To be honest, the war on
trigger warnings was unknown to me before this semester. Trigger warnings,
single sentences used to caution readers, learners, watchers, etc. of
potentially upsetting content, are being criticized, among other claims, as
being unnecessary and a result of an oversensitive generation. Having read
blogposts, critiques and watched videos which go both ways on this topic, I am
decidedly undecided on my stance on this issue; I understand many of the points
of view I’ve learnt about and cannot decide which is ‘correct’. For example, I
can understand Jack Halberstam’s critique that trigger warnings bring with them
a multitude of concerns, specifically that they require a decision to be made
as to which subjects have the potential to trigger people and which do not;
which subjects are valid triggers and
which are not. On this topic, Halberstam asserts that “a rhetoric of harm and
trauma” which is, according to him, a product of trigger warnings, “casts all
social difference in terms of hurt feelings and … divides up politically allied
subjects into hierarchies of woundedness.” Although his language is strong, his
sentiment is reasonable: trauma is a difficult thing to categorize and perhaps
attempting to do so can be damaging.
However, I also understand that
it’s a logical fallacy (of relative privation, specifically) to suggest that
acknowledging certain forms of trauma devalues other forms of trauma. For example,
that people are outwardly mourning those hurt in the recent attacks in Paris
does not suggest that other recent attacks in other countries mean less.
Similarly, that topics such as sexual assault and racism regularly appear in
trigger warnings doesn’t logically negate the validity of other upsetting
topics, such as anxiety. If it can be accepted that trigger warnings don’t
necessarily suggest that some forms of trauma are more significant than others,
then what’s the harm in using them for their capacity as a safety measure? Like
Julia Serano said in her critique of Halberstam’s blogpost, “activism can be
messy and difficult but … the quarrels over language and feelings are
ultimately worth the effort.” Because, if what results from trigger warnings is
that some people will have warning that what they are about to read could be
upsetting for them, then they are having a positive
impact.
It seems to me that the most
effective way to handle the difficulties that trigger warnings present is to be
conscious that they have limitations; they may not be the best tool to protect
every person from every type of trauma, but they can be useful for some and
there’s value in that.
I am also undecided about triggers. I initially had no problem with the concept with triggers, thinking of them as a few sentences just letting people know what they can expect to see or read. This seemed straightforward to me. However the readings and the videos have shown me that nothing is ever that simple, especially concerning anything to do with feminism. Throw feminism in front of anything and all of a sudden people seem to have a problem with it, I mean the warnings on movies and video games are never seen as triggering. They have been normalized and do not have the word feminist around it.
ReplyDeleteI can see the argument that triggers can cause the end of discussions about difficult subjects such as colonialism, transgender people, racism and many others. I feel that difficult conversations need to be had in a proper and respectful manner. As Sara Ahmed says "We might need to attend to bad feelings not to overcome them, but to learn by how we are affected by what comes near, which means achieving a different relationship to all our wanted and unwanted feelings as a political as well as life resource". We do need to be able to deal with difficult subjects, life will not censor itself for you. However the conversation against triggers makes it seem as though college students everywhere are revolting against anything that makes them feel bad. I'm sure that there are a few extreme examples of people who are supporting the beliefs of the anti-trigger people, but I think that these anti-trigger people are exaggerating quite a bit and dramatizing the whole trigger story. I myself am working on my second degree and have never seen this type to behaviour that anti-trigger seem to be going on about. I don't think that these people are giving university students enough credit.
Shannon, I really liked that you made the point that if trigger warnings are helping only one person, they are still doing good. I became so entrenched in analyzing trigger warnings that I forgot to take a step back and recognize what they are truly intended to do and how we measure their success. I do still worry, however, that our reliance on trigger warnings exacerbates and ignores a much greater systemic system of oppression. In our effort to create a safer space for those exposed to oppression, we actually just take subjective experiences and turn them into objective definitions. But, within these objective operations, I believe trigger warnings are actually put on the individual instead of focusing on sexual violence as a systemic problem, structurally enforced. I then think about the the fact that absolutely anything could serve as a trigger warning, but the example of a dog barking does not show up in a trigger warning very often. So if some appear and other possible triggers do not, are we then creating a hierarchy of triggers? Or if someone sees a trigger warning and backs out of the room, then do trigger warnings fail to create a safer space for the triggers and anxieties to exist? I think this requires us to move away from phrases like “socially constructed” and “hypersensitivity” and actually look at the systems that are creating this oppression of vulnerable people. Regardless if it is decided that trigger warnings are counteractive or important, we are still only talking about trigger warnings and not approaching the systems that create the triggers initially.
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