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Navigating the double bind

Linguistic representations of epistemic authority and discursive softening in The New York Times’ coverage of #MeToo

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Abstract
On October 5th, 2017, The New York Times published an article detailing the sexual predation of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein. Within weeks, millions of social media posts, comments and reactions involving the words Me Too had appeared online (Park, Andrea. 2017. CBS NEWS. #MeToo reaches 85 countries with 1.7M tweets. Accessed 30 June 2025 [URL]). Interviews with victims in traditional news media quickly followed, bringing a contradiction for interviewees to the foreground: These women needed to linguistically convey enough authority over their accounts that they be perceived as credible, while simultaneously conforming to positively sanctioned language-use for their gender (see Coates, Jennifer. 2004. Women, men and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Jule, Allyson. 2017. A beginner’s guide to language and gender. Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Kendall, Shari & Deborah Tannen. 2001. Discourse and gender. In Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen & Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), 548–567.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Lakoff, Robin. 1989. Language and woman’s place. New York, NY: Harper Torch Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Tannen, Deborah. 1994. Talking from 9 to 5: Women and men in the workplace: Language, sex and power. New York: Avon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; West, Candace & Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Sage Journals Gender & Society 1(2). 125–151. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). How women syntactically, grammatically and lexically bridged this divide in the first six months of the #MeToo movement in The New York Times will be examined in this article to illuminate who was listened to during the height of the #MeToo movement, and how women navigated the double bind they found themselves in once they were given the ear of the paper of record.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Background
    • 3.1Historical background of #MeToo
    • 3.2Theoretical Background
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Authority
      • 4.1.1Direct reported speech
      • 4.1.2Generalized you
    • 4.2Discursive softening
      • 4.2.1Saying no
      • 4.2.2Responsibility positioning
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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