminist progress, especially when none of the male award winners directly acknowledged Times’s Up in their speeches? How do we make sense of this moment of solidarity among women alongside the deafening silence of men and the simultaneous political rollbacks throughout the country?
As feminist scholars of women’s organizing, we’re concerned that too often the story about women coming together is told in a form of linear progress: women come together, change happens, the end. But a far more complicated and compelling story about what’s possible when women come together, and the work that remains deeply unfinished when they do, is a fundamental component of any assessment of feminist progress.
Buried at the end of The New York Times story about Time’s Up is a revealing quote: “members said the meetings had brought disagreements and frustrations as well.” How…