I FUCKING REFUSE
(could I get away with throwing books at the panelists, since learning must be unsettling and difficult? I’d be subverting norms of civility!)
(yeah, it would be a juvenile justification, but it’s jock h. !!! Know thy audience’s levels of theoretical sophistication!)
this is the worst this is the fucking worst i am furious about all of this!! and like, after this awful event description dripping with a passive-aggressive condescension that makes evident these theorists’ contempt for those with trauma, there’s something really disgusting and hostile about “all are welcome”
“epistemic violence created by ‘trigger warnings’”
??????????i’ve been getting emails about this from the gender-studies listserv that i’m on and every time i get an email reminder about it i get SOMAD
traumatized students ~~conjuring wounds~~ to suppress the freedom of speech of tenured academics, hahahaha i want to die
(also, can we talked about how fucked it is to collapse the discourse around trigger warnings into the same category of practices as censorship of anti-zionist organizing/criticisms of israel and the framing of radical social movements as violent??)
Sara Ahmed brought this event up on Twitter:
I just read a description of a workshop that implies trigger warnings create wounds in order to justify their management.
— feministkilljoy (@SaraNAhmed)//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Which also implied an analogy between those asking for trigger warnings and the suppression of critiques of Israel!
— feministkilljoy (@SaraNAhmed)//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Meanwhile said description was written poorly using passive voice: creating a vaguely defined administrative function as the subject.
— feministkilljoy (@SaraNAhmed)
CONJURING WOUNDS
I’m sorry, but even though I have actually *been in* classroom and campus activist environments where people invoke the traumas of antisemitism/the Holocaust in order to shut down debate about current awfulness being perpetrated by the state of Israel and remain cranky as fuck about it- and, yeah, this is a thing that used to happen now and then at Columbia, probably still does, and probably is informing Khalidi and Jakobsen’s takes on it- this is the most garbage mobilisation of anti-Zionist politics that involves no explicit antisemitism that I’ve ever seen
like, you can actually launch a much more effective counterdefense against that phenomenon by talking about ways in which the Nakba and current state oppression of Palestinians/Israeli Arabs/African migrants etc. parallel violence done to Jews historically??? I have seen that actually work, while I have literally never seen minimising the extent to which antisemitism is an active form of trauma for people help anything??? WHAT A SHONDE
