*During the Recent MLA conference, I presented this short paper as part of a panel on the relationship between reading and writing. This presentation was an opportunity to use some of the ideas I’ve been exploring as part of the Federated project, so I thought I’d post it here.
Trigger warnings emerged in digital spaces as a writing practice that could shape the reading practices of others. A piece of content is accompanied by a warning to the audience about what they are about to read, watch, or listen to, and that warning is meant to prepare the audience for troubling and potentially traumatic content. It is a practice rooted in the idea that reading is collaborative and that trauma can shape how we are affected by a range of content. But in recent years, critics on the left and right have derided it, and these controversies reveal an ideology that understands reading as a solitary activity. This ideology sees the reader as responsible for their encounter with the text: caveat emptor. The reader must assume responsibility for absorbing whatever a text inflicts. But this is a standardized notion of reading, one that understands all reading practices and situations as roughly the same and as solitary. Where does that ideology come from? I’m hoping to begin to answer that question in this brief presentation.
Now, please excuse the fact that I’m going to start with a viral metaphor, but you can blame Kendall Gerdes’ brilliant RSQ article and not me. In “Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity,” Gerdes analyzes the controversy surrounding trigger warnings that emerged around 2013. As part of that study, Gerdes points out that the trigger warning blowup often featured a rhetoric of viral infection to describe how trigger warnings moved from digital spaces like Tumblr onto college campuses:
One prominent commonplace about trigger warnings was the description of their spread to college campuses from their use on online forums and blogs (especially feminist blogs) as a virus or cancer. A telated move was to place blame for the outbreak on coddled, entitled millennials, or teenagers, particularly users of the social media site tumblr.
(Gerdes 6–7)
The academy’s immune response to this “infection” was quite effective, since the concern that trigger warnings would be widely implemented (or were becoming, in the words of Jack Halberstam, “standard fare”) turned out to be overblown. As Gerdes notes, a 2015 survey of MLA and College Art Association members revealed that 0.5% of respondents said their institutions had adopted a trigger warnings policy. We could (and I promise the virus metaphor is almost done) see this whole episode as an example of what happens when a system is exposed to a less effective version of an infection, since the insistence from critics that trigger warnings were going to take over the academy and academic freedom in general turned out to be a strawman, one that allowed us all to develop effective (and affective) antibodies. (Sorry, again.)
Trigger warnings had indeed been used in feminist and queer online spaces prior to this explosion of public discussion around 2013. And that discussion misunderstood the content warning in a variety of ways, not least of which was an insistence that the warning is a barrier to communication rather than as a gateway to it. This misunderstanding positions the warning as a binary logic gate of “read” or “don’t read” rather than a preparation or even a welcoming gesture. The trigger warning has never been primarily about stopping people from encountering things – it is instead a way for people to prepare for potentially triggering material. In fact, Neil Simpkins has argued that trigger warnings are often used as
“inventive devices, inviting authors to compose more expressive, visceral writing. Trigger warnings frequently function as the starting point of a post where writers position themselves in relation to their audiences.”
Orem and Simpkins
The trigger warning offers a way in to a text, image, or video, and it reveals that certain online communities must carefully construct the collaborative spaces. The trigger warning is a situated practice that understands reading and writing as activities that are happening in communities, not in some generic space. This insistence on the specific context is key to understanding why the trigger warning was so misunderstood by many, but especially academics. In a sense, we can understand the hostility to the content warning as an attempt to transform a bespoke, customized tool into something standardized and mass-produced.
The understanding of content warnings as a binary choice (read or don’t read, enter or don’t enter) was not only an overreaction by academics and others supposedly concerned about “free speech” or “snowflakes” or “academic freedom” but also a symptom of how an approach based on standardization clashes with tools and practices built for situated practices and for spaces with borders that are constantly revisited and renegotiated. Research on writing and rhetoric has long explored the collaborative nature of writing, and it has often seen digital environments such as wikis or social media platforms not as creating collaborative writing but rather as revealing how writing has always been a collective effort. Much of this research has looked to digital environments for clues as to how to theorize collaborative writing, and those same digital environments offer us clues as we consider how reading is also collaborative. Unfortunately, the trigger warning controversy indicates that we have been less open to digital culture’s cues when it comes to collaborative reading.
Interestingly, it may be that the digitization of nearly all aspects of life is partially to blame for this problem. We are now living in a moment where the logic of our digital environments so imbues (and is imbued by) everything we do – something that is beyond an infection and is more like an inflection – that we aren’t looking to digital technologies to learn about reading and writing. Instead, we are looking for the next module, app, or patch. The next killer app. When we tried to have a conversation about trigger warnings, it seemed to be a conversation about a “plug and play” tool that could be applied in a standardized way. But trigger and content warnings are not standardized practices or sets of rules to be applied. They are instead indicative of an ethics of reading, one piece of an entire suite of practices that includes trigger warnings, content warnings, avoiding some content, highlighting some content, contextualizing content differently, seeing reading and writing spaces as something constructed and maintained, and more.
Critics argued that warnings figure the reader as fragile and helpless: “What [those who reject trigger warnings] take issue with is the projection of the student as a fragile organism with no intellectual immune system and a minefield of a psyche that may explode into pieces at any moment” (Halberstam 539). While trigger warnings do ask us to care for our audience, the roots of that request are that we see reading as collaborative. The commonplace that writing is collaborative has largely settled, and while digital technology did not create this commonplace it certainly played a role. But for some reason, the trigger warning’s emergence on the scene had the opposite effect. Instead of playing a part in solidifying the notion that reading is a collaborative practice – shaped by communities, texts, technologies – the trigger warning was broadly rejected by a number of loud voices who claimed it was a threat to academic freedom and was a way of coddling those who were too sensitive and fragile. Instead of learning from tumblr about how we might understand the ways communities can be maintained and sustained, we fell back on the notion that an encounter with troubling or traumatic content either can’t or shouldn’t be avoided.
If we examine critiques of trigger warnings, we see that those critics envision this practice, developed for specific reasons and with specific goals as a standardized practice applied everywhere, like a blanket that would be laid over all of academia, snuffing out the flames of academic freedom. In one example that is indicative of this broader pattern, Lisa Duggan imagined what would happen when trigger warnings were widely adopted and standardized: “once they become the province of student senates, administrative bodies and university policies, they run the risk of marking and targeting the courses on gender and sexuality, critical race theory, colonial and postcolonial studies” (Duggan). We should note here the valid concern that the trigger warning would be turned against the very communities that advocate for it. But this is one more reason not to treat the trigger warning as a standardized practice implemented everywhere in the same way, an approach that very few advocates seemed to be calling for.
This logical leap, which moved quickly away from an understanding of warnings as a situated practice applied in fluid ways and toward a standardized practice imposed rigidly on all, is linked to an educational infrastructure that is understood as modular and standardized. It is rooted in the assumption that education is aimed at this rhetorical figure of “the student,” and it sees education as a set of practices that must be built the same way for everyone. This is where the logic of reading as “caveat emptor” comes from – it relies on the figure of the “generic student” who is treated the same in all contexts because doing it any other way is too difficult and requires too much care and maintenance
Trigger warnings were seen as one more solution that would be added to our standard set of scalable tools – the tools that can meet “any” need and that address a generic student, regardless of situation. However, the trigger warning operates in a different register, one that actually resists the standardization imagined by its critics. Trigger warning practices are negotiated and renegotiated in communities, not imposed from without, and their logic does not easily “click in” to the standardized infrastructure. That is because they were developed as a response to that standardized infrastructure. Digital environments imagine a generic user, and this means that they are always built for “someone else.” They are an attempt to be as generic as possible so as to be scalable. And so this software is by definition “badly made.” For some, it is especially bad – what is an inconvenience for one community is openly hostile and dangerous to another. Given many platforms disinterest in protecting people from abuse, communities have had to develop their own, bespoke tools and practices in order to operate inside of a standardized environment Trigger warnings and other similar practices were developed as tactical responses to these often hostile networked environments, and they were never really intended to become some broad template applied everywhere in some standard way. Unfortunately, this same logic of standardization, of the generic user, shapes our educational infrastructure.
The trigger warnings uproar was about a generic, solitary reader – an ideology of reading that doesn’t always adequately account for how we read with others, in communities. Critics actually projected this notion of reading onto those advocating for TWs, saying that trigger warning advocates see the reader as “fragile” and helpless. But trigger warnings are actually rooted in a collaborative and situated theory of reading, and that’s because they emerged in spaces that needed to be maintained and cared for, spaces with borders that had to be carefully managed. Marginalized groups on the internet need ways to carve out and maintain spaces, and this means that these communities do a great deal of work to protect themselves and their communities. They develop practices, like trigger warnings, not only to be inclusive but also to exclude the harmful, bilious trolls and harassers who are floating around the internet. These practices are custom-made, they are built inside of a standardized internet, and that very fact offers us a clue as to their true value to a range of places, including academia.
Given our current set of technical arrangements, it is easy to quickly jump to the logic of standardization, the modular thinking that shapes so much of what we do, and we did apply this same logic to trigger warnings, banishing it because it couldn’t be plugged in like an out-of-the-box solution, a Canvas application, some new piece of educational software, some five-year-old syllabus pulled from a folder and dusted off. The standardized approach to education sees all students (and readers) as roughly the same, plugged into the same boxes and courses. This generic student is expected to move through institutions of higher education that are designed the same way Facebook is, a scalable tool that is broken for everyone and is especially broken for others. But what if a course is a space that should be rethought and renegotiated constantly? There’s no question this is more work, but it is the approach suggested by trigger warnings and the communities that developed similar practices. This set of practices offers a way to resist the forces of standardization with different ethical commitments and different notions of what it means to read and write with others.
Works Cited
Duggan, Lisa. “On Trauma and Trigger Warnings, in Three Parts.” Bully Bloggers, vol. 23, 2014.
Gerdes, Kendall. “Trauma, Trigger Warnings, and the Rhetoric of Sensitivity.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1, Taylor & Francis, 2019, pp. 3–24.
Halberstam, Jack. “Trigger Happy: From Content Warning to Censorship.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 42, no. 2, University of Chicago Press Chicago, IL, 2017, pp. 535–42.
Orem, Sarah, and Neil Simpkins. “Weepy Rhetoric, Trigger Warnings, and the Work of Making Mental Illness Visible in the Writing Classroom.” Enculturation, vol. 16, 2015.
