Fight the Law and the Law Always Wins

So I thought Dean Spade was pretty great.  Spade’s ideas around the importance of political mobilization of queer and trans oppressions to actually save lives while refusing politics of inclusion completely reframes neoliberalism for me. In a neoliberalist society, the problem of the impossible trans person living in the set of circumstances can not be solved unless society exceeds recognition and inclusion.  Spade speaks of the commitment that social justice only trickles up, not down.  Therefore, we must centre experiences around the most vulnerable and reframe the “distribution of life chances,” or redistribute biopolitics and life politics (Foucauldian).  Furthermore if we rely on formal legal equality, that what the law says about a certain group is the sum total its goals, what are we actually accomplishing? “Regulate me, it feels good,” Spade says, critiquing the false sense of security found from two lesbians or two gay men being included legally in a marital relationship.  Instead of focusing on the reasons why, structurally, we have such vulnerable groups, we are hell bent on just adding more into these systems to make them more inclusive and work for more people than before.  Dean urges the need to focus on ideas of regulation and norms and how inclusion often only strengthens the norms as they articulate “some kind of new found justice and equality.”  Boom, I can’t even begin to think about how one attacks.  Legal processes are laid out.  There are a series of steps to follow and it can be met with tangible evidence of accomplishment or success, if only a false sense of it.  But what does it look like when we just go out and change laws?  We’ve been changing laws for years and questionably, do not see sweeping periods of change.  

I think it is important to situate what Spade is saying outside the context of our immediate world.  I think of Emma Goldman: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”  An extremely profound statement in the midst of decades of first wave feminists fighting for equal recognition in law, Goldman believes equal rights to life to manifest not in woman suffrage, but in revolutionizing sexual love and intimacy.  Fighting for suffrage in the domain of the man then acts as a distraction, a scam, to occupy women with while social conventions continue on as they were.  Similar to the ways in which inclusive legislation only works to strengthen norms for Spade, but in a much different context, with many different influences.

In a 2013 article title “Marriage Will Never Set Us Free” (I’ve included the link to the article below) Spade asks: What’s the deal? Is same-sex marriage advocacy a progressive cause? Is it in line with Left political projects of racial and economic justice, decolonization, and feminist liberation?” Followed by:

“Nope. Same-sex marriage advocacy has accomplished an amazing feat-- it has made being anti-homophobic synonymous with        

being pro-marriage. It has drowned out centuries of critical thinking and activism against the racialized, colonial, and patriarchal processes of state regulation of family and gender through marriage.”  

Through our cyclical celebration of changing laws, I never really stopped to think of what was being lost in the process.

http://www.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/modules-menu/beyond-capitalism/item/1002-marriage-will-never-set-us-free

Visibility and Validation

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.

Harvard Law Students: Not as bad as we think

When I first heard about the Harvard Law students refusing to learn about rape law, I was horrified — though, I never looked into it much further than ruminating on how angry I was. How could law students (the top ones, at that) refuse to learn about something so important? 

Upon looking deeper into this story, however, it appears that the story is much more complicated that it’s often presented. Instead of students merely refusing to study the material because it makes them uncomfortable, I think the infamous tale of the Harvard Law students tells a bigger story of how trigger warnings cannot possibly account for the myriad of traumas that could arise in a classroom, as Sara Ahmed discusses in “Feminist Hurt/Feminism Hurts.” A more structural change to how we think about oppression in the academy, I believe, is more fruitful to bettering the experience of survivors of sexual assault than trigger warnings could ever aspire to. 

The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, wrote an extensive series on how sexism manifests itself in Harvard Law School, from the Socratic method applied in classes, to the overwhelmingly male faculty. In short, women participate less and perform worse than males in Harvard Law, even though they are just as “qualified” in terms of capacity when they are admitted. A Buzzfeed article draws upon student experience to reveal how this culture influenced a distinct movement towards requesting trigger warnings in rape law classes, and an outright refusal of learning the material:

 "Some hate when professors insist on using the Socratic method, a common law school teaching practice in which students are    cold-called and mercilessly questioned, because a rape survivor might have to argue an accused rapist’s case. Others don’t understand why professors engage with students who make insensitive remarks about victims such as 'What if she looked older than 12?' or 'Is it still rape if it wasn’t consensual but he really thought it was?' instead of shutting them down."

Jeannie Suk, a Harvard Law professor, fanned the flames to this discussion in her New Yorker article, where she states that “some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.” Most interpretations I’ve read make this statements out to mean that the content of the classes is inherently “distressing,” hence feeding into the greater moral panic of hyper-sensitive college students demanding special treatment. However, given the above accounts of Harvard Law students, I think it would be fair to counter Suk’s argument: perhaps these students don’t object to rape law being taught, but the way it’s being taught, and students, generally, are not given the tools or power to be able to nuance this conversation. It’s easier, I think, to ask “can you not teach this?” instead of asking “can you overthrow the oppressive and sexist scaffolding upon which you were founded?”

I do not think that trigger warnings are the answer for making campuses a safer space. Students who walk campus and risk walking into their perpetrators daily and survivors, in the most intimate and public spaces of their lives, are reminded of their trauma. A trigger warning will not save survivors from that. In our class discussion today, my group discussed how regardless of what a professor may put on their syllabus, it is moot unless you approach the subject in a particular way. A professor can put a trigger warning for sexually violent content in his syllabus, but he can be insensitive in a myriad of other ways. How would the trigger warning help in that case? I appreciate the approach Ahmed mentions in her article, which requires a close reading of the "atmosphere" in the class to determine which kind of material to introduce, and finding alternative ways to introduce content when the atmosphere doesn't "allow" it. 

Ahmed says that by overlooking that structural causes of “bad feeling,” the bad feeling becomes rooted in other people. That is, people become the imagined origins of bad feeling, even though the root of bad feeling is something bigger than that person. Students'  suffering may be read, on the surface, as “stifling,” as Ahmed explains, but I believe it runs deeper. Being exposed to others’ trauma does not only stifle our ability to "move forward" in course content — it reveals that the world is not as equal that we’d like it to be, reveals we have privileges over others that we can’t control, and, sometimes, painfully, reveals the hurt within ourselves that we’ve tried to put behind us. And, in my experiences where students’ have revealed this pain, the classroom was only able to move deeper and pose the literature to greater critique — not void it of politics, or nuance, or discussion, like critiques of trigger warnings seem to suggest. Ahmed expands upon this idea in "Against Students," where she makes the poignant assertion: "The idea that being over-sensitive is what stops us from addressing difficult issues can be translated as: we can’t be racist because you are too sensitive to racism. we need to be too sensitive if we are to challenge what is not being addressed."

So, I see the perceived "sensitivity" of the Harvard Law students as something that speaks more strongly to a sore need to uproot the heteropatriarchial values of the academy — something that the students seem to cry out for, but nobody notices. To mirror Ahmed's language, it seems the academy is disturbed by their ability to not be oppressive, because the students are too sensitive to oppressionn. Thusly, to challenge what is not being addressed, these students may just need to be sensitive. 

Feminist Standpoint Theory

A few weeks ago we learned about feminist standpoint theory, which understands subjugated experiences to be a foundation for knowledge.  It assumes the vantage point of marginalized groups and oppressed individuals to challenge hegemonic power structures and normative ways of thinking, rooted in traditional ideas of rationality and enlightenment thought.  These experiences produce a distinct epistemology of knowledge that can only be produced from their unique “standpoint”. How do trigger warnings help create conversations around these experiences and include these perspectives (which are often dismissed, silenced, or recuperated)? How might they simultaneously work to further marginalize these bodies and exclude them from dominant discourse? 

In our group discussions today we talked about the pros and cons of trigger warnings. The group consensus was that trigger warnings generally create space for conversation and further engagement because they draw attention to systemic social problems instead of normalizing or naturalizing experiences of trauma. Of course, only certain experiences of trauma are recognized by trigger warnings, and what counts as “traumatic” or “triggering” is different for everyone, depending on who does the defining. Thus, trigger warnings can be understood as preparing the audience for their exposure to sensitive or offensive content, while at the same time participating in the construction of what it means for content to be “sensitive” or “offensive”. Trigger warnings provide suggestions for what the easily offended, hypersensitive, traumatized body should do: exclude themselves entirely or precede forward at their own risk. While the systemic social problem is often labeled and addressed, this also stands to put the “risk” back onto the individual. We provide few tools within actual trigger warnings themselves about what the body should do with trauma, offense, or pain, should they choose to engage with the content and experience these responses.

Despite this, perhaps trigger warnings are an attempt to take up a feminist standpoint theory framework. They start with the assumption that experiences of trauma actually exist and therefore need to be addressed, even through a simple warning. In labeling them, we bring them into the realm of existence. It validates that these experiences and perspectives are real and that we accept them as “true”. The extent to which these warnings accurately reflect the lived realities of actual survivors may be limited, but there could be exciting potential if we continue to create space for the inclusion of a collection of stories and experiences. This would mean recognizing both the individualized and systemic implications of an experience to move beyond warnings that demand only “some” people should take caution or risk if they are overly sensitive or easily offended. I’m not sure what this would look like exactly, but I think trigger warnings are productive in that they force us to reexamine what is absolute or “true” knowledge, which might open up space for us to think about other standpoints.  

The Use of Jokes as Raising Awareness?

In Wednesdays reading, Halberstam mentioned that, "humor is something that feminists in particular, but radical politics in general, are accused of lacking" (Halberstram, 2014).
In today's discussion class, my group had a very insightful talk in regards to the usage of jokes when speaking out on sexual assault. I personally do not agree with Halberstam as I do not see the awareness of sexual assault through jokes affective since it demeans the actually matter. I see jokes as diverting the issue from a space where language could be created to raise awareness and understanding to a space where people can laugh, have a good time and overlook the issue. 

Yet, throughout our discussion, we did mention how some survivor's may use the coping mechanism of humour as a way to enlighten their trauma. This reminded me of an article  that I previously read,  where a comedian was conveying her sexual assault experience through humour, and the audience and her friend would laugh at the story, even though it is a severe issue. Her friend then confessed how guilty she felt afterwards and the survivor responded with, 

"But I gave you permission to laugh!" ..."She explained that by telling the joke, she felt she was controlling how people reacted to her experience while simultaneously negotiating her own feelings about the incident. She found it therapeutic" (Stapp, 2013). 
So this makes me question, is it only survivors who are allowed to use humour in regards to sexual assault? If they do, then is it still addressing the problem or is it just a form of self-care? 

Further, changing the roles and having a perpetrator, or at least for this case, an "accused" perpetrator make jokes about sexual assault truly angers me as it reinforces the rape culture. Recently, Bill Cosby, a well-known actor who is accused of multiple counts of sexual assault had a stand-up show in London, Ontario where he was offered a drink by an audience member. "Cosby reportedly replied, "I already have one," pointing to a bottle of water next to him on stage, and added, "You have to be careful about drinking around me" (Nessif, 2015). This resulted in cheering and laughter from the audience, which demonstrates the devaluation of sexual assault as the audience supported a perpetrator and laughed at the unlawful actions he committed. 

Indefinitely, I believe there to be a grey line between who can and who cannot make jokes about sexual assault. I do not wish to impede in someone's healing process, but the majority of the time, humour is used in settings where perpetrators can rectify their thoughts and actions. This leads me to continue to be certain of my personal opinion in which I do not believe humour should be utilized in crucial issues like sexual assault as it further encourages the rape culture. Yet, I do believe in various forms of self-care so who am I to tell a survivor to not use humour because of my personal opinions? Ugh, I just am left with so many contradicting feelings and thoughts that cannot seem to measure up to a conscious  decision. 

Do trigger warnings have a place in academia? What about the larger societal context?

I think that, like most of the class, this week has made me very conflicted about trigger warnings.  I have been left with more questions than answers as I ponder a few different questions:

Who are trigger warnings designed for? What do they actually do? Which bodies are given priority with them? Who has the authority to decide what things are "triggering" - who decides what someone gets to be triggered by? Is there a hierarchy of "triggers" - is an article mentioning abuse more valid as a trigger than a school bus? What experiences are worth being protected from - whose bodies are then worth being protected?

As I said – more questions than answers. For this discussion, I want to really focus in on what we’ve been talking about all week: How do trigger warnings work to silence or encourage discussion and debate (in academia for this blog post) and then how does neoliberalism fit into all of it?

In the classroom, there are arguments on both sides – some think trigger warnings are more likely to stifle conversation, while others think they are more likely to engage with students. One of the arguments I found most compelling was included in “The Ethics of Trigger Warnings in the Classroom,” a blog post by Stacey Gogeun. Gogeun quoted Kate Manne who wrote an interesting piece on why she uses trigger warnings in her classroom which you can find here. Manne states that the use of trigger warnings “signals to everyone else – i.e., the students who have no need whatsoever to opt out of the discussion – that this is a morally serious subject which we are going to approach in a morally serious way, remembering that what we are talking about real lives, real bodies, and real social practices.” She argues that trigger warnings work to make valid the fact that academic study has implications within lived experience.
On the flip side, some argue that trigger warnings are coddling minds in academic settings by creating a culture where difficult subjects are not talked about, The Atlantic wrote a large piece on this. While the so-called coddling of the mind has not been my experience in academia, I can see why some may think that could happen. My own personal experience has much more been that we address difficult topics with a sensitivity that discussing them may be hard for some, and leave space for people to have reactions and feel what they need to.

In “Taking Offense: Trigger Warnings & the Neoliberal Politics ofEndangerment” by Lisa Duggan, as well as “You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma” by Jack Halberstam, we can clearly see that neoliberalism works with trigger warnings by having a “rhetoric of individual pain [that] obscures the violent sources of social inequity” (Halberstam). They seem to argue that neoliberalism centres our individual feelings around an issue, and makes it so political issues are psychologized and turned into individual issues. Do you agree that the neoliberal politics of trigger warnings work to ensure that structural issues are pushed onto a solely individual level?
Are trigger warnings really centred around feelings? I'd also be curious if people think that certain kinds of triggers are privileged over others, and what determines who decides what is triggering for people - and following from this, does neoliberal rhetoric decide what is worth a trigger warning and what is not? Does neoliberalism value certain kinds of trauma over others? To think about this, I have looked up lists of "common triggers" that people believe should be used; one such list is here. 

Blue Ocean Floor

Another post with the feelings. Do forgive the rambling as we go down the rabbit hole and all that jazz.

On our first day of class we discussed why we were taking the course, and I mentioned that I was interested in learning new things to take back to my friends and colleagues still in policing. In another blog post, I mentioned that frustration with internal politics was part of the reason I left my job in the first place. Both of those things are true, though not entirely. One of the main reasons I took this course -- possibly the main reason -- was to address internally the case I could not leave behind. That case, the case that I still hear in my sleep, the case that nearly led me to jump off a bridge at one point, is without question the biggest reason I left my job. To no one's surprise, it's a rape case.

I basically signed a NDA when I left my work, and I take it seriously -- the stories I carry with me are not my stories to tell. They belong to the survivors, the victims, the families. Unless subpoenaed, I am legally forbidden to discuss my baggage -- if I break this contract, I could potentially be convicted of a federal crime. 

When I left my work, I was no longer entitled to a psychiatrist with the security clearance to access the cases I had worked on, meaning, for all intents and purposes, I could not seek psychiatric help as I would not have the ability to actually describe in any detail the reasons I was seeking the help in the first place. And though I know I could still access services to help me, they require me to return to my former place of work -- something I have not done once in the four years since I walked out the doors; I don't even go to Kingsway Mall because it's too close. Essentially, I've been grappling with my PTSD alone, and I hoped that taking this course would give me some semblance of healing or closure that I couldn't get on my own.

To say that it's been a mixed bag would be an understatement.

In the context of trigger warnings, I didn't really require any; I knew what I was getting into. I knew the bulk of my issues stemmed around cases containing sexual assault, and I knew that they caused my most visceral responses. I felt that addressing these things head on, that engaging with them in an academic forum which took on various avenues of thought, might allow me to find a distance from what I had experienced. In some cases it worked. In others it backfired spectacularly. I've missed more class than I care to admit strictly because, after engaging with the readings, I didn't know whether I would be able to get through the class without bursting into tears or throwing a table -- possibly both at the same time just for funsies. And, like I say, I've been hesitant to discuss any of these actual visceral responses in class for two major reasons: one, I am not a direct survivor of sexual assault and so it is not my place to try to co-opt the experience of actual survivors; and two, I legally can't say anything even if I wanted to. The classes I have attended, I tried to engage with humour. Dark humour is a fall back for every first responder I've ever met -- we have to laugh at what we deal with, or we'll break down into pieces.

Right now, trigger warnings wouldn't really help me one way or the other. They do still serve a purpose for others, and I support their usage in most cases, even while acknowledging that they are but a band-aid in the grand scheme of traumatic experience. They allow for the creation of distance for those who need it, and that can be a life-saver.

But during the readings this week I came across this quote, which I've been mulling over for basically the duration of this entire week: We might need to attend to bad feelings not in order 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.

I have been hiding from feelings for four years. Five in December. And for basically the entire duration of that time, I've been actively beating myself up for not being able to overcome second-hand trauma. But perhaps overcome is not the word I should have been trying to achieve. Perhaps creating a working relationship with it is the best I can hope for. I really can't say.

Mostly, I just wanted to say that today, when I was supposed to be in class, I went to my former workplace and spoke with my former supervisor to get the name of a cleared psychiatrist. I haven't called them yet, but I have their business card. I have the possibility. And that small card kind of feels like healing.