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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrigger alerts are dumbing down education
SPOILER ALERT: It turns out theres no consensus on the right way to broach difficult and controversial subjects that can provoke strong emotional reactions. Case in point: Whats been happening in academia this year, as American universities have been increasingly trying to figure out whether and how to incorporate TRIGGER WARNINGS into their curriculums.
Trigger warnings have become a common staple of Internet conversations for years now, a means of alerting readers especially those whove experienced trauma and especially women to subject matter that could kick up intense reactions. And they are, depending on the things you tend to read and your perspective on healthy discourse, a useful tool for greater sensitivity or a chilling means of putting a fence around certain kinds of dialogue. Either way, theyre unavoidable. Its already been two years since the Awl declared the phrase had lost all its meaning and noted this useful thing has spread a litttttle far afield. Yet unlike other phrases that have come and gone since, trigger warning has only grown more ubiquitous, more recently moving from online debates to cropping up on college syllabi. Salon observed the phenomenon earlier this year, calling them an imperfect but sometimes necessary band-aid on the open and gaping wounds plaguing college campuses rampant sexual violence, for starters.
....
PTSD is real. Triggering is real. I know people whove survived military combat, assault and rape, and can attest to the powerful long-term effects those experiences have on an individuals trauma-rewired brain. I have sat in a movie theater with a man when an unexpected scene set off a panic attack. But the problem is that trigger warning has become a sloppy shorthand phrase, promiscuously applied to anything and everything that might incite not PTSD but any unpleasant, uncomfortable feelings. In too many of the debates over triggers, little distinction is made between an actual trigger and a normal even intended emotional response. While we put guidelines around words and images and ideas all the time especially content that is explicit and especially when dealing with audiences who are not yet fully adult we also need to remember that art and history and literature that dont provoke feeling are art and history and literature that are failing at their jobs. If you want a course of academic study in which traumatic things dont happen, then I suggest you must be taking math. Because if it involves human experience, youre in for tragedies and disasters. And we can be respectful of what individuals bring to their unique experiences of a work and still remember that to have a cathartic response is not automatically a bad thing. It can instead be a very healthy and profound one.
But the phrase trigger warning doesnt communicate that. Instead, its thrown around so much it easily becomes pointless and infantilizing. So explain what youre teaching. Justify it. Have conversations and ask questions and set a tone that inspires complex thought. Be sensitive and respectful. Just take more than two words to do it. Dont define a work solely by its most dramatic and upsetting elements, removing its context and giving it an automatically negative taint, because its hard to approach a work with an open heart and mind when the most important thing you know about it going in is that its going to be triggering. And as Dorothy Allison once observed, For everyone who will tell us our work is mean or fearful or unreal, there is another who will embrace us with tears in their eyes and say how wonderful it is to finally feel as if someone else has seen their truth.
Salon
Trigger warnings have become a common staple of Internet conversations for years now, a means of alerting readers especially those whove experienced trauma and especially women to subject matter that could kick up intense reactions. And they are, depending on the things you tend to read and your perspective on healthy discourse, a useful tool for greater sensitivity or a chilling means of putting a fence around certain kinds of dialogue. Either way, theyre unavoidable. Its already been two years since the Awl declared the phrase had lost all its meaning and noted this useful thing has spread a litttttle far afield. Yet unlike other phrases that have come and gone since, trigger warning has only grown more ubiquitous, more recently moving from online debates to cropping up on college syllabi. Salon observed the phenomenon earlier this year, calling them an imperfect but sometimes necessary band-aid on the open and gaping wounds plaguing college campuses rampant sexual violence, for starters.
....
PTSD is real. Triggering is real. I know people whove survived military combat, assault and rape, and can attest to the powerful long-term effects those experiences have on an individuals trauma-rewired brain. I have sat in a movie theater with a man when an unexpected scene set off a panic attack. But the problem is that trigger warning has become a sloppy shorthand phrase, promiscuously applied to anything and everything that might incite not PTSD but any unpleasant, uncomfortable feelings. In too many of the debates over triggers, little distinction is made between an actual trigger and a normal even intended emotional response. While we put guidelines around words and images and ideas all the time especially content that is explicit and especially when dealing with audiences who are not yet fully adult we also need to remember that art and history and literature that dont provoke feeling are art and history and literature that are failing at their jobs. If you want a course of academic study in which traumatic things dont happen, then I suggest you must be taking math. Because if it involves human experience, youre in for tragedies and disasters. And we can be respectful of what individuals bring to their unique experiences of a work and still remember that to have a cathartic response is not automatically a bad thing. It can instead be a very healthy and profound one.
But the phrase trigger warning doesnt communicate that. Instead, its thrown around so much it easily becomes pointless and infantilizing. So explain what youre teaching. Justify it. Have conversations and ask questions and set a tone that inspires complex thought. Be sensitive and respectful. Just take more than two words to do it. Dont define a work solely by its most dramatic and upsetting elements, removing its context and giving it an automatically negative taint, because its hard to approach a work with an open heart and mind when the most important thing you know about it going in is that its going to be triggering. And as Dorothy Allison once observed, For everyone who will tell us our work is mean or fearful or unreal, there is another who will embrace us with tears in their eyes and say how wonderful it is to finally feel as if someone else has seen their truth.
Salon
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