Wait, not this kind of trigger? asks the early Americanist.
Up until now, I’ve avoided weighing in on the debate about “trigger warnings” that has been raging across the humanities. The debate, as I understand it, is over whether or not professors and other pedagogues are responsible for warning students and other audience members about sensitive or controversial material that might elicit a strong emotional reaction or be traumatically “triggering.” The paradigm here is therapeutic, and the analogy is PTSD. The debate turns around who is silencing whom (see here for example): does traumatic material silence the traumatized? Or do trigger warnings silence those who would explore difficult material? I have stayed out of the debate so far because I’m divided on the issue myself. I’m skeptical about catering too much to students’ emotional needs, because isn’t the point of education to be challenged? But at the same time, my training as a historian has taught me the fundamental limitations of my own ability to understand others’ experiences, so who am I to say what might be “triggering” or not? But the whole discussion has sat uncomfortably with me over the past months. Finally, at long last, Jack Halberstam has laid out a set of objections to trigger warnings that capture my inarticulate sense of discomfort better than I have been able to do myself. Read more
