Colorblind Feminisms: Ansari-Grace and the Limits of #MeToo Counterpublics

Abstract

This article focuses on the uproar over the sexual encounter between actor/comedian Aziz Ansari and a woman known publicly as Grace as a lens onto the colorblind counterpublic feminisms driving the #MeToo movement. Tracing the ways that this sexual encounter between a Brown Muslim man and an anonymous, presumably white, woman were spotlighted, we show that race is superficially absent even as it informs the range of feminist counterpublics that emerged around this case. Extending feminist theories of counter/publics, we explore the ways that the hybrid media system, including traditional as well as digital media, enables colorblind feminisms. Focusing on Facebook as an index of these plural feminist perspectives, we examine eighty-four of the most shared links on this platform to show that, regardless of the positions taken, issues of gender and sexuality dominate framings of the Ansari-Grace encounter, even as race and racialization implicitly mediate the public conversations on heterosexual violence and misconduct. Situating these conversations within the broader history of US racisms and the politics of sexual assault, we also point to how mediated technologies are contributing to the hypervisibility of men of color and shaping which cases occupy the limelight and the feminist counterpublics emerging around them. We argue that these colorblind feminist counterpublics, in effect, center the pain of white women.