This week I would like to take the opportunity to use my blog to reflect on not only the discussion of trigger warnings from this week but on my personal learning trajectory from the beginning of year up until this point. More specifically, I want to engage with my previous pre-conceived notions, and perhaps biases, about this course and issues of sexual assault on a broader socio-cultural scale that have been dismantled (and rightly so).
I think that one of the greatest things I will take away from this class is that there are no explicitly correct solutions or answers and that trauma is experienced and “dealt” with in vastly different ways. In the past, I suppose I had been quite ignorant in participating in events such as Take Back the Night or Slut Walk without really thinking about what they meant critically and who they were leaving out paradoxically under this huge umbrella of individuals against sexual violence. What may be right for some may not be right for others and it is important to always take into account that broader theoretical and systemic perspectives/movements should always also be accompanied by the real individual feelings of survivors. Furthermore, theoretical and systemic perspectives should try not to overshadow individual lived experiences. (However, I do understand that this poses very practical roadblocks as we discussed about Take Back the Night. How is it possible to create visibility for everyone?)
“But to conceal the causes of hurt can make others the cause of their hurt… We have to work and struggle not so much to feel hurt, but to notice what causes hurt, which means unlearning what we have learnt not to notice.” (Ahmed)
The quote above has helped me work through some of the struggles that I have been facing with this weeks readings. I think that, to an extent, trigger warnings can act as signifiers of validation or “approval” of the triggers in question. In group discussion today, we touched on the ways in which defining the term “trigger” may create potential challenges for those that trigger warnings are meant to “protect” in the first place. Whenever we try to bring certain issues into visibility, there are always going to be others that are left in the dark. As Ahmed states, “structures can bruise some bodies whilst not appearing to affect others.” I think that is particularly important to acknowledge that everyone and anyone can be triggered by stimulus that does not fit into the neat box of what a trigger “should” look like. For example, someone might be triggered by the particular smell of a room, but it is very unlikely that that trigger will ever get a formal warning.
This leads us to think about the validation of feeling. Who gets to decide how someone else feels, why they feel that way, and how they should direct their feelings. At the beginning of the term, we read Audre Lorde’s piece about anger and “angry black feminism.” She pushed the urgency of the ways in which anger should be transformed in order to be generative instead of remaining a static and “unproductive” emotion.
However, I feel as though this argument could be wading in dangerous territory, specifically in regards to agency. As discussed last week, a great challenge that speak-outs face lies in the response that proceeds the actual act of speaking out in itself. Alcoff’s description of a recuperative response to disclosure is heavily problematized by what it does to the survivor’s agency. It allows another individual to impose meaning onto the survivor’s experience. It allows the “expert” to be the voice of authority in validating that experience. In a sense, this may be seen as a parallel to trigger warnings in the way that the people who choose to use them are, to an extent and perhaps unintentionally, selecting which “triggers” should be validated and consequently, which emotions are warranted. I believe that the bringing into visibility of some emotions through validation and not others speaks directly to the quote I had mentioned above.
An outside source I want to bring into the conversation this week as an extension of this blog is called “In Which Rape Makes Me Angry” by S. E. Smith (http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/05/18/in-which-rape-makes-me-angry/). The author talks about visibility. I think that this truly ties in so much of what we have discussed this term from Cindy Gladue, to the Kindred House, to Weiss, Benedet and Grant, etc. There are too many bodies and experiences left outside of the conversation and, as Smith states, this results in a lot of anger. Smith even talks about an "entirely new and incendiary level of anger” (Smith) in regards to disabled women as victims of sexual violence. I personally feel as though the blogger is completely entitled to this emotion and entitled to proceeding with any course of action with that emotion, whether it be transformative or not.
I am definitely interested to hear if anyone agrees or disagrees with the notion that emotions, especially anger, must be transformed or worked around in order to be productive. Or if anyone thinks that emotions have to be productive at all.
The ongoing conversations we have had in class regarding how we value emotion and different kinds of emotional responses is interesting to me. Emotions are largely perceived to detract from academic or otherwise "logical" discourse, however, an emotional reaction to something only proves that it is meaningful. Obviously, the minimization and devaluation of these kinds of reactions comes from a privileged experience of control over one's life, and the presumption that other people have this too. However, this is not the reality for many people, and this assumption serves to minimize people's experiences and knowledges. This hierarchy is so ingrained, that it even seeps into our conversations which attempt to include emotion, in maintaining, as you mentioned, that it must be productive. Obviously, this is a complicated rhetoric because it feeds into neoliberal responsiblization narratives, and further minimizes experiences which don't meet the required political affect.
ReplyDeleteFeminists talk a lot about how privilege obscures marginalization, but I think what is arguably more dangerous is the idea that because one knows what it feels like to be marginalized, that they also know what it is like for every other person who experiences any form of marginalization. That is what bothered me so much about the Factual Feminist video that we watched in class. She assumed that because she had experienced misogyny in her own life, that she was able to speak for feminists as a whole, including their own subjective experiences, opinions and potential pain. She was not "fragile," and so nor could any other feminist be, negating the realities of many people, but especially those who do not look like her.
Again and again, this course has impressed upon me the importance of listening, especially when the narrative sounds different from your own. We need to learn to listen to different kinds of knowledges, including those which are experiential and borne out of emotion, and those from different social contexts, different educations and different cognitive abilities. Of course political affect will be of concern to feminist discourse, but it shouldn't be our only concern, especially when this is achieved through the erasure of marginalized voices.