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This study explores the framing strategies and language features of U.S. news coverage surrounding sexual violence and gender issues across the ideological media spectrum at two pivotal phases of the #MeToo movement: (1) during its initial rise as a hashtag-driven social movement in 2017 and (2) during the Kavanaugh nomination and confirmation in 2018. Using structural topic modeling, community detection, and feature extraction, we reveal a heightened employment of political framing during the Kavanaugh accusations. Topical prevalence and language use in news treatment also showed clear partisan differences, consistent with theories of moral foundation and issue ownership. Implications for research on news coverage of gender rights and framing of social movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond a consciousness-raising hashtag, #MeToo has become a transnational movement, crossing the borders of many societies. However, outsized attention has been paid to the manifestations of #MeToo in the US and on Twitter when the reach of this movement was not restricted to a single country, language, or platform. Drawing from the concept of hybridization, we seek to understand how the uses of #MeToo are contextualized across cultures, languages, and social media platforms. By establishing a macroscopic computational approach, we examine the global diffusion of #MeToo as a hybrid communicative process across different language groups (English, Spanish, and Korean) and social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). Through time-series analysis and comparative descriptions of language groups and platforms, we demonstrate how discourse flows, language characteristics, and actors differ across cultural and platform contexts and how public discourse of #MeToo was reappropriated and re-signified in different parts of the world to localize connective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care remains an essential feature of transformative feminist and gender politics—including performance (Hamington & Rosenow, 2019). This article takes as its starting point feminist "ethics of care" scholarship that is grounded in the Cavelian theme of the "vulnerability of ordinary life" (Ferrarese, 2016; Garlough, 2013) and builds on performance studies work engaged by issues of oppression, human rights, and vulnerability (Becker et al., 2021; Bertrand, 2020; Dolan, 2010). Exploring care and performance from both scholarly and applied perspectives, it complicates the conceptual relationship between "vulnerability" and "crisis" to better understand the limits and potential of care in performance activism. Two research examples illustrate how caring practices, during interrelated global crises, have been addressed in local performances in the midwestern United States. The first explores elders' experiences of vulnerability, isolation, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on local Wisconsin Raging Grannies performers, as they reimagine vulnerability as "call for caring response-ability" through community performance activism that critiques "privileged irresponsibility" (Tronto, 1998, 2013). The second considers experiences of vulnerability and isolation through the documentary-style theatre project GenderTalks (2020) by Orion Risk. This ongoing work united transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people from Wisconsin and Iowa in candid virtual dialogues about gender during COVID-19 social distancing. A virtual play from the transcripts was performed in US fringe festivals. The GenderTalks project provides important insights about care's potential in performances to create opportunities for interconnection and social critique (D'Urso, Rosenberg, and Winget, 2021). Both performance contexts illustrate the impossibility of detangling care "from its messy worldliness" (de la Bellacasa, 2017) and how care becomes increasingly complicated and valuable in interrelated moments of crisis. This work centers ways that vulnerability can be reimagined through performance as a powerful political resource, as well as means of rejuvenation and social connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garnering coverage across the political spectrum is a major challenge for burgeoning social movements. The #MeToo movement stands out due to the volume of attention it generated. Yet, it is unclear how news media across the partisan spectrum covered the movement using different sexual violence language markers, latent topic, and word choices and which accusations and events drove media attention. To examine this, we used Media Cloud to extract 17,877 news articles from nine media outlets across the political spectrum, containing specific n-grams or co-occurrences of (1) "metoo," (2) "sexual misconduct," (3) "sexual harassment," and (4) "sexual assault" from October 2017 through February 2018. The analyses first examined whether language and attention differed across the ideological news ecology and then turned to time-series modeling of these discourses to examine what drove press coverage and structural topic modeling (STM) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis to understand latent topics and language usage. Findings reveal that (1) left-leaning media dedicated more relative attention across all topics—#MeToo, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—relative to centrist and right-leaning media. Moreover, across the right, left, and centrist media, the language markers "misconduct," "harassment," and "assault" decreased over the study period, while the mentions of #MeToo movement increased during the same period; (2) stories relating to entertainment and those accusing politicians, especially those belonging to the party in power at the Federal level, seemed to be by far the strongest driver of news media attention; and (3) we further observed partisan differences in topics of news coverage and language usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]