If you’ve spent any time in feminist social media circles over the last years, you will have come across trigger warnings. Essentially user-driven content warnings for the unmoderated internet, trigger warnings are tags giving succinct summaries of articles, videos, Facebook posts, and any other media that may contain depictions or discussions of potentially distressing content. A nod to the debilitating effects of flashbacks experienced by sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trigger warnings (posted with hyperlinks and status updates and such) provide an informal framework for giving people a heads up to look away if they’re likely to be upset.

Recently, however, trigger warnings have migrated off Tumblr and Twitter and into some university classrooms in the United States, prompting a flurry of discussion. Within days of each other, the New Republic, the Guardian, Salon and even BBC News published articles and explainers about trigger warnings.

In my own corner of social media, a friend reprimanded me on Facebook for posting an article without using a trigger warning. And then, lurking in a feminist forum, I came across a detailed discussion of the kind of content that warranted a trigger warning (obesity, yes; abortion, no ‘because it’s a medical procedure’).

According to one view, trigger warnings are an enabling tool: a method of informal classification that allows readers (and they are usually readers) to somewhat safely negotiate the online spaces they frequent. From another perspective, they’re absurd, slippery, and ineffective, because, as one writer put it, ‘There is no standard for trigger warnings, no universal guidelines. Once you start, where do you stop?’

For me, the terrain is fraught with contradiction. I understand that some people find trigger warnings useful negotiating tools, even if the resulting blanket classification-by-trauma seems highly problematic. I have sympathy for sufferers of PTSD and have seen first-hand how debilitating it can be, but I can’t help but question how many people out there are actually sufferers of the clinical condition, and how many simply find the language of trauma-induced anxiety and distress a convenient way of shutting down difficult discussion.

I appreciate the argument that trigger warnings have a rightful place in feminist spaces because the first place in which we should do right by each other is in our own spaces. But I believe their growing presence within the movement is indicative of a real problem and that they are becoming increasingly counterproductive there, too.

Proponents of trigger warnings are effectively making a claim about how progressives should navigate a series of political issues, such as sexism and racism. (Whether or not they began there, trigger warnings also seem now to be inherently tied to the new intersectional feminism that reinforces privilege theory – a debate for another day, but worth noting that in spite of its current popularity, intersectionality theory is not the only formula for analysing the multiple ways in which oppression manifests in the world.) In her Guardian piece, Jill Filopovic argues that trigger warnings are less about survivor assistance than they are a kind of righteous performance by the poster:

It’s perfectly reasonable for a survivor of violence to ask a professor for a heads up if the reading list includes a piece with graphic descriptions of rape or violence, for example. But generalized trigger warnings aren’t so much about helping people with PTSD as they are about a certain kind of performative feminism: they’re a low-stakes way to use the right language to identify yourself as conscious of social justice issues. Even better is demanding a trigger warning – that identifies you as even more aware, even more feminist, even more solicitous than the person who failed to adequately provide such a warning.

Cynical as her argument may be, Filopovic hits on something important. Trigger warnings originated on fanfiction forums and feminist message boards — some of the first forms of social media. Social media depends on a deliberate cultivation of a persona, on the construction of an online self, in which posts about political opinions become as much about the marking of identity as communicating anything. In this context, emotive responses (transient, individual) become interchangeable for political positioning, and emotion – rather than a practical, enduring formulation for how the world should be organised fairly – begins to steer the political agenda. Individualism — conveniently compatible with capitalism — thrives on this increasing personalisation of politics in place of collective struggle.

The spread of trigger warnings to news sites like The Huffington Post and some universities is evidence that they are universalising.

I don’t, however, expect the right-wing media to adopt the practice any time soon – not simply out of insensitivity, but because many of the issues on the long list of things that are now considered potentially ‘triggering’ (‘misogyny, the death penalty, calories in a food item, terrorism, drunk driving, how much a person weighs, racism, gun violence, Stand Your Ground laws, drones, homophobia, PTSD, slavery, victim-blaming, abuse, swearing, child abuse, self-injury, suicide, talk of drug use, descriptions of medical procedures, corpses, skulls, skeletons, needles, discussion of “isms,” neuroatypical shaming, slurs (including “stupid” or “dumb”), kidnapping, dental trauma, discussions of sex (even consensual), death or dying, spiders, insects, snakes, vomit, pregnancy, childbirth, blood, scarification, Nazi paraphernalia, slimy things, holes and “anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD”’) have become concerns directly or indirectly because of policies advocated or tolerated by the Right.

And it’s this that concerns me.

People retreat into private life when they feel like they cannot change the world. We avoid engagement, we wrap ourselves in cotton wool and try not to think about the hurt and hate that we cannot alter. We focus on living our own lives ethically, responsibly, and try to believe that this will do what activism has not. But the idea that if we are Good People the world will change is symptomatic of a sense of loss of political efficacy. For all our intentions, it has the perverse effect of entrenching the spaces between us.

A political space, an activist space, a space in which people attempt to change the injustices of the world is, almost by definition, not a safe space. It’s never going to be a safe space. It is precisely because the world is full of systems that engender hatred and oppression and people who use them to hate and hurt that activist spaces need to exist. But in order to change those systems we are required to confront them. The reality of that is ugly – but it does no good to pretend we can eliminate that ugliness while simultaneously protecting ourselves from engaging with it.

To me, that is the crux of the problem. The trigger warning as a political tool pushes against the necessity of actually engaging with the world. But if we want to change the world, we can’t just tiptoe around it, hoping to somehow create the best while avoiding the worst: in spite of how much it hurts, we have to open our eyes and face up to what’s in front of us.

 

Stephanie Convery

Stephanie Convery is the deputy culture editor of Guardian Australia and the former deputy editor of Overland. On Twitter, she is @gingerandhoney.

More by Stephanie Convery ›

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

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  1. Great post Stephanie.

    The fact you felt the need to write this shows what dire straits the Left is in and how far away it is from mounting a challenge to capitalism.

  2. A political space, an activist space, a space in which people attempt to change the injustices of the world is, almost by definition, not a safe space. It’s never going to be a safe space. It is precisely because the world is full of systems that engender hatred and oppression and people who use them to hate and hurt that activist spaces need to exist. But in order to change those systems we are required to confront them.

    Not all of the terrain of activism will be safe, and not all safe terrain will be politically active, but surely there is still room for spaces that are both politically active and safe.

    Does the practice of creating and enforcing safe spaces, through mechanisms like trigger warnings or discursive controls, really foreclose the possibility of “unsafe” (ie engaged in “confrontation”) but aligned activism alongside?

    In attributing a “loss of political efficacy” to communities that now use and respect trigger warnings (and in making slightly fearful references to the current popularity of intersectionality theory) does this piece veer towards reproducing that controversial Vampires’ Castle argument against identity politics – without actually quite getting there?

  3. Really, Dave? Your take on this thoughtful article is that the main problem with the ‘Left’ is all those soft women and their touchy-feely trigger warnings?

    I have mixed feelings about trigger warnings. But I disagree that what they symbolise is generally a refusal to engage with or face difficult/dangerous topics. Rather, they can show an awareness that participants or potential participants in a discussion have already faced them: that they aren’t abstract political topics, but lived experiences. It’s not shutting discussion down to try engage in it more carefully.

    I think, at best, trigger warnings represent a different arrangement of ‘public’ and ‘private’ than the ‘retreat into private life’ Stephanie writes about.

    Sure, like many people, I’ve seen discourse around ‘safety’ be used in an attempt to shut down necessary confrontation – but that’s a slightly different discussion.

    Also, just because something is sometimes arguable done performatively or in creation of an identity (esp in online discussion), that doesn’t mean that’s all it is. See, for example, innumerable pissing contests about who’s read Marx (or whatever) better…

  4. So, you’re suggesting that only people with PTSD have the right to trigger warnings and that anyone else simply wishes to avoid engaging with distressing subjects. Newsflash: not every person who experiences trauma goes on to develop PTSD. In fact, most don’t. Those people also have every right not to be unduly distressed by their experiences just because it suits you that they should be.

  5. Actually Really, they don’t have every right not to be unduly distressed by their experiences.

    In fact, nobody has a right to trigger warnings regardless of whether they suffer PTSD.

    The world is often a cruel and unsympathetic place and people should be encouraged to accept and learn to deal with that reality in a positive manner. Of course some people won’t be able to for various reasons, and my sympathies go out to them. But the eternal popularity of hard-hearted politicians with a tough love approach to community should be enough to convince anyone that the world isn’t going to take it easy on them, and it’s doing people a disservice to convince them otherwise.

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