ABSTRACT
Debates on trigger warnings depict the classroom as a space charged with friction between student demands for warnings and teacher responses to these demands. Although there are many ways to practice giving warnings before showing or engaging in material that deals with violent content, this chapter interrogates how the relationship between students and teachers is negotiated through the debates around trigger warnings themselves. Drawing on scholarship in the areas of affect studies, gender studies, feminist pedagogy, and education and psychoanalysis, the chapter considers how teaching and learning are informed by the frictions, tensions, and difficult affective encounters that play out in the classroom and are contested through the politics of gender that aim to transform the power relations of the classroom. Beyond narratives of student trauma and faculty academic freedom or authority, the debate on trigger warnings opens space for thinking about the role of solidarity as a technique for mediating pedagogy and affect in the classroom.
