Trigger Warnings in the Queer Classroom

• In Event: 547 - Section on Teaching and Learning in Sociology Paper Session. Addressing Contentious Issues in the Classroom

Abstract

Trigger warnings are increasingly used in the college classroom to signal an ever-broadening range of difficult or challenging content. Instructors, institutions, and students have debated their utility for both privileged and marginalized students. In this essay, I explore the genealogy of trigger warnings as an educational concept rooted in feminist discourses of safety and address its ambivalent use in the student-centered queer classroom. I argue that the critical and supportive responses to recent trigger warning debates offer a conceptual case through which we might consider the place of affective engagement, power, and politics for students, instructors, and institutions. Ultimately, whether and how to use trigger warnings in the queer classroom is a political choice. The queer classroom is fundamentally affective, political, and imbued with power, and whether trigger warnings enable inclusive and productive individual and social change depends on how we frame and manage the very same contexts that run through our classrooms.

Author

• Clare Forstie, Northwestern University