Trauma warnings are on the rise as studies conclude they are ineffective. These warnings that the content could be sensitive, irritating or trigger disturbing reactions are now proliferating in the arts world, a realm of emotional upheaval and aesthetic shock. Museums, literature classes, books, shows, operas warn their visitors, readers and spectators. Look, in a series of texts, on this phenomenon of trigger warningsor TW for short.
In several private groups where you can read testimonials on social networks, trauma warnings (TW) are mandatory surtitles. “TW: harassment, abuse of power, sexual violence. Or “TW: eating disorders,” and “TW: miscarriage,” for example. Appearing in the 1990s, trauma warnings have recently evolved into warnings that warn of increasingly diverse forms of sensitivity. Back to the past to better understand the phenomenon.
Last November, the Opéra de Montréal warned spectators of The beauty of the world that Nazi symbols would be shown on stage. The Canadian Museum of History recalls on its website that its collections “contain objects and images that evoke violence, war and other forms of conflict and cultural content of a sensitive nature”. Many universities now mention in descriptions that “this course may not be suitable for you due to the traumatic nature of the material that is covered. Each student must judge his emotional capacity to follow him”.
The TWs are multiplying. Moreover, they merge with other warnings with different intentions. Born from a real desire to take care of traumatized affects, the use of TW is now a tightrope walker, sometimes in a precarious balance between attention, or carevirtuous political display, cultural mediation and emotional politeness.
Those who trace the history of the TW agree: they appeared in the late 1990s on the discussion forums of private feminist groups, where the members related hard stories. Where ? When ? The answer remains fleeting.
“The genealogy and chronology of the phenomenon remain rather vague”, explains Isabelle Arseneau. A professor at McGill, specializing in medieval literature, she makes trauma warnings “a kind of second field of research”.
Testimonials and fanfiction
To find the story of the first manifestations of TW, you have to turn to resources in English, scholarly and popular, continues the one who is preparing a book on the teaching of literature in the era of traumawarnings. We know that the TW found themselves, at the end of the 1990s or the beginning of the 2000s, on the discussion forum of Ms Magazine, American feminist magazine.
The TWs then propagate in the fanfiction. On the LiveJournal site, where members can keep a casual journal or create pastiches of their favorite cult entertainment, they popped up in the early 2000s.
TWs are then placed to “offer a ‘safe’ discussion space” to female readers by warning them of the potentially disturbing content of messages that are published on the forums, indicates Ms.me Arseneau, “and which may, for example, contain crude descriptions of scenes of sexual assault or rape”.
From warning to traumawarning…
The TWs appear decades after the content warnings that predate the movies, which we are now used to. In the wake of the establishment in 1930 of the Hays code, which “regulates” Hollywood productions, and whose moral origins are assumed, the United States adopted a system of classification of film content in 1968. The ratings (G, PG-13, or R, for example) are there to guide parents on which movies they want their kids to see.
These limits are essentially moral: nudity, sexuality, language, violence or the use of drugs serve as measures for this barometer. The TWs, on the other hand, have a different objective: by announcing the color of what is to come, they seek to allow traumatized people to avoid content that could give rise to flashbacks and reviviscences in them.
“It is a therapeutic use, analyzes Isabelle Arseneau. Maybe it has its place in a private support group, but there is a slippage when we keep this use in the public space, which is not a therapeutic space.
For the psychologist Pascale Brillon, trauma warnings coexist in the media and social space with the concept of safe space (neutral zone). Isabelle Arseneau notices the same juxtaposition of ideas, even if the safe space is a “notion that appeared decades earlier”.
In the mid-2000s, trauma warnings then penetrated the world of university education, observes Ms.me Arsenal. “I seem to see a lot of confusion here. First of all, between a relationship to art that is entertainment and consumption (the readings that my mother-in-law does as a dabbler; the evening at the cinema with the children), and the other that would be… more critical, dare I say?, and another type of “requirement” (criticism, teaching, research, etc.). »
Another confusion, names the teacher, “between the pedagogical space and the therapeutic space”: “The teacher does not have the necessary skills to find all the potentially ‘sensitive’ or ‘traumatic’ places in a work, and even less those necessary for their hierarchy… This practice has, in fact, something impractical…”
… and from traumawarning to warning
Today, in the universities of Quebec, we find a bit of everything like the use of TW. English-speaking universities, including McGill, provide their professors with pre-written, ready-to-use TWs. At UQAM, the Psychology Department places TWs on its course descriptions, while the Literature Department does not.
If the new law 32 on academic freedom prohibits these institutions from imposing traumatic warnings, nothing prevents them from facilitating their use. And nothing prevents a professor from choosing to put one.
The field of traumawarning is expanding more and more. It now slips towards the warning, much more general, diffuse, like a kind of “prevention is better than cure”, like the formula: “This content could offend certain sensitivities. From the intention of not reigniting a trauma, the TW passes to that of preventing any collision. An impossible task.
“I wonder if the TW is not responding in this way to a kind of broadening of the definition of ‘trauma'”, indicates the literature specialist, analyzing the term of social discourse, very different, of course, from medical discourse. “As if we had gone from symptoms of post-traumatic shock disorder to shock, then to discomfort and simple surprise. The term “trauma” has known a maximum extension for a few years”, concludes Isabelle Arseneau.
Next week: Warning: this museum contains traces of history