So this is a bit different than what I usually post here, mainly because I thought I’d be posting it somewhere else. But that didn’t work, so at HU it is. You can consider that a warning of sorts, I suppose.
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In Patricia Hill Collins’ classic monograph Black Feminist Thought (2nd edition, 2000), she describes seeing a difficult presentation by a White feminist scholar. The lecture was about Sarah Bartmann, a Khoikhoi African woman who was displayed as a freak show novelty under the name the Hottentot Venus in 19th century Europe. The scholar, Collins says:
“refused to show the images [of Bartman] without adequately preparing her audience. She knew that graphic images of Black women’s objectification and debasement, whether on the auction block as the object of a voyeuristic nineteenth century science or within contemporary pornography, would be upsetting to some audience members. Initially I found her concern admirable yet overly cautious. Then I saw the reactions of young Black women who saw images of Sarah Bartmann for the first time. Even though the speaker tried to prepare them, these young women cried.”
The white feminist scholar Collins is discussing here could be seen as providing an early form of trigger warning — a notification intended to warn people of content that may cause a painful or damaging emotional reaction.
As Collins’ anecdote shows, trigger warnings have existed for a long time in informal settings. But they became codified on the internet, especially on feminist websites and blogs. Feminist internet trigger warnings focused on sexual abuse or torture, suicidal or self-harming behavior, and eating disorders, according to the Geek Feminism Wiki. The goal of these warnings was to alert survivors of sexual assault, or those with a history of suicide attempts or eating disorders, that the article might trigger PTSD or anxiety. “Someone who is triggered,” according to Melissa McEwan, “may experience anything from a brief moment of dizziness, to a shortness of breath and a racing pulse, to a full-blown panic attack.” Andrea Garcia-Vargas, a PolicyMic columnist who writes about the intersection of gender, sex, and tech, argued in an email to me that such warnings are:
…absolutely necessary. Why? Because PTSD in response to depictions of violence (particularly sexual violence or war violence) is a very real issue, and people who may be triggered by violent images or depictions deserve a “heads-up” that it’s coming. That’s not to say that the trigger warning is going to completely stop PTSD. Of course it won’t. It’s only one step. But it’s a very necessary step. With the trigger warning, the reader can decide whether or not they are in a frame of mind to proceed.
Many writers use trigger warnings as a matter of course. There’s one on McEwan’s article, for example, and one on this piece by Soraya Chemaly at the Huffington Post. Some commenters, though, argue that the warnings aren’t all that helpful. Amanda Marcotte, for example, notes that
“I write often about difficult subjects like rape and abortion, but I never use trigger warnings. My experience is that the audience can do a better job than I can at figuring out what kind of content will upset them by reading the headline than I ever could randomly guessing what blog posts count as triggering.”
Along the same lines, Jill Filopovic points out that PTSD “triggers are often unpredictable and individually specific — a certain smell, a particular song.” Trigger warnings suggest that you can protect people from traumatic reactions, which isn’t necessarily the case.
Filopovic agrees that it’s reasonable to provide warnings for the most common triggers like sexual assault or eating disorders on feminist blogs. She and others, however, have become worried that the use of trigger warnings is moving off the internet and into other real-life venues, especially college classrooms. Oberlin College (my alma mater) has recently put out an official discussion of triggers, advising faculty to “strongly consider” making “triggering material” optional for students. Among the books that were suggested as being triggering was Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, which Oberlin warns might “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”
Some argue that the use of trigger warnings in a classroom setting may do more harm than good. Emory sociology PhD candidate Tressie McMillan Cottom worries that trigger warnings play into a model where students are perceived, not as learners, but as customers, who are never supposed to feel any discomfort. Trigger warnings then become part of a system which works “to rationalize away the critical canon of race, sex, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and capitalism” — students who don’t like discussions of racism or colonialism will never have to confront their prejudices or preconceptions. Jenny Jarvie at The New Republic goes even further, arguing against trigger warnings not just in college settings, but online as well. “Structuring public life around the most fragile personal sensitivities will only restrict all of our horizons,” she says. “Engaging with ideas involves risk, and slapping warnings on them only undermines the principle of intellectual exploration. ”
I can see the virtues in the arguments both for and against trigger warnings — and partially as a result, I feel like both may be framed in overly absolutist terms. To me, it seems like it might be better to think about trigger warnings not as a moral imperative, but rather as a community norm. Warnings exist, after all, in dialogue with reader expectations. In some forums, people may expect to be warned about difficult content. In other cases (as with Amanda Marcotte’s posts) readers will have a sense going in that sensitive issues are going to be discussed with some regularity.
Negotiating exactly when and where there needs to be a warning, and what kind of warning, then becomes something that different communities can work out differently. Marcotte, for example, mentions a recent episode of the television show Scandal in which a major character was raped. Many fans responded with anger, insisting that the show should have included a trigger warning — and the show’s creator, Shonda Rimes agreed with them. You could see this as the show failing in its moral duty to protect its fans. Or you could see it as Rimes caving to oversensitive censorship. But it seems like it might be more useful to see it simply as a particular community figuring out how it wants to deal with charged material.
This doesn’t mean that writers have no ethical obligations when discussing difficult content. On the contrary, it seems like trigger warnings are just one possible way of dealing with one’s obligation to deal thoughtfully with such material. Angust Johnston, a historian and founder of studentactivism.net, wrote to me in an email that:
“content warnings are a part of a larger set of questions about how you’re interacting with your readers. Are you shocking them for the sake of shocking them? If so, content warnings are just a fig leaf. On the other hand, if you’re being careful about how you approach a subject, I think you can often write your way around the need for them.”
Johnston added that this applies offline in a classroom context as well. “I think professors have an obligation to recognize that their students are human beings who may have strong emotional and psychological responses to class materials and discussions, and to deal with those responses in a respectful and sympathetic way,” he said. Content warnings could encourage professors to think about those issues, which would be good — but they could also be a way, as Tressie McMillan Cottom suggests, to avoid important issues. Content warnings themselves are just a tool, which can be used well or badly. The real ethical imperative is to approach an audience, whether online or off, with, in Johnston’s words, “thought and care (and humility.)”
In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins describes another, less sensitive presentation on Sarah Bartmann. A White male scholar lecturing about historical scientific racism included pictures of Bartmann as part of his PowerPoint presentation.
“Leaving the image on screen for several minutes with a panel of speakers that included Black women seated on stage in front of the slide, this scholar told jokes about the seeming sexual interests of the White voyeurs of the nineteenth century. He seemed incapable of grasping how his own twentieth-century use of this image, as well as his inviation that audience members become voyeurs along with him, reinscribed Sarah Bartmann as an “object…a malleable ‘thing'” upon which he projected his own agenda.”
The issue, then, is not simply including or failing to include a warning. The issue is recognizing your own relationship, as a writer or presenter, to race, gender, violence, and other intersections of power. Trigger warnings can be one way to do that, but the argument about them pro or con shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the main goal. That goal, as Johnston says, is to treat your audiences, or audiences, as human beings.
I feel like “trigger warning” is sort of over and mis-used a lot, because it was conceived for very specific psychiatric conditions — primarily phobias and experiencers of traumas, particularly PTSD — that a lot of people use “triggered” to mean “made somewhat discomforted” or “makes annoyed”. I feel like a shift towards “content warning” would semantically make more sense and not seem like it was trying to co-opt the serious concept of being triggered psychologically while also being inclusive of people for whom discussion of visuals (or audio, etc.) of such things would be psychologically bad.
Now, what qualifies as a decent warning is also an issue. Just saying “content warning” or “maturity warning” is pretty useless, and have a laundry list “content warning for rape, murder, racism, homophobia, snakes, gore, slurs, swearing” and so on into eternity miiiight work for a TV show (if it was displayed for long enough), but if it was presented at the beginning of an English class it would be lost in the kerfuffle. In the case of the class, students must take some responsibility to take care of themselves while also passing. Asking the teacher individually about or for warnings, or asking alternate assignments if a text may be too upsetting is reasonable; But while unless the professor is incredibly rude you’ll get the former, the student needs to be aware that they may have to read something discomforting. And on some level, that’s good.
Thinking back, probably the most valuable book I read in AP English, and many of my classmates had agreed with me then, was Catch-22. It was intensely disturbing and, in the interest of full disclosure, had some moments which left me with mild symptoms of a panic attack influenced recall. But the book was firstly important to my grade, but also important to me on a level of understanding how to be a better writer, and honestly? Dealing with a restricted exposure to the contents of the book helped me slightly iron my ways of coping, which at the heart is the goal of so many who have phobias or PTSD. I understand the world can’t trigger warn all of the eensy-beensy things that could set me off — I ask people I know to try and stay away from specified things, but the world can’t, and the world won’t understand that, and honestly I can’t do it either. But having a little bit of a heads-up for certain types of things, like the sort described in this article, it is a help.
And, yes, of course the big thing when it comes to being confronted with upsetting, possibly panic-attack inciting content in a format of academia or media, how and who is presenting it strongly matters. This is true of nearly any sort of thing, but particularly for things for which an emic understanding of sorts is often needed to really present it fairly, honestly, and with care. This is not to say people who don’t have first-hand experience with the content cannot discuss it, write about it, teach it, etc., but they must defer to sources from within the group who know it, to truly understand it, and to present it with care, unlike that loutish professor from the second excerpt.
Hmm. Would you require trigger warnings on this blog,Noah? Or insert them yourself, as needed, in other writers’posts?
I’m not against the idea per se, mind you.
I don’t use trigger warnings here in general..or even nsfw warnings for the most part. I feel like HU isn’t exactly a general interest site, and most folks coming here have a pretty good sense of what they’re getting into. I do hope that sensitive issues are handled thoughtfully…and if someone wanted to put a trigger warning on their post, I wouldn’t stop them, I don’t think.
I am all for being considerate, but it is worth noting that trigger warnings are a suggested mental health intervention for the treatment of PTSD that lack an empirical basis and have never been tested for efficacy. This is something Jill Filipovic address in her piece. PTSD is complicated, and the triggers for an individual’s PTSD are individuated, making basically any intervention difficult to design.
Because of this, I am deeply skeptical of the idea that trigger warnings should be expanded (a) outside of the realm of things that might trigger PTSD of survivors of sexual assualt and (b) into the realms of creative expression and academia. This would be troubling even if we had real evidence that trigger warnings work, but it’s extra-troubling given that we don’t. That Oberlin code of conduct thing is pretty scary from an academic freedom perspective, and it’s anti-literature, as what it seeks to protect students from is the basic experience of being affected by a work of art (in this case “Things Fall Apart”) regardless of whether that effect is really traumatic. I understand given this, why Filipovic and the New Republic reacted as strongly as they did to it.
Furthermore, I think it’s worth acknowledging how often the demand for a trigger warning is used after the fact to silence people. And if you spend enough time on lefty twitter, is at times applied to just about anything anyone might find objectionable. I think, in other words, there’s a theory/practice divide here that’s worth exploring.
Well…that’s why I say in the piece that I think it’s better to think of it as a social community more rather than a moral absolute.
I think the general point that you should think about how what you’re doing might affect various audiences, especially with painful or sensitive content, is reasonable.
I spend a fair bit of time on left twitter and haven’t really run across people using trigger warnings to silence…but I’m probably just not in the right spaces. (And, of course, telling someone that if they do want to use trigger warnings they’re doing it wrong can be a kind of silencing too….)
I don’t have any insight into PTSD, but I can think of cases where a trigger warning would be a simple courtesy to the reader.
To get back to HU, it isn’t rare here to discuss gore movies, or rape in popular media, or war comics, for instance. Each of these topics could involve strong text or images. Maybe a warning would be appropriate sometimes?
Of course, this should be handled on a case-by-case basis.
Yeah…the fact that it’s so common here is kind of the thing, I guess. I feel like we discuss sensitive content all the time, and readers who don’t want to read that have already bailed.
I’ve also just never had anyone say they wanted trigger warnings, and since I see it as a community norm issue, that suggests to me that it’s not a norm that folks who read here feel they want to or need to establish.
I love the questions you raise in this post, Noah.
Over the years in my teaching, I have started to add “content warnings” – I agree with R. Baldwin’s comment above that this is a better distinction for everyday use – to lectures that contain scenes/images some students have difficulty processing. Mostly lynching photos and some racial caricature. I don’t do this because students these days are particularly fragile, but because I want them to be prepared and because I want them to know that it isn’t easy for *me* either. Working through our discomfort is part of the reason why we are there. I have found that the alternative – no warnings – makes them fall silent and less willing to engage the material for fear of revealing their ignorance and/or anxiety.
I also don’t want to come across as callous or cold, if I’m really being honest. I have a tendency to appear that way when I have been working on this material for a while (like the scholar mentioned in the post who told jokes during the presentation). So while I think trigger warnings can be useful, part of me wonders if their increased frequency online is more for the writer’s benefit – as you say, “recognizing your own relationship” to intersections of power – because they (or I) don’t want to appear insensitive to the discomfort of others.
Now that I mull it over though….don’t you think that the writing, if done well, should contain its *own* kind of trigger warning? If the writer wants to be cautious, he or she should be able to figure out how to present the material in a measured way, by making certain language/narrative choices, by being considerate about where to insert images or other media, by crafting the title in a particular fashion. Also by choosing an appropriate venue to publish the work. All these can contain their own implied “warnings.” It’s much easier (maybe too easy?) to stick a huge disclaimer at the top of a post.
(By contrast, look at Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye – if I recall correctly, she made a very deliberate choice to have the opening lines of the novel detailing the father’s incestuous relationship with his daughter printed on the first edition’s front cover. She has also talked about Beloved as purposefully beginning in a way that does not allow readers to prepare for the difficulty ahead. In those cases, the trigger is purposeful. I wonder if she would get away with that today?)
Again, because the intervention is untested, and because “priming” is a real phenomenon, by including trigger warnings, we could be encourage people to be triggered and to read things in a triggering way. We simply don’t know.
To me, trigger warnings are most useful if they’re a way of alerting certain readers to simply not read a given piece of writing. But this is why I also think they’re inappropriate for an academic setting, where sometimes reading a text is necessary and nonnegotiable, and thus a trigger warning again may cause the very thing it seeks to avoid.
I think Isaac may have a good point. While including warnings for lectures in an academic environment seems like it would be a good courtesy, the significance of some texts, some very important, might be reduced by having warnings everywhere, and make people not think so critically about it. Qiana Whitted’s point about the text itself containing a trigger warning is certainly true of many satirical pieces or of novels trying to make a social point — on the other hand, a lot of the English literary canon don’t handle some topics with a lot of subtlety. It’s a mixed bag, creating required reading lists. But still, some things are not so skippable as an unpleasant news article.
Intentionally writing intensely disquieting things and inserting them abruptly — or in Morrison’s case, putting it on the front cover — is always a risky and audacious move, but also one that is incredibly significant in the hands of a skilled writer with a clear purpose for doing so, to create a jarring and dissonant reaction in the reader. The problem is when such things are done for shock value alone, instead of searching for the reason for including the value of shock. A motive needs to be there. Problematic content is often discussed on the net as if including it in media is bad, but at the end of the day how the problematic content is treated and used is the defining factor for understanding it.
My only issue with trigger warnings is in the classroom environment – and not with the warnings themselves, but with the idea that the noted material would then be optional. I may be being insensitive, but I see the warning as a call to prepare oneself psychologically for what it to be read/see – not as an alert to optional material. If I am teaching African-American social realist lit, for example, can I let a student get away with not reading Native Son b/c it may trigger him? Rather, I would warn them about the intensity of the material and hopefully bring that discomfort and anxiety into the class discussion – or at least into the written assignments about it.
In the social media world, trigger warnings should be used by readers to decide if they want to read some article or watch some video, but in academia? I would have a hard time teaching under a la carte conditions.
I’d like to provide a couple skeptical reactions to the two stories from Collins’ book, specifically about the speakers who used images of Sarah Baartman.
In the second anecdote, a white male presenter — whom I am guessing was Stephen Jay Gould — is castigated for participating in the continued objectification of both Baartman and the black women in the audience (who, Collins says, had to objectify themselves in order to share in his presentation). She also argues that the speaker invited the audience members to share in the voyeurism of his images and in the laughter connected to jokes about the image.
It seems unclear to me how the presentation, at least as described, is doing any of these things — and if it is, when exactly the crime occurred. Was it the length of time the image was up? Was it the implied invitation to look at the image? Was it is the discussion of demeaning jokes from the period about white’s audience members’ prurient interest in the “Hottentot Venus”?
If Gould was the speaker, then I am assuming that the image was probably this one — “Les curieux en extase, ou les cordons de souliers” — a cartoon that shows various white viewers trying to get a better look at the woman on display. (Of course, part of the joke is also that the white woman, pretending to tie her shoelaces, is actually getting a peek up the Scotsman’s kilt, while the eager dog chooses his own preferred vantage.)
Assuming that this was, indeed, the image, what again was the problem, and how might it be rectified? By a shorter time with the cartoon on screen? By removing the image altogether, solving the voyeurism issue? By avoiding any texts that might make light of the tragedy? By refusing to talk at all, which fixes the problem of turning Baartman into a thing on which a speaker might inscribe his agenda?
Collins’ answer implies that the real problem was not with anything that the speaker did, but was a problem with what he felt — or did not feel. His was a failure of the imagination. He was “incapable of grasping” the feelings of his audience members or his fellow presenters — a lack of imagination that helped to rob these human beings of their subjectivity.
It seems, turning to the other example, that the solution to a lack of imaginative feeling is even more imaginative feeling. Hence the first story, in which a speaker presents her “trigger warnings,” avant-la-lettre, as a sort of call to shared affect. An act of community building — not by letting people know that there are images ahead that might make them cry, but that there are images ahead at which they/we should cry. It’s the kind of thing we do here.
This does not mean that “trigger warnings” of this sort cannot be useful, or just plain kind and respectful. Noah’s absolutely right on this. Nonetheless, these stories, while fed by real disgust at the male speakers, white and black, expose some of the difficulties involved both with accusations again one’s empathy and “humanity” (when you don’t offer warnings) and the false promises that such warnings can proffer (when you do).
I think Collins’ accusation of insensitivity is actually based on the fact that when she told him that there was a problem, he dismissed her and got defensive.
Obviously we’re hearing Collins’ account here — but using a free speech defense when you’re claiming to be combating racism and a Black women tells you there are problems seems like a problem. So, I think when she says he’s “incapable of grasping” the problem, she’s saying that she told him there was a problem, and he refused to hear her.
Collins is quite anti-porn, incidentally; she’s kind of second wave on that issue in a way that I’m not entirely on board with (though I think she makes some good points about the treatment of black women’s sexuality in pornographic settings.)
It certainly seems like a plausible scenario. I’ve seen Gould be a jerk to lots of people when challenged, and he tended to jump directly into shut-it-down mode. Regarding Collins, I think it’s unclear whether she is saying he was incapable of grasping her point (and thus dismissing it, unprofessionally and insultingly), incapable of grasping the legitimacy of her feelings and position, or incapable of grasping the undeniable fact his use of the image re-inscribed Baartman as an object. The sentence leans towards the last possibility, but of course, that idea is connected to her argument, her feelings, and the way Gould (if it was Gould) treated her.
Nice post, Noah. I’m glad we got to see it here!
Posted this on Twitter, posting it here, too:
I think trigger warnings may be a response to blanket PC taboos on certain types of speech; they allow us to say more. They provide a cultural framework to what would otherwise be unutterable and unrecognizable AS traumatic.
Just a thought.