Bailey - Confession and Catharsis in The U.S. Academy - Trigger Warnings, Coalitions, and Academic Audiences

Confession and Catharsis in the U.S.
Academy: Trigger Warnings, Coalitions, and Academic

Audiences
Author(s): Courtney Bailey
Source: QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking , Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 83-97
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/qed.3.1.0083
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)))
Confession and Catharsis in the U.S.
Academy: Trigger Warnings, Coalitions,
and Academic Audiences
Courtney Bailey
During the spring semester of 2014, an untenured faculty member at my selec-

tive liberal arts college (SLCA) teaches, for the first time, the introductory course
to our Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program. As the semes-
ter progresses, she increasingly hears complaints from students about having to
read, watch, and engage with “triggering” material. No longer the “I’m not a
feminist but . . .” students of the 1990s and 2000s, many of these young adults
come to my college as self-identified feminists primarily informed by online
sites, blogs, etc. They are bright, social justice oriented, and savvy about rape
culture. Some of them demand that the instructor not only issue trigger warn-
ings (TW) for all course material, but provide alternative readings and viewings
for every single piece listed on the syllabus. The instructor comes away from the
course perplexed: why do these students in particular balk at tackling systems of
privilege and oppression? Shouldn’t they be the ones advocating for including
such material throughout the college’s curriculum? Do they have a point worth
further consideration?
I am a tenured faculty member in my college’s Department of Communica-
tion Arts with strong investments in feminism, queer studies, critical race stud-
ies, rhetoric, media studies, and critical/cultural studies. I have strong ties to our
recently redesigned Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) program,
and I serve on the program’s interdisciplinary Steering Committee. After hear-
ing our colleague’s story, the Steering Committee created several email chains
Copyright © 2016 Michigan State University. Courtney Bailey, “Confession and Catharsis in the U.S.
Academy: Trigger Warnings, Coalitions, and Academic Audiences,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ World-
making 3.1 (2016): 83–97. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights reserved.
83

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84 ( Courtney Bailey
exploring the various facets of the TW debate; we devoted part of our 2014
summer retreat to the topic; we collected and circulated blog posts and news
media articles; and we drafted several memos to the administration offering rec-
ommendations for diversity and inclusion initiatives on campus. I tell this story
because it illustrates in particularly vivid ways both the promises and the pitfalls
of the TW debates currently circulating throughout academia.
As seen in the mobilization of the WGSS Steering Committee and its allies,
many social justice oriented initiatives on my campus embrace coalitional poli-
tics in two striking ways: 1) by regularly bringing together students, faculty, staff,
administrators, and representatives from the local community, and 2) by foster-
ing connections among groups devoted to a range of marginalized identities.
These initiatives frequently position themselves against the reactionary landscape
of contemporary U.S. dominant culture. As articulated in my SLAC’s state-
ment of community, they strive to “challenge and confront” the bigotry, preju-
dice, and discrimination that emerges from the campus climate. Hyper-aware
of the continued existence of sexism, racism, and homophobia as systems of
oppression and privilege, they consistently advocate both structural and cultural
changes and therefore represent critical worldmaking practices.
Despite this potential, I have unfortunately witnessed a widening gap between
critically minded folks and those who would appear to be their natural allies:
other social justice oriented students, administrators, staff, faculty colleagues,
and diversity officers. This gap occurs at the very moment my college trium-
phantly embraces diversity and inclusion as core values. I argue that this gap
arises, at least in part, precisely because of the college’s embrace of diversity and
inclusion as core values—or more precisely, its embrace of a neoliberal vision of
diversity and inclusion. A pervasive belief system in contemporary U.S. culture,
neoliberalism favors self-governance or “governing at a distance” over direct
forms of state intervention like the ever-dwindling social safety net.1 Assuming
that all citizens start on a level playing field, it emphasizes each citizen’s individ-
ual responsibility for avoiding risk, maximizing their own potential, and making
the right choices necessary for personal happiness.2
My article offers the concept of the “confessional-therapeutic” as an especially
productive way to tease out the neoliberal stakes underlying the TW debate.3 I
take inspiration from the work of scholars like Lisa Duggan, whose pivotal 2004
book The Twilight of Equality traces neoliberalism’s cultural and economic ascen-
dance over the last few decades and its consequences for contemporary progres-
sive social movements.4 In a blog post on trigger warnings, Duggan characterizes
“the general drift of change from the 1970s to the 1990s” as a move “from the
utopian to the pragmatic, from the collective to the individual, from the trans-
formative to the therapeutic.”5 My phrase “confessional-therapeutic” builds on

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Confession and Catharsis in the U.S. Academy ) 85
Duggan’s argument, highlighting the moral suppositions that also influence this
shift.6 Whereas a therapeutic model appeals to judgments about the normal and
pathological, the confessional model appeals to judgments about the good
and the bad. Working in tandem, both models conflate what we should do or not
do with who we should be or should not be.
This framework first positions community members as precisely the kinds of
people who need confession and therapy to restore moral and civic order and
facilitate healing in the wake of hardship. If this process fails, the community
must sacrifice its own members in a classic scapegoating move. As a “vessel” for
sins and sicknesses, the scapegoat must be completely purged from the larger
society.7 Only then can absolution and purification truly happen. Already viewed
as immoral and abnormal—and culpable for their own hardships—members of
marginalized groups make for particularly appealing scapegoats. As one man-
ifestation of the confessional-therapeutic framework, the TW debate hinges
on a series of false dichotomies: emotion/reason, personal/political, private/
public, and so forth. Only conceivable in opposition to each other, such binaries
become mapped onto moral conceptions of good and bad and psychological
conceptions of normal and abnormal. The neoliberal version of the debate fos-
ters polarization and paralysis by promoting a zero-sum game in which gains for
one side automatically mean losses for the other.
In this fashion, official and institutionalized shifts to social justice within the
corporatized terrain of higher education can easily co-opt feminist, queer, and
other critical perspectives. And yet the TW debate has considerable potential
as more (or other) than a straightforward manifestation of neoliberal binary
thinking. I also consider how it can reenergize critical worldmaking impulses
that interrupt and disrupt neoliberalism’s relentless and ruthless focus on the
autonomous individual. This article both endorses and enacts such worldmak-
ing efforts by insisting on the necessarily political and collective nature of the
emotional and experiential (and vice versa). Furthermore, I outline a critical
vocabulary designed as accessible to multiple constituencies within academia,
especially those not typically taken into consideration in traditional disciplinary
scholarship. Given the TW debate’s wide-reaching effects and contributors, my
piece reconceptualizes and broadens who can count as part of an informed and
invested “academic” audience. I thereby hope to enable the very kind of coalition
politics disabled by neoliberalism’s obsession with the personal and individual.
Overall, the TW debate illustrates that its participants inhabit different—even
incommensurate—perspectives and operate via systems stratified by power.
However, these same qualities make the debate a vital and viable site for world-
making projects that can see around the neoliberal corner and imagine a more
democratic, just, and compassionate world.

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) ) ) A Brief History of Trigger Warnings

Before proceeding into a detailed analysis of the TW debate, I first outline the
historical roots of trigger warnings and the notion of trauma itself. Although
tracing origins is tricky business, this section identifies a number of past con-
texts still circulating within the current TW debate. Our present-day notion of
trauma, for instance, stretches back at least into the nineteenth century when it
began to signify “mental or psychic distress” rather than just physical wounds.8
In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud’s famous psychoanalytic work
deepened the now taken-for-granted links between trauma and the psyche.
These links emerge in the more recent clinical diagnosis of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD). Its attention to the ways external stimuli can inadvertently
and unexpectedly induce an individual’s previous traumatic experiences makes
it central to modern debates over trigger warnings.
The phrase “trigger warning” itself refers to qualifiers that alert people to the
possibility that an image, website, story, etc., could retraumatize them by recall-
ing their experiences in graphic ways. This particular meaning arises, at least
partially, from debates within 1980s feminism about the role of trauma in gen-
dered and sexual oppression. In a similar fashion, online feminist/queer spaces
devoted to eating disorders, sexual assault, and domestic violence often deploy
trigger warnings. Pressure from students and faculty over the past few years
has led several schools, most in/famously Oberlin College, to consider man-
datory trigger warning policies. The spring and summer of 2014 saw a heated
TW debate among feminist, queer, and other critically minded academics and
activists, largely via blog posts, email chains, and listservs. During the same time
period, major news outlets like the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the New
Republic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education also published articles about
trigger warnings.
) ) ) Trauma Meets Academic Freedom: An Analysis of

the TW Debate
To maintain a balance between comprehensibility and complexity, I have made

several analytic choices. First, I divide the debate into pro-and anti-positions
for the sake of clarity, although I do not mean to suggest that strict stances
are the only options. Second, I focus on three recurring themes that animate
the debate: trauma, academic freedom, and the trigger warning itself. Third, I
concentrate on two specific articles: Angela Shaw-Thornburg’s article “This is a

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Trigger Warning” from the Chronicle of Higher Education 9 and the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP)’s report “On Trigger Warnings.”10
Widely accessible in form, tone, structure, and publication source, they exem-
plify typical pro-and anti-stances. I analyze both pieces with an eye to their
(mostly unstated) ramifications for teaching, research, and work on so-called
controversial subject matter—the already precarious topics that seem most obvi-
ously ripe for trigger warnings.
Theme 1: Personal Trauma
Shaw-Thornburg’s article exemplifies a confessional-therapeutic approach to

personal trauma, especially around gendered and sexualized violence. Her arti-
cle’s structure takes readers through successive phases of her life, marking each
time she was brutalized and then subsequently triggered. The narrative builds
toward an apparently inevitable conclusion, namely that her traumatic experi-
ences in and of themselves prove the need for trigger warnings. To give readers a
sense of Shaw-Thornburg’s tone and structure, I provide a long quotation:
I am 12. It is summer, and I am on the floor, supine. . . . I am fighting my
attacker. . . . I lose, and every early summer from the time I am 12 until this, my
40th year, I unravel. I am 25, in a graduate class on the Victorian first-person
narrative. . . . I do fine in the class until we get to the weeks when we read a mem-
oir detailing the sexual history of an upper-crust Victorian who exploits girls and
women to satisfy himself. I am curled up in my bed reading, so when I blank out
this time, there is no danger of my falling. . . . In the weeks that follow, I am all
animal. I eat infrequently and refuse to bathe because I cannot bear to touch my
own body. . . . I am 40. I am reading an article in the Chronicle about how much
the author hates the advent of trigger warnings. . . . I have been in therapy on and
off since I was 25 and have . . . learn[ed] how to push my voice out into the world
when I am feeling most silenced. But still, the arrogance and lack of compassion in
[anti-TW] essays stun me into silence.
In this way, she first confesses her sins and the sinful things that have repeatedly
happened to her. Given that dominant U.S. culture often blames women for
sexual assault, her revelations are as much about her individual failings as they
are about her perpetrator’s. She then identifies therapy as the key mechanism
that has allowed her to express her voice for the first time in public. We could
interpret her article as a collective gesture, where she models breaking her silence
in public so that others may do the same. However, this sort of role modeling
remains couched within a confessional-therapeutic framework: she has finally

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freed her voice, but only after she reveals her individual moral failures (confes-
sion) and seeks private redress (therapy).
Author and Readers, Parishioners and Priests, Patients and Practitioners

Shaw- Thornburg’s confessional- therapeutic narrative establishes a distinctive
power relationship between author and audience. Her readers are asked to play
the role of priests who listen to her sins and therapist-practitioners who listen
to her trauma. She positions herself as a parishioner looking for absolution
and a patient looking for a diagnosis and treatment. But priests and therapists
do not simply listen; they are invested with the power to determine whether
souls are saved or whether psychological healing has occurred. Making such
judgments requires parishioners and patients to replay the very trauma the
confessional-therapeutic mode claims to mitigate. Even further, one must restage
one’s trauma in the appropriate, expected terms, namely as a result of individ-
ual moral failure and/or injury, sin or sickness. In Shaw-Thornburg’s case, she
has failed to meet cultural expectations that determine women’s moral purity
according to their avoidance of too many or the wrong kind of sexual encoun-
ters. This individual failure has led to the physical and psychological damage that
have plagued her entire life. The article illustrates the benefits of confession and
the “talking cure” associated with therapy. Both had to occur in private before
Shaw-Thornburgh felt absolved, healed, and liberated enough to repeat the pro-
cess in a public forum, once again subject to readers’ moral and psychological
judgments.
Drawing Boundaries around “Real” Trauma and Creating an Immoral/Sick Enemy

The relationship between author and readers established in Shaw-Thornburg’s
piece begs an important question: how exactly can readers know that her con-
fession and rehabilitation are genuine, authentic, and sincere? Many pro-TW
advocates, including Shaw-Thornburg herself, answer this question by restrict-
ing the realm of “real” trauma to PTSD. For instance, one participant in a chain
of emails generated on a women’s studies listserv (WMST-L) argues that “PTSD
is real. Having flashbacks is real. Being overcome with emotion when seeing/
reading/hearing something that brings back that trauma in a sudden flood is
real” (emphasis added).11 As an officially recognized mental disability, PTSD
serves as a counter to anti-TW folks who often diminish or dismiss injury. The
legitimacy of PTSD, however, relies on terms set by powerful institutions like
psychology, psychiatry, and medicine.

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Let me be clear: I am not contesting the reality of gendered and sexualized

violence or PTSD. I am, however, questioning the way in which particular lan-
guage (like PTSD) makes that trauma materially real in specific ways. For exam-
ple, we could name gendered and sexualized trauma as forms of “oppression”
instead of (or in addition to) PTSD. Doing so would call attention to the sys-
tems of power that PTSD overlooks. We could better understand, for example,
the historical practice of hospitalizing LGBTQ+ folks and treating their gender
and sexual identities as mental malfunctions. Or we could apply the oppression
framework to the forced sterilization of black women in the United States in the
name of managing a supposedly diseased and disorderly population, or the use
of psychiatry to medicate white, middle-class women who feel discontent with
their domestic roles as wife and mother.
Furthermore, pro-TW arguments often identify their primary enemy—not
as perpetrators of violence or systems of power—but as anti-TW folks who lack
the proper confessional-therapeutic credentials. Not only do they fail to under-
stand trauma in professional terms, they refuse to acknowledge their moral obli-
gations. Shaw-Thornburg alludes to morality in her final sentences: “I am an
earnest, somewhat old-fashioned English professor; I am a true believer: language
is powerful, images even more so. . . . To blithely introduce powerful, rousing
images of violence into your classroom . . . then to deny that such stuff might
at least bruise those students is the worst kind of hypocrisy” (emphasis added).
As a quasi-religious metaphor, “true believer” equates a pro-TW stance with the
morally good based on its allegiance to an “old-fashioned,” fixed set of values
from the idyllic past. She comes across as a seasoned veteran who still has to
defend those values against rash, morally dubious, and inexperienced anti-TW
barbarians at the gate. Pro-TW academics can only maintain their moral and
professional certitude by positioning anti-TW academics as unprofessional,
unethical, and unreasonable adversaries.
Thus, the separation of good/professional teacher- scholars from bad/
unprofessional ones surfaces as one of the most important underlying stakes
of the TW debate. Feminist, queer, and allied teacher-scholars often already
occupy precarious places within higher education. For instance, our WGSS pro-
gram does not have departmental status, which means that WGSS teachers have
a trickier task when navigating institutional structures developed around and for
departments. Furthermore, they frequently challenge the masculinist paradigm
studied by Blair, Baxter, and Brown, rendering them less legitimate from the
start.12 Such programs make good candidates for partial or complete dismantling
as institutions balance their budgets in the face of deep cuts to state and federal
funding. Culling bad and unprofessional faculty from their ranks also satisfies

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demands for state oversight of higher education’s outcomes (usually understood

through careerist metrics).
Theme 2: Academic Freedom
If a confessional-therapeutic notion of trauma animates many pro-TW stances,

then an anti- confessional-
therapeutic— yet still neoliberal—
notion of “aca-
demic freedom” animates many anti-TW stances. In brief, the term emerged as
a shield against McCarthyism’s pursuit of so-called anti-American intellectuals
in the 1950s. Grounded in freedoms of speech and association, it protects the
ability of (tenured) professors to teach, research, and publish on topics deemed
taboo or controversial. This theme runs clearly and strongly through a 2014
report published by the AAUP. The AAUP’s statement characterizes both TW
policies and trigger warnings themselves as threats to academic freedom. They
argue that “administrative regulation constitutes interference with academic
freedom; faculty judgment is a legitimate exercise of autonomy.” This quotation
relies on familiar neoliberal values: faculty status and power stem from the indi-
vidual rights and liberties of individual experts who can operate without fear
of administrative policing or censorship. To justify this conclusion, the AAUP
treats personal experiences of trauma as 1) illegitimate evidence within an intel-
lectual exchange and 2) a hindrance to achieving a civically minded education.
What’s the Matter with Students These Days? Infantilized Victim or Informed
Citizen
Although the AAUP report invokes an adversarial relationship between faculty
and administrators, this gesture functions mostly as a red herring. Even more
important, trigger warnings represent a threat from students themselves. The
AAUP argues that a focus on protecting students in the classroom is “at once
infantilizing and anti-intellectual. It makes comfort a higher priority than intel-
lectual engagement.” As evidence, the AAUP report cites a Huffington Post arti-
cle written by a Wellesley student.13 The author contends that the placement
of a half-naked male statue on campus forces students to walk by a potential
trigger every day on their way to class. The article concludes that “as a college
community, Wellesley’s first priority should be the safety and well-being of its
students. Wellesley is our home, and students have to a right to feel comfort-
able here.” Rather than troubling the idea that all students experience home as
safe or comfortable, the AAUP accuses the Huffington Post article and its ilk of

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turning students into infantilized victims with no agency (the capacity to affect
change) or responsibility. Doing so thwarts one of the key goals of higher edu-
cation already under siege by the corporatization of the university: preparing
students to become informed adult citizens. Far from ensuring comfort, this
process requires students to encounter material that may (even should) make
them feel alienated or uncomfortable.
The same logic reappears in a New York Times article on the subject of trigger
warnings.14 The Times cites Greg Lukianoff, president of a watch-dog organiza-
tion called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He states that
“frankly it seems this is sort of an inevitable movement toward people increas-
ingly expecting physical comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives. . . . It
is only going to get harder to teach people that there is a real important and
serious value to being offended.” Like the AAUP report and even the pro-TW
Huffington Post piece, Lukianoff presumes that students already live in a world
of comfort where being offended is a rare occurrence. This perspective charac-
terizes good and healthy students as clear-headed enough to understand the
intellectual value of offensive material and tough enough to take it. Their ability
to self-manage passes the neoliberal test; they are either free of trauma or able
to quarantine it within the private spaces of the confessional booth and the
counselor’s office. In contrast, bad and sick students remain unable to keep their
personal experiences and emotions safely locked away.
The AAUP report contends that “the classroom is not the appropriate venue
to treat PTSD, which is a medical condition that requires serious medical treat-
ment.” Like pro-TW stances, the AAUP concedes that PTSD is the “real” prob-
lem, but places responsibility for fixing it on medical professionals. This move
permits faculty to pursue their individual academic interests, assured in the
knowledge that sick students have been properly transferred out of pedagogy
and into psychiatry. The report maintains a hard line between the classroom’s
orderly intellectual project of teaching citizens and therapy’s unruly emotional
project of treating victims. For example, it draws clear boundaries around appro-
priate and authoritative interpretations of literary texts. The AAUP contends
that if “The House of Mirth or Anna Karenina carried a warning about suicide,
students might overlook the other questions about wealth, love, deception, and
existential anxiety that are what those books are actually about” (emphasis added).
Although students might very well find a novel’s treatment of suicide compelling
and still explore its other themes, the AAUP insists on an either/or binary. Either
the professor can teach the text’s single reasonable interpretation to obedient,
good, and healthy students, or the unruly emotions of bad and sick students
can rule the day.

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Moreover, the AAUP’s blanket refusal to consider suicide warnings on certain

books reinstates the traditional teacher–student hierarchy. Under the banking
model of education, the teacher possesses superior knowledge and deposits it
into the eager student’s brain.15 The student then gives that knowledge back
to the professor via tests, papers, or other assignments. Good and healthy stu-
dents make a successful transfer in which the professor’s knowledge recognizably
reappears in their assignments. Bad and sick students cannot see past their own
trauma, which throws a wrench into the banking model’s orderly system. The
banking model denies students’ ability to bring new or different insights to the
text, instead chalking them up to emotional and psychological confusion.
According to the AAUP’s logic, a TW regime would undermine academic free-
dom by corrupting students and destabilizing the appropriate faculty–student
hierarchy. The AAUP notes that “faculty might feel pressured into notifying
students about course content for fear that some students might find it dis-
turbing.” An improper neoliberal motive, fear casts any obligation to students’
psychological well-being as a threat to faculty autonomy and expertise. Students
who do not obey neoliberal rules hinder faculty’s ability to make sound, rational
judgments and to prioritize their own self-interest.
If pro-TW advocates tend to frame anti-TW advocates as the moral and pro-
fessional enemy, anti-TW discourse merely flips the script. It positions admin-
istrators and students as the villains with faculty members as the heroes/victims.
The AAUP report continues “if trigger warnings are required or expected, any-
thing in a classroom that elicits a traumatic response could potentially expose
teachers to all manner of discipline and punishment.” By controlling faculty
members through fear of punitive measures, TW adherents rob teachers of their
professional judgment, autonomy, and rational choice. Trigger warnings interfere
with the liberal arts goal of civic preparation. They ultimately undermine the sta-
tus of administrators, students, and faculty members as good neoliberal citizens.
Theme 3: Trigger Warning as Master Theme
Finally, I arrive at a closer scrutiny of the phrase “trigger warning” itself. The
term “trigger” calls to mind a gun, ready to shoot at the slightest provocation, so
sensitive that even the slightest pressure will set it off. Shaw-Thornburg employs
this very metaphor: “a word or an image is as capable of triggering hurt or
delivering violence as a fired gun.” The opposite assumption guides the AAUP’s
moral panic over censorship. Rather than granting control over violent words
and images, TW undercut faculty control over what they can teach or publish.
As the Anna Karenina and House of Mirth examples suggest, TW can backfire

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and act as triggers themselves, creating an endless and counter-productive loop.

Neither Shaw-Thornburg nor the AAUP give much thought to the second word
in our phrase: “warning.” If the term “trigger” brings to mind the image of a
loaded gun about to go off, pairing it with warning makes the situation seem
even more urgent. In general, warnings make us highly aware of danger so that
we may sidestep it. Warnings frame harm as predictable, immediate, and—most
important—avoidable if only we would heed their call. They hail individual,
responsible, and self-governing citizens, and we have only ourselves to blame if
we fail to take them seriously.
Both pieces ignore the fact that language— and communication in
general—has a life and force of its own. Symbols always have multiple mean-
ings and can never fully represent what they refer to. These factors create a gap
between symbols and their future effects, some of which cannot be predicted in
advance. In other words, we can never be sure what a symbol means once and
for all or what influence it might have on the world. Trigger warnings promise
to fix that by making words and symbols predictable and controllable. However,
given their own status as symbols, this is a promise they cannot keep.
In addition, neither piece understands privilege and oppression as simulta-
neously internal and external, personal and political, individual and collective.
Rather than paying attention to the links between personal and systemic vio-
lence, both pieces engage in a neoliberal blame game. Whereas pro-TW narra-
tives position students as the victims of faculty indifference, unprofessionalism,
and unethical negligence, anti-TW narratives position faculty members as the
victims of overly sensitive and unruly pro-TW students and administrators.
Regardless of whether we align ourselves with one side of the TW coin or the
other, we must pass certain tests to count as legitimate citizens. We must purge
ourselves of any prejudice we harbor or witness in others via confession and
therapy. Or we must protect our freedom by purging confessional-therapeutic
dupes from the academy, lest they interfere with the process of educating good
citizens. In either case, we engage in the confessional-therapeutic scapegoating
process.
) ) ) Conclusion
The conclusion tells a story that moves away from trigger warnings per se and
toward the larger (yet still related) lessons I have learned from my participa-
tion in diversity and inclusion initiatives. This story touches upon many of the
themes discussed earlier, but hones in on making, unmaking, and remaking coa-
litions in a neoliberal, hyper-individualistic world. Given the difficult, sensitive,

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and sometimes confidential nature of these incidents, my account paints them

in rather broad brushstrokes. The sequence of events started with the arrest
of a well-known professor on charges of distributing child pornography. As a
response to his arrest and resignation, the college cancelled classes for one day to
hold a campus-wide forum.
Framed as a space for “voicing of concerns pertaining to campus climate,”
the forum positioned upper administrators as “deep” listeners with the goal of
“raising campus awareness” around diversity.16 Although a wide array of peo-
ple attended, students ended up taking center stage. They spoke directly to the
upper administrators, who pledged to sit in silence and listen. Some participants
positioned themselves as members and/or allies of marginalized groups, voic-
ing their experiences with bigotry and discrimination on campus. In particular,
many female students of color described their daily encounters with sexism and
racism at a predominantly white institution, whereas queer students revealed
their experiences with homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism.
Out of the forum’s undeniable energy and power emerged a new ad hoc
group dubbed Community@Allegheny. This social justice coalition brought
together upper administrators, staff and faculty members, and students with
the goal of harnessing and fostering the palpable momentum on campus. It
gradually turned toward articulating concrete changes that could most effec-
tively address the group’s concerns. These ideas eventually wound their way
through the college’s committee structure and into an official Action Plan for
Diversity and Inclusion. Two of the plan’s themes notably resonate with the
confessional-therapeutic logic that also underwrites the trigger warning debate. I
quote the Action Plan to provide their respective descriptions (emphasis added):
“Safety: What can we do to help students and employees feel safer both physically
and emotionally on our campus?”
“Community and Campus Climate: How can each of us foster positive and healthy
relationships and create a more inclusive campus?”
My own experiences during the 2014–2015 school year reveal how institutions
can inadvertently formalize and co-opt stories of trauma that arise from mar-
ginalized groups. Allegheny’s Action Plan, for example, evacuates the political
almost entirely. It never once refers to the systems of oppression and privilege so
frequently cited in the campus-wide forum and Community@Allegheny meet-
ings. It instead betrays a confessional-therapeutic approach that safely couches
politics in terms of individual growth and healing.
Lisa Duggan argues that “though the personal is political in many ways, per-
sonal experience and preference are actually lousy guides for political organizing

176.88.102.154 on Wed, 01 Sep 2021 12:30:44 UTC
and action.”17 I agree with Duggan that personal experience is not always (or
even primarily) a solid starting point for political mobilization. However, we
should not understate its role, given its potential to highlight traumas that dom-
inant culture often disregards. As I argue in my analysis of the TW debate,
the inclusion of personal experience is not in and of itself a problem. Rather,
the problem arises when we treat personal experience as self-evident and there-
fore not available for critique or when we treat it as irrational, trivial, or simply
counterproductive.
In fact, one of my English colleagues reminded me of the subaltern moments
that did occur in both the forum and Community@Allegheny. In the tradition
of work by feminists and womanists of color, she offered me the alternative
framework of “witnessing” and “testimonio.” Maria Antonia Alvarez, who stud-
ies memoirs from authors of color, describes testimonio as a genre that uses indi-
vidual witnesses of injustice to “metonymically represent” larger groups.18 This
narrative technique “places the story of [the authors’] lives within a story of the
social context in which they occur” and projects a collective “vision of life and
society in need of transformation.” Although not without its own limitations,
this framework reminds us to recognize and foster stories that do not automati-
cally obey neoliberal dictates.
If we are to disrupt neoliberalism’s insistence on the autonomous individual
and work toward developing both conventional and unconventional alliances,
we need to 1) look for potential connections between the personal and political,
2) recognize how larger systems both enable and constrain individual and collec-
tive agency, and 3) broaden our ethical responsibilities to ourselves, our commu-
nities, and our world. As people involved in education, we need to grasp every
teachable moment that helps us think beyond narrow neoliberal parameters,
connect our experiences on campus with the larger culture in which we live, and
imagine how that culture could be made otherwise. Only then can we address
the types of change needed to make living together less traumatic and more just.
not e s
1. Nikolas Rose, ‘‘Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,’’ in Foucault and Polit-
ical Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew
Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996).
2. Alan Petersen and Deborah Lupton, The New Public Health: Health and Self in the
Age of Risk (London: Sage, 1997).
3. Although the sheer number of posts and articles on trigger warnings are too
numerous to cite in full, I do provide a representative sampling. See, for instance,

176.88.102.154 on Wed, 01 Sep 2021 12:30:44 UTC
Jack Halberstam, “You are Triggering Me,” Bully Bloggers, July 5, 2014, accessed
October 7, 2015, http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering
-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma; 7 Humanities Pro-
fessors, “Trigger Warnings are Flawed,” Inside Higher Education, May 29, 2014,
accessed October 7, 2015, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essay
-faculty-members-about-why-they-will-not-use-trigger-warnings#sthash.1umm5li5
.KxbNAVsx.dpbs; Natalia Cecire, “On the ‘Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm,’” Works
Cited, July 7, 2014, accessed October, 7 2015, http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2014/
07/on-neoliberal-rhetoric-of-harm.html.
4. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).
5. Lisa Duggan, “Taking Offense: Trigger Warnings and the Neo-liberal Rhetoric
of Endangerment,” Bully Bloggers, November 23, 2014, accessed October 7, 2015,
https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/11/23/on-t rauma-a nd-t rigger-w arnings
-in-three-parts.
6. Courtney Bailey, “Coming Out as Homophobic: Isaiah Washington and the Grey’s
Anatomy Scandal,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 1–21.
7. I borrow this notion of scapegoating from rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke. See
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1941).
8. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003).
9. Angela Shaw-Thornburg, “This is a Trigger Warning,” Chronicle of Higher Educa-
tion, June 16, 2014.
10. “On Trigger Warnings,” The AAUP, August 2014, accessed October 7, 2015, http://
www.aaup.org/report/trigger-warnings.
11. “Trigger Warnings,” wmst-l@listserv.umd.edu, compiled by Giavanna Munafo
(June–July of 2014), accessed October 7, 2015.
12. Carol Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie Baxter, “Disciplining the Feminine,” Quar-
terly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 383–409.
13. Sarah Mahmood, “Why Wellesley Should Remove Life-Like Statue of a Man in his
Underwear,” Huffington Post, February 6, 2014, accessed October 7, 2015, http://
www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-mahmood/why-wellesley-should-remove-lifelike
-statue-of-a-man-in-his-underwear_b_4732982.html.
14. Jennifer Medina, “Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm,”
New York Times, May 17, 2014, accessed October 7 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/
2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html?_r=0.
15. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993).
16. Action Plan for Diversity and Inclusion, accessed October 7, 2015, http://sites
.allegheny.edu/diversity/action-plan-for-diversity-and-inclusion-phase-1.
17. Duggan, “Taking Offense.”
18. Maria Antonia Alvarez, “Narrative Power from the Metaphor of Witnessing,” Revue
LISA/LISA e-journal 2, no. 4 (2004): 183–94.

176.88.102.154 on Wed, 01 Sep 2021 12:30:44 UTC
)))
Courtney Bailey (PhD, Indiana University) is Associate Professor of Commu-
nication Arts at Allegheny College. She specializes in rhetorical studies, femi-
nism, queer theory, critical race studies, and media studies. She has published
articles on these topics in journals like Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies, Feminist Teacher, and the Quarterly Review of Film & Video.

176.88.102.154 on Wed, 01 Sep 2021 12:30:44 UTC

Bailey - Confession and Catharsis in The U.S. Academy - Trigger Warnings, Coalitions, and Academic Audiences

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Bailey - Confession and Catharsis in The U.S. Academy - Trigger Warnings, Coalitions, and Academic Audiences

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Confession and Catharsis in the U.S.

Academy: Trigger Warnings, Coalitions, and Academic

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During the spring semester of 2014, an untenured faculty member at my selec-

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) ) ) A Brief History of Trigger Warnings

) ) ) Trauma Meets Academic Freedom: An Analysis of

To maintain a balance between comprehensibility and complexity, I have made

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Theme 1: Personal Trauma

Shaw-­Thornburg’s article exemplifies a confessional-­therapeutic approach to

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Author and Readers, Parishioners and Priests, Patients and Practitioners

Drawing Boundaries around “Real” Trauma and Creating an Immoral/Sick Enemy

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Let me be clear: I am not contesting the reality of gendered and sexualized

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demands for state oversight of higher education’s outcomes (usually understood

Theme 2: Academic Freedom

If a confessional-­therapeutic notion of trauma animates many pro-­TW stances,

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Moreover, the AAUP’s blanket refusal to consider suicide warnings on certain

Theme 3: Trigger Warning as Master Theme

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and act as triggers themselves, creating an endless and counter-­productive loop.

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and sometimes confidential nature of these incidents, my account paints them

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Shaw-Thornburg’s article exemplifies a confessional-therapeutic approach to

If a confessional-therapeutic notion of trauma animates many pro-TW stances,

and act as triggers themselves, creating an endless and counter-productive loop.