Abstract
In the last few years, the language and politics of trigger warnings have spread all over the Internet and academic classrooms. The question of whether warnings should be given about content that may be upsetting, offensive or trigger post-traumatic stress responses has been heatedly debated in feminist, queer and anti-racist discussions online. This chapter examines and contextualises these debates, asking how they both negotiate and generate experiences of vulnerability and agency in relation to controversial media content. The chapter analyses the differences and overlaps between three key sites of the debate: feminist discussion groups where the use of warnings is a required and normalised practice; feminist critique of trigger warnings emphasising the value of negative affect; and anti-feminist online spaces where trigger warnings are ridiculed.
A version of this Chapter has appeared in Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä and Ingrid Ryberg (eds.) ‘The power of vulnerability. Mobilising affect in feminist, queer and anti-racist media cultures’. 2018, Manchester University Press.
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Notes
- 1.
The Signs digital archive on trigger warnings is available at: http://signsjournal.org/currents-trigger-warnings/#digitalarchive (accessed 4 June 2018).
- 2.
I contacted the moderator who created the document in November 2017, explained the purposes of the research and the article, and requested permission to use the rules document in my research, with the understanding that the moderators would check and, if needed, correct the article before publication. The moderators gave permission for this. In early February 2018, I sent a pre-proofread article draft for them to check, and on February 8 they gave permission to move forward with the publishing process without corrections.
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Kyrölä, K. (2019). Negotiating Vulnerability in the Trigger Warning Debates. In: Graefer, A. (eds) Media and the Politics of Offence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17574-0_11
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