Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

'this bitch really gets it bad in the next chapter, so… watch out'

'Birth of a Nation' is an explicitly racist movie that we are watching because adults can study things that they don't always agree with.

Try to avoid using graphic language yourself within the trigger warning, but do give students a hint about what might be triggering about the material. If you say something like, “This movie might be upsetting to some of you,” that can a) sound patronizing and b) lead everyone who’s experienced trauma to feel like they might have a terrible time. Try instead saying, “This movie contains scenes of racism, including slurs and even physical violence, but I believe that the movie itself is working to expose and stand against racism and I think it is important to our work here.”

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 20, 2014 4:22 PM (7 minutes ago)

this was written by a student, right

You may hesitate to issue a trigger warning, or try to compose a vague trigger warning, because you feel it might also be a “spoiler.” A trigger warning does not need to give everything away. If you’re warning people about the issue of suicide in Things Fall Apart, you can write, “Trigger warning: This book contains a scene of suicide…” You don’t necessarily need to “give away” the plot. However, even if a trigger warning does contain a spoiler, experiencing a trigger is always, always worse than experiencing a spoiler.

the "always, always" really makes me feel like they gave this to a grad student to do

here's the whole thing

http://web.archive.org/web/20131222174936/http:/new.oberlin.edu/office/equity-concerns/sexual-offense-resource-guide/prevention-support-education/support-resources-for-faculty.dot

"educate yourself"!!! ok, i can't

always, like, waaaay worse

you there, in the purple shirt

it is always, always worse to misattribute a gender to someone than it is to call attention to their wardrobe

may i have your permission to direct your body using physical contact with my own?

clear trigger warnings are not reducible to "content warnings" otherwise there would be no controversy. "this is the same as saying 'there's some rough content here', right?" isn't cutting it, as much as it gets repeated. merely giving such a warning is not at issue (well, it is, among people with an investment in harshness...)

two aspects of trigger warnings are meeting skepticism and resistance or "reaction" in political terms: what is proposed to deserve a warning, and what a student is permitted to do once the warning is given.

first, trigger warnings, if put into practice, would institutionalize consideration of things like racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry on the same plane as individual experiences of violence or victimization (war, abuse, etc) that cause PTSD. post-trauma is the model. it insists that politics and psychology are indivisible. conservative and universalist-liberal objections tend to fall here

second, (and things are fuzzier here) students at risk of being triggered will have some kind of avenue or resources to complete the course in an alternate way. disability is the model here: dyslexia, and so on. if a text is so "warned" then pedagogy and the surrounding administration have to provide multiple options. academics, as a class, already have a self-conception as tough-minded and justice-aware people, but aren't exactly inviting of another administrative headache, to put it very generously...

it is always interesting to me that these kinds of controversies always spring up in English departments.

This response is going around.

But learning about these topics are all necessary forms of education. And trigger warnings won’t solve or ameliorate the problems that open, frank, guided discussion by well-trained, competent instructors can. Every semester, I gird up my loins to address the range of defensive and uncomfortable reactions that students have to material they have been taught never to discuss in polite company.

well, what if such an instructor isn't available?

go stand in the fuckin corner

Now go home and get your fuckin shine box

historians will write about how liberal humanism finally collapsed when it was no longer able to effectively distinguish between trigger warnings and spoiler warnings.

one was always, always worse than other, but no one could remember which

schoolchildren will be taught a mnemonic they will call 'the warning warning'

re goole: yeah, that's exactly what i was trying to say-by-asking, but like, clearerer

back to one of mordy's questions iirc, CDC report (haven't found a link yet) says 30% of inner-city children suffer PTSD which makes it harder for them to learn

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/05/16/hood-disease-inner-city-oakland-youth-suffering-from-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd-crime-violence-shooting-homicide-murder/

but supposedly some people are suggesting it is a more complex form that is going by the unfortunate name 'hood disease'

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/05/inner_city_youth_suffer_from_hood_disease_also_known_as_ptsd.html

and of course that's not a good idea

http://gawker.com/can-we-stop-trying-to-make-hood-disease-a-real-thing-1579145911

I've posted a link before to a study about a high percentage of Native American kids having PTSD, but on phone now and can't find it. Studies are out there.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/05/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trigger-warnings

laurie penny

There is some debate over where precisely the term "trigger warning" entered common parlance. I first encountered it on Livejournal and in related online communties that were sensitive to mental health issues; mental health bloggers in particular used the term to signal that what was about to be discussed or described might be harrowing for those with PTSD. One of the many crucial things that has been missed, deliberately or otherwise, is that "trigger warnings", at least initially, were almost always attached to personal narratives. They became a way to share stories of trauma, anger and extreme experience whilst preserving a space which did not alienate the vulnerable.

In those spaces online, we spoke about rape and abuse, racism and gendered violence, discrimination and frightening mental health experiences, but these discussions were not designed to shock- indeed, part of the point of the discussion was that these things happened so often that they should not be shocking, happened to so many of us that there needed to be a way to talk about them. I honed my own writing in exactly those forums, discursive spaces where the personal and the political were raw and real, and "trigger warnings" were just a part of the shorthand I grew up with - and I may have got this entirely wrong, but I’m not known as a delicate, retiring person who’s reticent about speaking her mind.

http://m.xojane.com/issues/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trigger-warnings

jacqui shine

This stigma has persisted. Scholar Joshua S. Goldstein has thoroughly documented the long history of framing traumatized combat vets as emasculated and weak. And though we’ve seen some growth in public attitudes toward trauma and PTSD in military combat veterans, less than half of soldiers with PTSD seek treatment, largely due to fear of stigma--including the fear of being seen as weak and feminized. Likewise, men who survive sexual abuse struggle to reach out for help because they don’t want to seem weak or have their sexuality called into question. Despite the work of feminist physicians and researchers like Judith Herman, whose Trauma and Recovery challenged stigma and advanced evidence-based treatment for PTSD, we still view even trauma itself through a profoundly patriarchal lens.

Our contempt for the trigger warning comes from--what? A fear that people--particularly women--might insist on being fully seen and recognized, even if it’s inconvenient? That we might have to reckon with the pain of others, especially the most incomprehensible varieties of suffering? That sometimes it takes a long time to get better, that sometimes we don’t? That we might have to acknowledge our shared responsibility for a world that is still so profoundly hostile toward women of all genders that, as Dylan Farrow’s recent revelations demonstrate, we categorically refuse to believe survivors?

It may or may not be practicable or advisable to provide trigger warnings in college classrooms. Honestly, I don’t care much either way. What I do care about is the way in which the subject seems to provide a convenient excuse to pathologize and shame survivors. The conversation about trigger warnings is, in every way, a conversation about trauma survivors, and, in a small way, a conversation about what part we each play in creating communities in which all of us can fully participate. If we’re going to have that conversation--and I think it’s an important one!--we need to do it without diminishing or lionizing trauma survivors. Pain, even and especially the pain of trauma, is neither permanently damaging or inherently ennobling. It’s just a part of life. As with most things, we deal with it individually and communally, whether we like it or not.

And you know something? I don’t think that how we as individual survivors manage our struggles every day is the problem here. Let’s stop acting like it is.

agree completely w all that. to the extent i have concerns, it's about the intersection of the moral, social and legal in dealing with the idea of triggering, as framed by ongoing push-pull between bullshit, anti-intellectual constructions like "creepy liberalism" and "illiberal liberalism" (the accusation cast by the thread title as it might be smugly framed from the opposite direction).

more accurate would probably be 'creepy leftism' which makes a lot more sense

or at least more accurate to what the thread is now about. cardamon seems to be describing a different phenomenon in op

feel like shine is making the easy argument there ("we should be aware of and responsive to the varieties of suffering"--well of course!) without making the hard one: should this sort of thing be institutionalized, codified, compulsory?

and if so, what counts and what doesn't? who gets excluded from these protections and why? i feel like if you're not addressing those points you're keeping you're hands clean in the name of an all-inclusiveness which can't really be actualized to any pragmatic end at all. the point being that for TW to be of any use in the university, or to retain any coherence as an idea, some things have to count and some cannot. someone, some modes of suffering, will inevitably be excluded by any such scheme.

well, isn't part of the point of taking on the trauma-theoretic machinery that it allows for the consolidation of distinct, sometimes aligned, sometimes not, liberatory/anti-oppressive political praxes and discourses under one institutional lever / line of rhetorical attack? —with standing recognition (backed by scientific research) of forms of social oppression as the criterion for triggered suffering that counts and triggered suffering that doesn't (aside from, i suppose, the usual individualized medicalized/psychiatrized forms of same).

yeah i think that's absolutely the point of that machinery: it allows you to make those distinctions with some authority. but that machinery surely fails to address what shine writes about: That we might have to reckon with the pain of others, especially the most incomprehensible varieties of suffering?

this is obviously a profound point and i am all for it! but i dont see how it can be reconciled to the trauma-theoretic machinery which enables such decisions as to what counts and doesn't count.

if we didn't call it a "trigger warning" but instead a "some heavy shit warning" would that change the discourse. how.

phrases like "liberatory/anti-oppressive political praxes and discourses" and "standing recognition...of forms of social oppression" are (relatively) tidy and agreeable-sounding, but the social realities they describe are vastly complex and rarely agreed upon by all concerned parties. since it's implicit in what you suggest, j., i'm curious how the pathologization of identity and political relation might play out in legal & institutional practice.

well yes so am i that is why i revived this thread

fair enuf :D

I got a trigger warning
it's full of rocks and stones
and if I lose you
I'll be coming back today
(I got a message for you)

i got a letter from the college the other day
i opened and read it, it said i would suffer
they warned me about a trigger or whatever
picture me giving a damn—i said never

Shine's piece seems fine. It's not xojane's responsibility to frame the implementation (that's a discussion for individual universities and their counsellors / academics / student groups), but journalists can try to ensure that any wider public discussion takes place in good faith and it is useful in that respect.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/empathetically-correct-is-the-new-politically-correct/371442/

I’m not entirely unsympathetic. As an English professor, I had a student—a rape survivor—express feeling traumatized by classroom discussion of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I learned about her difficulty only following her repeated absences from class. A trigger warning might have prevented—or perhaps merely ensured—these absences. But a person traumatized by reading a Victorian novel is a person in need of help, and the entire episode brought about the small crisis which resulted in a more important outcome: getting her connected with a college counselor.

"a person traumatized by reading a Victorian novel is a person in need of help" < otm

express feeling traumatized by classroom discussion

traumatized by reading a Victorian novel

these aren't the same thing

really what we're talking about is not the text itself, it's the discussion of the text in a controlled, semi-public space like a classroom.

with visual materials the sense a little different, but there's this idea out there that words on the page are the triggering thing at issue (they can be)

in that prof's own description, i wonder if it wasn't a classroom of kids blithely talking about rape w/o much insight or sensitivity that was the thing, not slogging thru hardy

ideally it would be on the professor to challenge what the kids are saying then, right? i mean i don't think anyone is calling for a banning on discussing rape or colonialism or whatever in humanities seminars

or at least more accurate to what the thread is now about. cardamon seems to be describing a different phenomenon in op

Yup

The kind of people I was thinking about when I said 'creepy liberals' are, at this very minute, putting links to this story on facebook and talking about the rise of politically correct censorship and et cetera ... and yet one feels that they don't really care very much about literature or trauma victims. For them, Literature Under Threat is just useful as a rhetorical image, and unlike me, they have no interest in exploring the real psychology of triggering and flashbacks.

Update over, carry on. (Some of the most interesting stuff I've read on ILX for a while coming through here.)

IDK I was a lit major in a pretty small department and a small state collegeand I got raped by another lit major. They should've put a trigger warning on him! Haha, not really. But seriously the hardest thing was having to run into him on campus almost every day.

A lot of the books I read could've had trigger warnings, and I wouldn't have wanted them to. Esp the "postmodern" class with stuff like Kathy Acker, Muriel Spark's _The Driver's Seat_, V., }The Passion According to G.H._, a lot of books I've forgotten just made me think "postmodernism = repeated motifs of severe genital injuries/sexual abuse." And, no biggie, because it was so arty and weird. And it might sound silly but I am glad I got to reach this definition of postmodernism ON MY OWN.

The only time it GOT weird was in my <3<3<3ed class on William Blake, when we read "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," which features sort of a No Exit triangle of a husband and wife figure (IIRC) and the wife gets raped by the third guy. She gets upset at her pussy-ass husband who just mopes and does nothing, and upset at the rapist, and also experiences sort of a changing sense of self/sexual liberation because of it (NB: paraphrase). So, that poem was actually really liberating and thrilling, and it was a huge part of me reclaiming my own identity, and probably the first precipitating event towards eventually getting divorced! Just to be overly real here.

ANYWAY, what made it AWFUL was a guy in class who was just insisting over and over that "it had to be a rape, it had to be a rape" to make Oothoon, the main character, sexually liberated. And the prof was trying to deal with it gracefully – "You've been the main voice in this discussion, so you're not going to get to talk anymore so we can hear other voices." But he kept piping up if anyone disagreed. "No! It had to be a rape!" I was feeling self-conscious anyway because the prof known I'd been raped (because she had to get that guy who raped me off the roster the first week of class – I told her about it). And him just repeating it, man!

What I mean to say by all this is boorish people have always been "triggers" for me in a way no piece of literature ever could.

fwiw i don't care very much about literature. don't teach these books, cancel these classes, shut down these departments, and move the funding elsewhere. perhaps something like the ptsd research cardamon apparently does irl. humanities are ridiculously overfunded at a college level anyway, the arts esp. w/ class discussions surely one of the roles of an educator is to instruct in students appropriate kinds of behavior and methods of interaction in a workplace environment. some shmuck like the guy in crabbits class would've been justifiably fired for behavior like that in the real world, and so any prof that didn't deal w/ it or shut it down effectively would be failing that boorish student, other students in that class, the school and society in general.

humanities are ridiculously overfunded at a college level anyway

they're not, at least in Florida. Piddling before, worst now that testing and Kaplan rule the earth.

typically the humanities pay for themselves through enrollments in well-attended service courses and efficient use of their budgetary allotments. it is not uncommon for them to profit while other programs that supposedly subsidize them run at losses.

p sure he's trolling

getting pretty tired of teaching Muriel Spark to bored sophomores tbh