Fun Home, Self-Censorship, and Emancipation Beyond Trigger Warnings

Chapter 7 Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation beyond Trigger Warnings

Taine Duncan

1 Introduction

In his lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault argued that neoliberalism was uniquely difficult to resist. Against traditional liberal ideology, fol- lowing the tradition of economists indebted to Adam Smith and laissez-faire capitalism, Foucault (2010) differentiated neoliberalism as a system wherein politics, society, and the market were deeply interwoven, and in which the systems must be maintained with “permanent vigilance, activity, and interven- tion” (p. 132). For Foucault, therefore, neoliberalism maintains power by en- trenching in every dimension of our lives. Wendy Brown (2009) extends Foucault’s analysis, arguing that neoliberalism’s reach is maintained by institutions that connect “the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire” (p. 39). For Brown, therefore, the unchecked late-stage capitalist university is one of the primary systems of neoliberalism. Important- ly, Brown also notes that the structures of neoliberal universities intentionally impact the very basis of modern subjects. In other words, if we are not vigilant against the neoliberal structures, those structures will continue “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action” (Brown, 2009, p. 40). As a professor with a critical theoretical pedagogy, I am deeply committed to principles of inclusion and liberation in both my theory and my pedagogy. I invite students to engage in parrhesiastic speech in “safe zone/ brave space” classrooms and offices, in part because such practices resist the colonization of neoliberal ideology and values. In this chapter, however, I ex- plore the ways in which challenging and nurturing classroom environments have been co-opted by corporatized straw-man arguments about “trigger warnings.” By examining the specific case examples of various universities’ backlash against teaching Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and utilizing sources in- cluding popular reporting, I frame a specific problem manifesting from neoliber- alist intersections with the contemporary university. I contrast those examples

124 Duncan against my own usage and teaching of Fun Home at a state university in the Bible Belt to demonstrate an alternative. In this chapter, I argue that the trends of self-censorship, university rejection, and formalization of trigger warning practices are not the results of intentional inclusivity and liberationist pedagogy, but in fact reflect the late-stage capitalist tendency to universalize student experience and identity as generic consumers. Against this neoliberal ideology, I offer a critical alternative by arguing that resistance comes from empowering students authentically.

2 Fun Home and the History of Its Censorship on College Campuses

The graphic novel Fun Home came out to critical acclaim in 2006. The author, Alison Bechdel, most widely known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and her name’s association with the Bechdel Test—a now commonplace so- cially feminist test for assessing a film’s inclusion of three-dimensional female characters—gave the graphic novel the subtitle A Family Tragicomic. This subtitle perfectly captures the tone of the book; it is a bravely personal autobi- ography, filled with memories of a childhood where Bechdel experienced com- plexity, tragedy, and conflict. But Bechdel’s wry sense of humor, and willingness to examine how moments of tragedy were also moments of growth and rela- tionship-building, make this book much more than a sad-sack memoir. It is filled with authenticity. It is also a richly and creatively designed piece of visual literature. The success and widespread readership of the novel led to both a Tony Award-winning musical adaptation and multiple attempts to censor and boycott it. In this chapter, I will return to a discussion of the depth and richness I find useful for teaching in the text, but for now I would like to focus on some of the attempts to censor the book. Fun Home is hardly unique for having experienced organized attempts to censor it from libraries, college courses, and sum- mer reading programs. However, the censorship of and uproar against Fun Home has been uniquely focused on college experience, with frequent appeals to the costs and intentions of college education. As Maren Williams of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has explained, Fun Home faced a multi-faceted attack, though primarily under the criticism that it was a pornographic book. In the first challenge of its inclusion in a college course at the University of Utah in 2008, the objecting student was given the option of alternative assign- ment, but still “alerted a Salt Lake City area group called ‘No More Pornogra- phy’ to the book’s inclusion on the course syllabus. The group started an online petition and issued a press release calling for the university to remove the book