on queer space and metatriggers, by Elizabeth Hassler

[Image description: Sign in front of a barbed wire fence, in the daytime with a blue sky and cumulus clouds. Big red letters: UNSAFE AREA/DO NOT ENTER.]

Semi-ironic trigger warning for … stuff? Unpopular Opinions, inevitable-type emotional abuse, ableist language, queer suicide. I've spent weeks writing this; I thought really hard, y'all. Apologies in advance to people who don't like the poem-format

This piece is a sometimes-direct response to Jack Halberstam's recent essay “'You Are Triggering Me!' The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma.” All the other links/intertexts are extra credit. And, hey, there were a lot more disclaimers on previous drafts. If you want them, just imagine they are there.]

I know that I am not really

broken, or anyway

that Hemingway did not

speak in terms of (post?)modernity and

our PTSD.

The world breaks everyone, not

only those of us who were

intently broken. Nor only

those of us for whom brokenness

went viral.

Here is the story I am afraid to tell

in honest prose:

there was a boy and there was queer negativity

and I thought it was the revolution because I could

be femme

like a sponge is femme. I was trained enough

to do that. One way to become

a Cautionary Tale

without a

scratch: (1) Be a congenital burden.

(2) Grow up thinking you don't understand other

people or your own limits or

regular emotions. (3) Work very hard to compensate,

because some days

in your house

failure to negotiate the emotions around you

feels like failure

to breathe. (4) Find your fellow

crazy people, and build

up a tolerance for suffering

because it speaks your language.

(5) Find an internet feminism

that treats every word

like shrapnel. (6) Find an

academic feminism that valorizes feelings

(bell hooks, mostly. And see?

For some of us

in the room this

is not just

theory). (7) Meet a boy

who says those classes

made me feel again, and doesn't

hate the things you want, is not

deterred by your body, tells decent jokes.

(8) Say all the right things, because you know

how; have that be so good

and so enough

until it isn't. (9) When that isn't

enough to keep anyone alive, push back

and start to catch hell (perhaps

not in that order). For example, (10)

when you are starting to become disillusioned,

say you like an Audre Lorde quote

that says caring for oneself is an act

of political warfare (one you

don't know how to commit,

obviously). Because your needs are not separate

from your boyfriend's needs, obviously,

you cannot have been meaning to like

the quote on your own behalf. As consequence:

my body, my choice rhetoric,

as if you've done something  antifeminist and wrong.

(11) Extricate yourself, because

you still can and because

loving the boy to the specifications put forth

is exhausting and more impossible than flight. More poetically:

shit's ridiculous. (12) Become the bad guy,

even though you were so good.

Of course

there are twelve steps, because I am an idiot** with

an eye for narrative structures.

**Dear reader, that word is an ableist slur

you should avoid trying at home. I know.

Ordinarily I would not say or type it, even.

But this is an essay in which I am trying

to live with/in

my unreliable narratorships and linguistic imperfections,

so I will tell you honestly

how I think about myself. Vintage example:

I thought we had equivalent needs,

the boy and I. Note to Halberstam and newly-minted self:

facilitating someone's access to a space is different

than letting their traumas run roughshod over your body

and their emotions seep into your

skin. The requests come from different

planets

(see also:

multiple chemical sensitivities are not

a figment of the neoliberal imaginary).

But I thought we were the same,

and in the end we were. If

acquiring the shadows of someone's trauma

makes the two of you the same.

Dear reader, let me be clear: I don't blame

the boy on whose behalf I broke

for most of the breakage. I mean, I was cracked already.

I thought deeply disingenuous dynamics were

the way to go. It was unfair,

really, to expect

functional anything

from someone actively disintegrating.

I'm grateful, in the aggregate: I

think I needed to be hurt

to learn what I really needed and

that I could be a grown-up and take

care of myself.

I'll always be a crippled girl,

but now

self-care

is not constantly

illegible.

Still, swearing me to secrecy was anything but kind.

Here is a secret

about “courageous” social circles

at small rural schools: they're fucking small.

So I was just supposed to inhale

all that second-hand misery alone?

And cease and desist with the poetry.

I tried (the breakup

was harder

than the love itself: I

measured every word, shook it

to get the feeling out, strung measuredness

into sentences---to be met with a variety

of low-level betrayals

and concentrated guilts). I hate

that I will hate myself if I don't apologize

for writing the Cautionary Tale

---here, in particular,

situations have been

made significantly opaque to protect

my introverted former lover and also

myself; from conditioned panic.

The panic will happen anyway,

since I have after all Caught(ionaried)

a spot of the Trauma: c'est la vie.

Writing this is fucking painful,

incidentally,

but that is no one's responsibility except

my own. Also: stories of my failures are Important,

for Community Learning &c. [A Community,

alas, wherein the ex in question and I share custody

of some three dozen Facebook friends. If you

find this: hi!] How am I supposed to

Caution y'all without the Tale? And I do

find the Tale-ing freeing

when there is less risk of being yelled at. Anyway.

Some “things I notice,”

in tutoring parlance: (a) the feminist spaces I am a part of

tend to celebrate heightened emotionality. (b) As a Highly Emotional

person, that shit seems like a good idea. (c)  It's usually not?

I mean, emotions are cool,

but fostering them is Chaos, all right. Also:

(d) prescriptivism (because, like,

if I respond to a stranger's individual emotions incorrectly I am

perpetuating individual

harm). Never my favorite.

By the way, everything I’ve written thus far

has very little to do with whether I

think trigger warnings are a good idea.

I think they are mostly an access issue

as opposed to a cultural one, and

unlike Halberstam I don't find the two

synonymous. Regardless, for the record,

I'm 90% in favor.

I use them (see above).

I find some of them important

for myself. I just wish adopting them didn't require a goddamn

Cultural Shift

into talking about our collective traumas, traumas, traumas

(because that hurts me; see above).

Trigger warnings are

one commodity in service of which trauma becomes performative,

one thing people have to act out being Traumatized

in order to get,

because neoliberalism is one way

vulnerable people are forced

to justify their needs. Meta-example

from earlier this week: “I need you

to be explicit with me and tell me if you are

triggered” (because “I'm not comfortable with that”

was not enough). Later retracted for reasons

involving being triggered: is this or is this not

an ever-widening circle?

#confessionalimperativesareyucky,

but one must, apparently. I don't

mean to attack anyone who tells their story.

Stories are important.

But some people don't want to tell

their stories, sometimes or ever,

and that shouldn't be

so pressurized (aren't there other

counternarratives

to silencing?). I don't want to, not really,

because I’d rather not walk around like a raw nerve

and technically I’m supposed to be silent and

the whole thing makes me feel dumb (because

sometimes I think of myself in ableist terms:

see above. Which, by the way,

is not the bad kid of failing. At least

this time it's a pun!).

This pseudoessay isn't really a martyr's errand,

though: I no longer Live

for the Cause. If

people could tell me their stories less

like they had something to prove,

I could leave martyrdom behind

more easily. This isn't an individual problem,

dear reader. Y'know, 'cause I learned

to soak up the emotions of others like a codependent sponge and

to make myself responsible

for the happinesses of people not-me.

[Great job, Elizabeth!] at the same time as other people learned

no one would listen to their emotional lives unless

they lived them really loud (me, my emotions were always

more than loud enough).Therefore: conflict!

So much conflict.

So much secondary pain

over which to fucking obsess.

Performative trauma hurts, dear reader.

We've established that it hurts me,

individually,

because I am a special kind of broken; doesn't it

also hurt the collective when our lives

are made nothing but blood?

The kind of blood neatly filed away

into individual compartments

for goddamn examination (See also: trigger warnings

by administrative mandate. I am sure there is a list

of acceptable notations somewhere).

The capital T in Trauma is for

the pressure to identify oneself as Traumatized

and to tell the story

of why.

Capital-C Codependent counts too. You know,

telling my story has made me

an easy mark. I've been

hurt with that. It lets people know

that my pieces are easy to manipulate.

I want to call this dynamic

of co-constitutive performance and absorption,

the ways that people telling and people

being told demand each other,

“trauma culture” (which is also the title of a book

I ought to read).

Trauma culture

is Halberstam's target, no? Trauma culture is

me giving myself a panic attack trying

to help someone in emotional distress.

Trauma culture is the expectation of trauma.

Trauma culture is fucking dangerous (if

you want to talk

about danger),

because it feeds the environment of danger

and it doesn't grant me access

to much of anything.

Does it save you?

Interdependence does not mean

taking responsibility for the feelings of others,

which took me forever

to learn. So why do we

frame access that way? Accountability

is not the same thing as

guilt, is it.

Halberstam says

this thing I am calling trauma culture

is the purview of “wimpy white feminism,”

as opposed to “a multicultural,

poststructuralist, intersectional” feminism for which

“people got over themselves”---

now, admittedly the I'm a white grrrrrl and the intersectional

feminisms I'm a part of are sometimes more Tumblr

-liberal than Crenshaw, but

I can assure you we did not.

And that's not what I’m asking for;

where is over, anyway? (Not

in the community

rainbows with which I'm familiar, that's where.)

It'd be pretty ridiculous

to say the only cool kids watch Monty Python

and reclaim other people's slurs. So:

maybe my critique borrows less from Halberstam and

more from The Revolution Starts at Home,

but they both show us

the fallacies that embody safe space.  One:

queer and disabled and otherwise Other

bodies are unsafe, and something society protects against

using institutions of various colors

and shapes. Two: the thing we call queer safe space

encourages queer brokenness,

because queer scars are so romantic. Three:

where Halberstam sees sterile whiteness

I see bleeding hearts bleeding

every everywhere. Safe space

is so much carnage. Four: the revolution

requires so much

more than anti-oppressive language

and nonviolent

communication.

Five: no utopia is pure.

Six: remember, dear reader,

trying to be someone's safe space

broke me into pointed shards. Describing the difficulties

in writing this piece, I said: It's a lot of “don't

be stupid like I was stupid!” so, you know.

And you do know, don't you? Why the

story went the way it did. Even though I wouldn't

describe another person in those terms.

My story is familiar, and queer.

There's a certain kind of urgency

in queer stories I find terrifying. Because queerness

is about urges, we make it

also about suicide (hold, please,

while I give myself a panic attack).

Of course, this is a glass house

in which I should not throw Lamictal prescriptions,

but I'm terrified of

suicidal expectation and the ways I've been complicit

in that kind of fear. Godsake,

past-Elizabeth, Dead people can't orgasm!

is not a clever way of saving anybody.

And---deep breath---you are not obligated to

crisis-counsel anybody just because they kiss you

or you love them

or they're not dead yet or

whatever. Your self-worth is not determined

by your capacity to deescalate (no, not

even re: yourself). No one should

leverage their health and safety or lack thereof

to manipulate you into being their doll---dear

reader, this is not tangential.

The suicidal queers I've known

have mostly been adults; evidently we did not

Get Better. Personally,

the urge and I are not

strangers and so when it visits it feels right at home,

usually settling in

with a dull ache instead of sharp points

and hot dramatics.

For all their intensity, my moods have rarely been

flashy. But then, I love my life.

And even so the urge is exhausting.

Thus, I'm ambivalent about moralizing here.

Your body, your choice, indeed.  But

fuck that, on the other hand.

Too often, we pretend

suicide is an inevitable

and neutral act (at least,

I did). Universalizing the

extremes of fragile livelihood

to all

people with queer bodies

does not help The Cause.

Loving neuroqueer, hoping neuroqueer

can be for queer communities,

is my opposite of abandoning

specificity. I'm not saying

all queers are crazy or

all crazies, Autistics, neurodivergents

are queer. I'm pretty sure

if I tried,

we'd need a universal safe space

full of people's triggers.

In that sense, Halberstam's essay is intense

relief: “I want to call for a time of accountability and specificity:

not all LGBT youth are suicidal, not all

LGBT people are subject to violence and bullying, and

indeed class and race remain much more vital factors

in accounting for vulnerability to violence,

police brutality, social baiting and reduced access
to education and career opportunities.” Queer

and queered bodies

and bodies

of work

are more than houses for trauma,

even mine. 

                                                   ~Elizabeth Hassler