Autoethnographic research of internet-based anti-rape social movements is simultaneously immersive and distancing. Such investigations demand a willingness to question positionality—to gaze at pieces of myself made visible (thus malleable) to digital publics and to critically question the purposefully concealed. The level of privilege my online presence re-embodies dictates affective reception. Fissures mark my identity layers: a neuroatypical first-generation-college-student, an aesthetic maximalist covered in tattoos, a 30-year-old white woman with PTSD, a rape survivor, a lesbian. The metadata tag, #MeToo, is a smooth monolith, queer fractures like #MeTooButDifferent are exiled outside of the collective. I must choose what is more important: assimilating or expressing the script-defying state of being a woman raped by another woman, a crime still unrecognized in the largest anti-rape initiative? What are the consequences if the latter is more important to my research, to my healing, to my fight? Baring these layers, I am politicized, fetishized, villainized, or worse: unacknowledged—something people don’t believe. If I must be reduced to myth, I’d choose a queer-coded monster. If I am to be gazed upon, I want to gaze back, entrapping voyeurs. I embrace the monster that survivors different-like-me are portrayed as when their existence calls for accountability.
