Beyond Trigger Warnings

Safety, Securitization, and Queer Left Critique

Christina B. Hanhardt and Jasbir K. Puar, with Neel Ahuja,

Paul Amar, Aniruddha Dutta, Fatima El-Tayeb, Kwame Holmes,
and Sherene Seikaly

Introduction

Christina B. Hanhardt and Jasbir K. Puar

We have followed campus debates about calls for safe spaces, trigger warn-
ings, and Title IX. Like many of our colleagues, we have been concerned
about approaches to safety that disregard the geopolitics of policing and
punishment in and beyond academic institutions. And yet, the predomi-
nant critiques of these ideas focus on students, positing them as “special
snowflakes” or, as is more common on the left, as neoliberal dupes who
expect unprecedented attention and make unwarranted claims of precar-
ity. We are dissatisfied with these approaches, even as we recognize how
neoliberal logics can cast self-subalternization as a radical political claim;
we look instead to analyses that move beyond the simple diagnosis of
such a resonance to explore the complicated ways in which students and
other people actually navigate life on campus today. Moreover, across
the political spectrum, attention to college safe spaces has focused on sex
and sexuality, even as campus development and militarization projects or
opposition to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign
against the state of Israel also trade in these same terms. Given this, we are
interested in what queer studies might offer to an analysis of debates over
campus safety in the context both of increased repression and retribution
across scales and of social movements. New approaches in queer studies
take as their object of study not only sex and gender but also the cultural

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 politics of liberalism; in turn, scholarship on the geopolitics of injury dem-
onstrates the situatedness of both identity and economic forms. Brought
together, these scholarly approaches provide an important lens on many
of the contradictions of the contemporary college campus.
Take, as an example, trigger warnings: verbal or written cautions
that a representation of trauma may follow. For advocates of their class-
room use, they are promoted as a proactive response to student vulner-
ability, especially following sexual violence. For those opposed, they
are often described as attacks on free speech, or as anti-intellectual and
individualized forms of coddling students. Still others point out that the
demand for trigger warnings can punish faculty who are themselves vul-
nerable as teachers of sexual content or that posttraumatic stress disorder,
the symptoms of which trigger warnings address, is not best managed by
faculty. Many also seek to deexceptionalize sexual violence in relation to
the many types of violation studied in classrooms, from the history of
US slavery to ongoing state-sponsored genocide. Drawing on our own
research on policing in US cities (Christina) and along state borders (Jas-
bir), and our shared interest in the vexed place of psychological knowledge
in social movements, we are interested in what the call for trigger warn-
ings also reveals about the cost-cutting decimation of student services
(such as long waiting lists for mental health counselors) and what might be
learned from public health practitioners in places like Palestine, who have
critiqued the use of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder for how
it normalizes quotidian trauma, conflict, and war.1 Or, if we literalize the
trigger as that which sets off a firearm, what are the links or gaps between
student activism for trigger warnings in the classroom and against guns
on campus (either concealed, as in Texas or Kansas, or held by campus
police, such as at the University of Chicago or Howard University, both
in once working-class Black neighborhoods) or campaigns against wealthy
philanthropists like Warren Kanders (at Brown University) whose profits
come from the production of weapons used in such places as Ferguson,
Missouri, and Palestine?
For this roundtable, we gathered scholars whose research takes on
questions of safety and security, broadly conceived, that are in productive
tension with queer studies, even as only some of our interlocutors explic-
itly identify with that field. Some roundtable participants consider these
issues through the lens of sexual and gender politics specifically; others
focus on liberal ideas of power, identity, and norms. In line with this issue
of Social Text, central to this roundtable is the question of what counts as
queer studies, and the continued utility of what has been called “subject-
less critique.” Subjectless critique has come to mean many things, both
as a foregrounded analytic in the 2005 issue of Social Text titled “What’s
Queer about Queer Studies Now?” and as part of a much broader move

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 across fields to multiply or destabilize the subject. For our purposes here,
we approach the issue of safe space, one that has so adhered to debates
about sex and gender, to both reflect on the prioritized subjects of these
debates and detach their overdetermined significance.

Christina B. Hanhardt and Jasbir K. Puar: For this first question, we ask you
to consider the salience of the concept of safe space on campus — be that your
own campus or elsewhere — and/or elaborate what you perceive to be the pressure
points for the politics of safety and security more generally.

Neel Ahuja: One entry point for addressing campus securitization is to con-
sider how the state has begun to actively recruit scholars and students in
the post-9/11 security state expansion. Although such strategies may feel
far afield from student-initiated requests for making classrooms or depart-
ments “safe spaces,” it is interesting to note examples in which there is some
overlap with the explicit strategies of the security state. The recent history
of Islamophobic “countering violent extremism” (CVE) programming at
US universities is a case in point. Echoing older laws that authorized colo-
nial surveillance and suppression of nationalist movements, post-9/11 CVE
programming claimed that states could prevent violence (mainly attributed
to Muslim communities) by identifying and publicly countering “extrem-
ist narratives.” CVE originated first in United Kingdom and European
Union counterterrorism policies in 2005 and later migrated to the Obama
administration’s Department of Homeland Security, which began funding
grants for local surveillance of US Muslim communities in 2014. Because
“antiradicalization” programs like CVE are promoted by liberals as an
alternative to traditional warfare, their racialized and militarized forms of
surveillance and their extraction of the unpaid labor of students are usu-
ally ignored by journalists. The overlap between Obama CVE programs,
university communication and public health department, and antibullying
discourse is particularly salient. CVE programs targeting Muslim youth
work on the assumption that the racism and resulting bullying, alienation,
and susceptibility to radicalization they purportedly experience is inevitable
and individual (rather than produced by geopolitical conditions). Produc-
ing digital space as safe space guarded by morally virtuous undergraduate
mentors, supervised by liberal faculty, is the proposed solution.
In 2015, students in the undergraduate course Communications 163:
Public Diplomacy at UCLA participated in an international antiradical-
ization competition launched by the US State Department and consulting
firm EdVenture Partners. The students collaboratively produced a website
and logo for their CVE initiative called Safe Spot. Informed by so-called
experts on “ISIS itself as well as Islamic belief systems, interpretations of
the Quran and the struggles of modern Muslims living in the west,” stu-

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 dents created web content targeting “isolated individuals” with testimonials
of ex-Islamists, a discussion forum, and other propaganda.2 Such course-
work — which operates on the assumption that the unpaid student labor of
producing social media narratives will be able to successfully preach liberal
values to Muslim American youth experiencing racism — is funded as one
of four categories of Homeland Security grants (Category 4: Countering
the Narrative), which are in turn linked to municipal, nongovernmental
organization, and police grants that engage in other policing, data mining,
and surveillance operations targeting Muslims. Dozens of US universities
received such grants, with emphasis on grants going to faculty in communi-
cations and public health. Given that the Trump administration has frozen
federal CVE funding, the fact that universities have continued such work
on a local basis demonstrates how discourses of student safety are intersect-
ing with the university’s attempt to deploy its excess capacity for racial sur-
veillance. There are some community organizations, such as the Muslim
Justice League of Boston, that are doing excellent work to combat CVE,
but there has yet to be a comprehensive reckoning with how such work is
becoming institutionalized at US universities.

Kwame Holmes: I am particularly interested in the interaction between so-

called trigger warnings, which prepare students to immerse themselves in
potentially activating content, and those campus systems that alert students
to the dangers posed by metallic triggers on firearms. Here I am referring to
campus emergency notification systems. I have worked at three large pub-
lic universities, and all encourage students, faculty, and staff to add their
cell phone numbers to a database that sends out text alerts to list members
during a major crisis. These systems can respond to natural disaster and
are often used to communicate weather-related closures, fires, and — my
subject — active shooter or assailant events. Their near universal adoption
is an outgrowth of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, where many students
lost their lives by remaining mobile during a shooting event. Given the scale
of these potential and actual threats, some readers may worry that putting
emergency systems and syllabus content warnings in conversation only con-
firms mischaracterizations of campus feminism (lobbed from the right and
left) as self-referential ephemera.
Yet consider the following. In 1993, the New York Times published
Katie Roiphe’s antifeminist polemic “Date Rape’s Other Victim,” which
accused college feminists who circulated statistical evidence that 25 per-
cent of women either were or would become victims of sexual assault of
“walking around with this alarming belief: a hyperbole containing within
it a state of perpetual fear.” Rolphe’s work remains popular among the anti-
feminist right, but we should pay just as close attention to a subsequent
Times article from 1995 that heralded the arrival of a modern emergency

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 notification system called CAMPUS SECURE at Syracuse University. The
article, “Campus Safety by Computer,” tells readers of New Jersey dentist
Michael Beales who had learned of “sexual attacks” on the Upstate New
York campus “where he was dropping off his daughter Lara” to begin her
college career. As it turns out, the Times described Beales’s response to his
fear for Lara’s safety as a technical marvel rather than a paranoid fantasy.
“Dr. Beales developed a device the size of a keychain that incorporates a
radio transmitter. With the press of a button, it instantly tells a central com-
puter in the campus security office where the person is and pinpoints the
location on an electronic map.”3 According to the LA Times, Beales had sold
his beeper system to five campuses, including the University of Bridgeport,
Loyola University in New Orleans, and Scranton University.4
It would be another decade before cell phone saturation made it pos-
sible for universities to deliver messages to tens of thousands of community
members at once. Still, attacks on campus feminism in the 1990s made
space for the broad social acceptance of these technologies. After decades
of reactionary, often evangelical attacks on feminist interventions against
rape culture, research universities were, by the mid-1990s, the last large
institutions to employ and support feminist activisms. Higher ed cities
like Columbus, San Francisco, and Austin were also home to more radi-
cal feminist formations like the Lesbian Avengers and Cunt Revolt, groups
that often collaborated with undergraduates in women and gender studies.
On and campus-adjacent feminisms combined calls for women’s physical
safety with the need for cultural transformation through shared public emo-
tional processing, informed by a range of psychotherapeutic techniques.
These included confrontational street activism, reading groups, poetry
slams, healing circles, and more. For campus feminism, affect was not a
by-product of activism but a primary subject of intervention. Automatic
alerts undercut feminist authority by simplifying the terms of safety, leaving
us safe from the more complicated discomfort we experience when asked to
interrogate our personal relationship to rape culture.
These systems “keep women safe” through an instantaneous connec-
tion with police forces, themselves trained to automatically respond with
deadly force at the slightest hint of threat. Their absolute reach to campus
community members closes the affective borders of the university, decen-
tivizing collaboration with off-campus radical elements. Their emotional
austerity allows the campus to rely, exclusively, on the small set of univer-
sity administrators (overwhelmingly men) entrusted to activate alert sys-
tems. To confront rape culture, to teach affirmative consent, or even to
raise the possibility that course content may retraumatize students is to ask
campus communities to sit in emotional ambiguities that feel nothing like
the “safety” provided by alert systems. Campus safety alerts, arriving as
one item within a list of equally sized emails or texts, bring with them the

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 imprimatur of order. The speed of their delivery, their efficient circulation
to the whole campus, and our technological self-consciousness all serve
to reassure us that not only has someone seen something but they’ve said
something. And we, thank heavens, won’t have to.

Fatima El-Tayeb: In my research, I focus on Europeans of color, who are pri-

marily portrayed within European politics, media, and often enough aca-
demia as a threat to the continent’s safety and security — that is, Europe’s
cultural identity, progressive values, economic stability, and overall integ-
rity. The safety and security of Europeans of color are most decidedly not
treated as an issue, notwithstanding the fact that they are exposed to vari-
ous forms of violence on a regular basis. European universities are still
almost exclusively white on the level of faculty (Germany has a population
of more than 80 million and fewer than a handful of Black professors). Stu-
dents of color accordingly face a high level of isolation and rejection. In their
organizing against this structural marginalization, they partially follow US
models for safe spaces and trigger warnings in classrooms. This gets much
press along the same lines as it does in the United States: the student activ-
ists are framed as spoiled snowflakes who see discrimination everywhere,
while the hyperbolic reaction of the overwhelming white male professoriat
screaming censorship is treated with much concern and sympathy. The
students are also organizing for more faculty of color and the creation of
ethnic and Black studies programs (not a single one exists in all of continen-
tal Europe).5 This gets close to no media attention or support from (white)
faculty. The students’ demands for safe spaces is largely dismissed (espe-
cially by the white Left) as imitative of US discourses that have no meaning
in supposedly colorblind and enlightened Europe. To me it indicates that
demands to be protected by the system do not have to exclude the attempt
to radically change or dismantle it.
This is also evident at my home campus. I teach at the University of
California, San Diego (UCSD), where Tijuana, Mexico, is only miles away.
While the conditions produced by the US government’s response to the so-
called refugee caravan got much attention and, temporarily, brought lots
of press and volunteers to town, it is a relatively small group of activists
who remain consistently involved. A number of them are current or former
UCSD students, working until exhaustion, while also fluent in the language
of self-care and trigger warnings. In my experience, the latter are often a
shorthand for students’ attempts to make sense of their shifting position in
the world; that is, this is not necessarily about specific issues or images they
are exposed to but about larger fears and stresses. Calls for trigger warn-
ings, safe spaces, and especially self-care tend to activate my Grumpy Old
Man Fatima persona, but I acknowledge that I come from a not very pro-
ductive “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” background, which is

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 enhanced by being an immigrant into a culture that performs emotion in
ways that are still sometimes baffling to me (and I do worry about the many
immigrant students from similar cultural backgrounds who might not be
helped but, rather, further alienated by this shift in campus culture). In
classes, I try to work with community agreements instead, which means we
proactively and collectively take ownership of the class room experience,
focusing less on avoiding triggers than on strategies to deal with the anger,
trauma, and sadness that invariably surface when addressing the experi-
ences of communities of color under racial capitalism.
This is not to deny that we do have a responsibility for our students,
which might not consist of avoiding all their triggers but does include care
for their emotional well-being. As important are the material conditions
they face and the resources they have, not only once they arrive at campus
but also before — and attention to the fact that many potential students never
arrive (the percentage of Black students at UCSD, for example, continues to
hover around 1.5 percent, while that of Black faculty lingers at 2 percent).6
Administrators meanwhile have picked up on the advantages of focusing
on students’ mental and emotional well-being. In the face of attacks — be it
a white man in La Jolla shooting Black people at a pool party “because his
girlfriend left him” or escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric on the national
level — our administration is quick in offering sympathy and references to
campus mental health services. Universities can and should offer these ser-
vices, but this is not where our responsibility ends or begins, or where our
greatest strength as academic institutions lies.

Sherene Seikaly: In my research and political work, safety and security are
mottos of dispossession. In Palestine, the Israeli state’s mobilization of secu-
rity and safety work to dispossess the Palestinian. The Palestinian stands
as a threat to security, not a subject who may desire security. The War on
Terror nourished this logic in the United States. While recognizing these
post-9/11 realities, it is important to also work across and underneath them.
Arab authoritarian regimes, whose intimate codependency and alignment
with Israeli state interests and power are today clearer than ever, have long
mobilized security and safety to suffocate revolutionary potential. How do
we balance the longing for safety and security with our understanding of
how these ideas strip, contain, and suffocate individuals and collectives?
To me, coming back to teach in the United States after a decade in
Europe and later at the American University of Cairo, trigger warnings
looked like another weapon to contain and police. On the first day of my
modern Middle East history class, I gave a blanket trigger warning: every-
thing in this course will trigger you. There will be blood. You have to deal.
The regime of trigger warnings had placed a barrier between me and my
students. It did not take long to wake up. I quickly learned to appreciate and

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 be empathetic to my students, who in the public system often navigate two,
sometimes three jobs and face a future of debt, uncertainty, and insecurity.
It took me a while, but I came to learn that the language of trigger warnings,
as Fatima suggests above, was “often a shorthand for students’ attempts to
make sense of their shifting position in the world.”
Dismantling the trigger warning as a barrier required two steps. The
first was to invite students to search for commonalities in addition to differ-
ences among the Iraqis, Egyptians, Palestinians, Turks, Kurds, Algerians,
Iranians, Israelis, and others they were learning about. The second was to
explain that we were not just learning about these other people; we were also
learning about ourselves. The tactics and strategies of historical actors are
an abundant resource for confronting our realities. Students in the United
States today are subject to the ravages of neoliberalism; they understand
what it might mean for people in other places. Many students are increas-
ingly denied the promises of security and safety. They live the reality that
things can always get worse; we do not have to teach them this lesson. The
task at hand is to dismantle and repurpose trigger warnings in a way that
models radical empathy and provides students with tools to enact it.

Aniruddha Dutta: Concerns about safety are articulated in distinct and

sometimes contradictory ways as they move across different geopolitical
settings within and outside the United States. While doing ethnographic
fieldwork in 2017, I participated in a discussion on safe spaces in a meeting
of a queer-trans collective comprising individuals and nonprofit organiza-
tions within and beyond Kolkata, in eastern India. One attendee brought
up an experience of sexual assault while working with a local activist, ask-
ing whether the collective could take any action to support such survivors.
While the attendees were sympathetic, some expressed concern that the
collective should not be turned into a khap panchayat or “kangaroo court”
where sexual assault allegations would be arbitrated. They reiterated that
the principles of “natural justice” would need to be followed. In the Indian
context, khap panchayats are extralegal councils of caste elders who mete
out popular justice to people who violate codes of caste patriarchy, such as
intercaste couples. The evocation of the khap here suggests that the demand
for adherence to natural justice principles goes beyond a liberal demand for
due process so common in #MeToo conversations, to further reflect a con-
cern over hegemonic social morality and mob justice that have imperiled
queer, trans, and other marginalized people in South Asia and beyond. I
pointed out routine cases of workplace exploitation within nonprofits where
trans feminine kothi-hijra staff from working-class and Dalit (oppressed
caste) backgrounds cannot even raise allegations without risking their
livelihood — thus the exceptionalist attention to sexual assault would result
in a safe space only for select middle-class activists who could afford to raise

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 such allegations. Another participant proposed that the collective should be
conceptualized as an enabling space rather than a safe space, where com-
plainants would be enabled to share their stories and seek legal help, but the
collective would not pronounce judgments or take punitive action. In this
context, the imperative of preventing miscarriage of collective justice takes
precedence over “safe space,” which emerges as less of a valued ideal rela-
tive to many similar spaces within the United States.
At the University of Iowa, in response to students’ experiences of mis-
gendering, my colleagues and I developed a paragraph on gender inclusivity
and nondiscrimination for course syllabi that encouraged the use of pre-
ferred gender pronouns and forbade expressions of hate in the classroom.
However, we were wary that such clauses could be used to shut down cri-
tiques of systemic power and privileged groups by teachers and students. I
have received course evaluations that pan my classes as biased against white
students. The syllabus insert thus specified that “the critical analysis of
social hierarchies and systems . . . [and] any critique of advantaged groups
is fully protected under academic freedom, and is quite different from sin-
gling out individual students who are members of such groups.” However,
when this insert moved through the bureaucracy of the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences for approval, these sentences were removed. Another
sentence targeting “expressions of hate and bigotry” against marginalized
people was replaced by a broader clause prohibiting discrimination against
protected identities, which excluded the specific word expressions so as to not
run afoul of constitutional free speech protections. Seemingly, structural
critique is not explicitly protected from the safe space discourse, but indi-
vidualized freedom of speech is — and it is not students who are the agents
or dupes of such a predictably neoliberal process but, rather, administra-
tive logics that protect the university from potential litigation based on the
first amendment.
And yet, the bureaucratic uptake of the insert also points to the rising
institutional cachet of diversity — even the modified statement might not
have been passed a few years ago. Following Sara Ahmed’s critique of insti-
tutional diversity discourse as a “nonperformative,” 7 this episode points
to how a tokenistic valorization of diversity and nondiscrimination might
take precedence over structural change. While the modified nondiscrimi-
nation statement made its way into university syllabi, a Spring 2019 digi-
tal campaign by students using the hashtag #DoesUIowaLoveMe revealed
unchecked incidents of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, and transphobia
on campus. Many students critiqued the lack of adequate resources for
sexual assault survivors, the lack of therapists from minority backgrounds,
long wait times for mental health care, and underfunded minority cultural
centers. In a context where the Republican state government repeatedly
mandates cuts in the university budget, leading to the retrenchment of staff,

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 adjunctification of faculty, and cost-cutting across departments (but not
reduction of upper-level administrative salaries), a syllabus insert on safer
and more inclusive classrooms may serve as a convenient gesture of insti-
tutional commitment to diversity without ensuring the resources needed to
combat structural discrimination. Contrastingly, students involved in the
campaign also evoked the ideal of the university as a space of safety and
belonging but pushed it toward a systemic critique of infrastructural gaps.8
Safety and safe space thus gather contrasting valences—an aspira-
tional tool for equalizing higher education, a neoliberal ruse that tokenizes
diversity, a feared capitulation to hegemonic morality — rather than func-
tioning as a coherent logic or discourse, neoliberal or otherwise.

Paul Amar: Security and safety have become defining terms shaping the man-
agement of populations and the content of pedagogy in US universities. In
the twenty-first century, this trend has been paralleled by the systematic tar-
geting of schools by armament cultures and militarized masculinisms, lead-
ing to horrific shooting incidents, intimidation and “lawfare” against student
groups and faculty of color, and escalating student suicide rates. Educational
institutions, as some of the last remaining spaces of the public, are serving as
security laboratories. In this context, how could we imagine schools expand-
ing liberal commitments to academic freedom and skills-based empower-
ment or, more substantively, aiming for redistribution of cultural capital and
the means of knowledge production? Or will schools become prisonized as
lockdown zones patrolling for bullying, trolling, or worse and thereby entirely
folded into the security-surveillance industrial complex?
Take the university where I work, University of California, Santa
Barbara (UCSB). Perched on a beautiful plateau overlooking beaches and
the Pacific Ocean, the school might seem detached from the violence of
securitization and social change, but, in fact, we are at the heart of it. In
1968, students at UCSB and at San Francisco State University mobilized
sit-ins and challenges to university administrations that led to the creation
of the first Black studies and Chicano studies programs in California. In
1969 a historically massive oil spill surrounded the campus and generated
international mobilization that catalyzed the environmental movement and
founded Earth Day. And in 1970 a student uprising erupted against the
Vietnam War and the LA Police Department (LAPD), which had been
commissioned to rule Isla Vista (the unincorporated student city adjacent to
the UCSB campus) with an iron fist, despite its location one hundred miles
north of Los Angeles. In subsequent protests, UCSB student Kevin Moran
was shot and killed by the LAPD. Ever since this age of student revolution,
Isla Vista has been regarded as a zone of high security, with students inten-
sively, “protectively” policed.
Another way to consider safety and security is in relation to the risk

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 management of study abroad and international research. UCSB is the home
of the UC Education Abroad Program; my global studies department has
the highest proportion of students in international study opportunities in
the entire UC system. Despite their high profile, these programs have been
choked by securitization. For example, students were ordered to leave Egypt
during the Arab Spring. Subsequently, insurance companies and political-
risk consultants have refused to authorize the reopening of study abroad
in the country. This has had real economic effects on youth in the Middle
East, since it led to the near bankruptcy of our partner school, the American
University in Cairo. AUC is one of the most important educational insti-
tutions in the Middle East, which depends on international student tuition
to be able to offer scholarships for less privileged Arab students. And this
process has been repeated in a number of sites. The security or risk rating
for a site seems to be shaped by generalized notions of cultural otherness,
by Eurocentrism, and by political risk experts rather than by dialogue with
knowledgeable educators on the ground, much less with youth and student
movements in those world regions targeted as at risk. Programs in Paris,
Rome, or London are never closed, although students frequently become
injured or even arrested during study abroad in Europe. And, as we know,
shooting and assaults of students in Santa Barbara are far more numerous
than on any of our international campuses.
The university also watches over faculty travels, sending warnings
that securitize faculty movement and displace liability onto them. I am wor-
ried that insurance, security, and political-risk agencies, not academics, are
overseeing student study abroad and increasingly monitoring researchers.
These risk agencies are not fluent in the nuances of the social, political, and
educational contexts in these regions. Their calculations are not neutral in
terms of world region or race and culture. I understand that universities are
responsible for the undergraduates that study abroad under their umbrella.
Yet students are adults, and it is odd that the educational process should
generate mechanisms to reinfantilize students. The experience of study
abroad should be the essential opposite of infantilization.

All of your responses demonstrate the usefulness and limits of safety rhetoric on
the left and the right. Might you elaborate on what you see to be the implications
of this flexibility, and how it has shaped life on campus, both for you as a faculty
member and for students?

Holmes: Campus safety experts spend a significant amount of time thinking

about how to make campus alert systems more effective. When safety alerts
are effective, recipients respond to news of an emergency with “protec-
tive behaviors.”9 These include remaining still, reporting any sightings of a
threat to security forces (most often campus police), and remaining atten-

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 tive to electronic devices for further instructions from campus authorities.
Campus safety administrators are also keen to make safety alerts “sticky,”
so that recipients will remain on high alert until every possible threat has
been neutralized.10 The coercive bent of the campus alert system starts from
the moment students, faculty, and staff join what is often called the “campus
community.” Nearly every institution of higher education creates an email
address for community members and strongly encourages them to submit
their cellular information so that text notification can reach their phones
in the event of an emergency. Nor can we blame campus administrators for
their aggressive recruitment of user data. Following the tragic shooting at
Virginia Tech in 2007, a bipartisan Congress and the Bush administration
passed the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which, among other things,
amended the 1990 Clery Act to penalize colleges that failed to notify stu-
dents about an ongoing threat in a “timely manner.”11
Nonetheless, the tragic irony of campus emergency alert systems is
that they succeed by inciting terror rather than alleviating it. A recent quali-
tative study of teen interaction with emergency alert system found partici-
pants were “likely to feel fear and worry if they received [emergency] alerts
in a real-world setting.” To quote one of the participants, “ ‘I would do as
the message says but in a panic.’ ” Researchers also found that participants,
“felt reassured and at ease upon receiving the ‘all clear’ message.”12 Alerts
produce panic, which incentivizes compliance. These findings demonstrate
how emergency notifications systems create “campus community” through
emotional management. Given the administrative compartments that sepa-
rate student life from faculty and staff labor, receiving an emergency alert
is one of the few “universal” on-campus experiences. In the wake of actual
or neutralized violence, campus administrators will often praise members
of the campus community for giving into threat response by complying
with emergency instructions and participating in protective behaviors. We
should be deeply troubled by gestures toward community amid moments
of collective panic. Research into social anxiety finds that safety-seeking
behaviors — in this case looking to security forces for instructions and reas-
surance during a disaster — can cause individuals to misattribute the feel-
ing of safety to an external object or a compulsive behavior. In other words,
emergency alert systems delivered to handheld devices, whose omnipres-
ence hooks them directly into our central nervous systems, legitimize and
reinforce both our fear response and an automatic trust in security forces.
You can, no doubt, intuit the problem this sort of emotional manage-
ment poses to Black people on any college campus, but particularly pre-
dominately white institutions. Black people, to paraphrase Fanon, continue
to represent a phobic object in the minds of the majority population; this is
something few of us can ever forget. When I have received emergency alerts
while working at predominately white institutions, I have not been reas-

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 sured. When a man wielding a machete was shot by University of Colorado
Boulder police in the spring of 2016, the emergency alert left me concerned
for my own safety. I now knew I was surrounded by thousands of fellow
campus community members whose threat response had just been activated
at the flip of a switch. Their heightened anxiety, I knew, would increase
rather than decrease at news that the police had used deadly force, because
the very deployment of that force would mark the suspect — without benefit
of a trial — as a genuine threat to campus safety. It goes without saying that
a campus of powerfully activated and anxious white people does not and
cannot represent a safe space for people of color.
Digital notifications of everyday on-campus crime offer empty com-
fort for Black and brown people. While at the University of Virginia, my
colleagues at the Woodson Institute were paralyzed by a crime alert that
vaguely described a Black man “in a hoodie and jeans” who had been “iden-
tified” as a suspect in a number of recent sexual assaults. If emergency
alerts during a potential mass shooting encourage deference to state vio-
lence, crime alerts actively deputize the campus community, encouraging
anyone within a university’s digital jurisdiction to be on the lookout for rele-
vant information. Here again, people of color are faced with the impossible
choice of hoping the alleged criminal is quickly apprehended and battling
fear that racialized crime anxiety will make them the victim of a different
sort of violence.
Perhaps the most devastating moment in the experiential and nar-
rative arc of the campus safety response is when, inevitably, the dean or
university president announces that the event is over. Often this arrives
as a notification indicating that “all is clear.” But is it? There are unre-
ported micro- and macroaggressions on a daily basis. It is impossible for
them to know that “all is clear” on their campus. Yet provided campus alert
systems allow administrators to create a virtual record of safety, they can
avoid accountability for their institutions inability to provide comprehensive
safety all members of the campus community.

Amar: The gendered moral control of student life is a key battleground for
the progressive as well as reactionary aspects of security and safety prac-
tices, where respectability politics and militarized economies fuse. Stu-
dents are consistently interpolated as partiers rather than public citizens
or activists. I am interested in the violence of infantilization when “child”
subjects (of any age) are created structurally so as to render or represent
them as unautonomous, insecure, debilitated emotionally and politically,
and thus dependent on security regimes.13 This configuration reveals how
the contemporary predilection toward shooting and caging children could
emerge from a humanitarian hegemony obsessed with rescuing and pro-
tecting children.

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 UCSB students, despite their rich history of public engagement, polit-
ical history making, and successful collective action, are routinely repre-
sented merely as wild things, especially in Isla Vista. A state of continuous
moral panic hovers over the campus and residential areas, conscripting
what Kwame describes here as phobic subjects. Protective and preventative
policing explicitly defines the practices of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol (the
security service that replaced the LAPD). This approach includes preven-
tively arresting intoxicated young women to jail them overnight to “pro-
tect” them from hypothetical sexual assault. At the same time, efforts by
student collectives to purge frat hazing and to focus on creative women-
centered, trans-, queer-, and nonbinary-positive socializing and accompa-
nying “decrim” policy around sex work, houselessness, and pot, have not
won university support. Instead, fraternities persist untouched, and polic-
ing is the university’s primary response: chain-link fencing walls off the
entire campus community from the outside world, and checkpoints and
stop-and-frisk practices transform the campus into a militarized camp.
Students and workers organized a housing cooperative and food coop and
struggled for decades to gain municipality status for Isla Vista, which lan-
guished as a dependency of the county and the university. In 1972, activ-
ists won the Isla Vista Recreation and Parks District, but it was not until
2017 that they created a community services district, a “junior municipal-
ity” that provides sanitation, recreation, and other services but cannot pass
resolutions around rent control or police oversight.
Rather that reproduce the discourse of safe space, this case study
points to the importance of focusing on other kinds of advocacy: redistribu-
tive justice and substantive sovereignty among students and the communi-
ties within they live and work. Student organizers’ collective aim has been
to create transparent mechanisms for ensuring the accountability of police,
landlords, and campus administrators, as well as to shape responses to
violence — not just sexual violence but also the violence of eviction, policing,
“slumlord” neglect and price gouging, and racist/misogynistic housemate
interaction. The effort to center issues of race, gender, sexuality, and migra-
tion in public governance, to support student sovereignty, and to redis-
tribute resources stands at the heart of a “decrim” political economy of
the university or a decarceral politics. These students advocate an alterna-
tive to the project of safe space that, as Christina has analyzed, deploys a
police-centered framework in which sexuality triggers apparatuses of liabil-
ity rather than fostering autonomy and collective transformation.

Ahuja: I have a couple of comments on these points. The first relates to

issues raised by students in the classroom, the politics of safety within, and
the moralizing discourse on student infantilization raised cogently by sev-
eral of the responses above. As a practical concern, I think that some of

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 the criticisms of requests for content warnings and other interventions into
pedagogical practice are worth careful consideration, as they can open into
larger discussions of power dynamics at the university. Student activists,
including feminist and antiracist activists who seek to rethink the power
dynamics of the classroom, regularly point out how university classrooms
and infrastructure have generally been hierarchical spaces in which access
and resources are radically unequal. As greater numbers of students from
more varied backgrounds are corralled into the university rather than given
opportunities for formal employment, and as these students make demands
for diversification of the curriculum and reckoning with structures of vio-
lence on campus, it should be no surprise that they might challenge the
pedagogical assumptions and classroom technologies developed in the tra-
ditional disciplines. This includes requests that we carefully think about
how we bring large groups of students into conversation around histories
and representations of social violence.
I believe it is possible to do this without transforming such experi-
ments into a regressive quest to make everyone at the university safe. That
potential pitfall is something that the far Right in the United States has been
attempting to exploit at my own campus. The American Renaissance — a
blog and lecture series that attempts to project an elite and intellectual face
for white nationalism — has created a series of posters for alt-right students
to post on campus. These posters include messages like “it’s OK to be
white” and feature idealized images of a retro white femininity that is to be
defended against campus feminism. In 2018, these posters appeared mul-
tiple times on the hallway door outside the offices of several faculty in criti-
cal race and ethnic studies and feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz. On the
level of content, such posters register how the Right attempts to couch its
identity politics in the language of white minoritization and within biopo-
litical frameworks of demographic decline and durable cultural difference.
Such strategies have been critiqued in a long line of critical race and femi-
nist research on the post–civil rights racial revanchist race-gender discourses
of the Right. The more complex element of the messaging occurs on the
level of form. Because such posters were in this case targeted to interrupt
the everyday messaging of departmental bulletin boards and office doors
(where various safety and resource messages for trans students, sexual
assault survivors, Muslim students, Spanish-speaking students, and oth-
ers are displayed alongside event and book flyers), they take advantage of
the apparent substitutability of group identity in the ecology of postings in
order to suggest that white male safety would logically unfold as a natural
element of identitarian claims of inclusion. But in this case, the purported
threat to safety is the academic departments, curricular formations, and
personnel present in the built space of the academic unit. As such, the
postings draw power from their potential to activate the response of the

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 departments themselves, who may take a range of actions, including engag-
ing campus police, publicly denouncing the posters, or enforcing campus
flyer policies for removal. Although I simply removed the posters I found,
notifying other faculty and staff about the incident led immediately to the
generation of a report that went to campus police, whom I had not intended
to involve. The posting effectively trolls the department into performing its
relation to the institution as one of sovereignty, surveillance, and policing,
most likely in ways that further the suggestion that women, people of color,
and gender-nonconforming people hold outsized power at the university —
all this despite the marginalized relation of these units to traditional disci-
plines, funding, and resources. Simultaneously, the spectacular and nos-
talgic nature of the images will be accurately read by persons transiting the
space within a longer history of public spectacles of racism. In this case, the
posters associating white nationalism with safety and inclusion messaging
were particularly effective in rhetorically and performatively activating a
revanchist logic of threatened white masculinity at the institution.

Seikaly: I am a scholar and product of Palestinian history. I am often frus-

trated when people express admiration because I work on and teach a topic
that is so controversial. This categorization of the Zionist-Palestinian con-
flict and Israel/Palestine essentializes and exceptionalizes the place and its
history. In the context of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)
movement and the entrenchment of the ongoing Nakba, or catastrophe, that
is Palestinian reality, administrators and lobbyists weaponize safe space and
free speech to shut down any critique of Israel. Antisemitism is a salient
charge. These charges instill fear in teachers, students, and organizers. These
patterns of policing speech and action have already escalated in the wake of
Donald Trump’s December 2018 executive order that elides the critique of
Israel with antisemitism. Here, too, we can chart how the manufacturing
of safe space, as Neel suggests, “can entrench the role of university admin-
istration and coursework in state security apparatuses.”14 In a sense the
Palestine/Israel case is a good case study for diagnosing the neoliberal belly
of the safe space beast while fostering transformative and collaborative
learning environments.
Several strategies can facilitate collaborative intentions and outcomes.
First, it is crucial to delink safety from discomfort, to embrace risk and diffi-
culty as rich opportunities for learning, and to aim for fostering brave rather
than safe spaces. Here, too, I am following the leads of Aniruddha, who
discusses above enabling as opposed to safe spaces, and Kwame, who sug-
gests above that confronting the challenges of our times requires “campus
communities to sit in emotional ambiguities.” Three steps facilitate brave
spaces in a course on Israel/Palestine. One is to decenter conflict as the only
way to grasp the history, present, and alternative futures of Israel/Palestine.

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 For this reason, I teach a class titled History of Israel/Palestine, as opposed
to the History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. A second strategy is to locate
Israel/Palestine in the broader histories it speaks to: European nationalism
and its exclusionary and violent trajectory, Arab nationalism and its flaws
and fallacies, settler colonialism as both an idea and a practice, the rise and
consolidation of US empire, anticolonial revolutionary possibilities and fail-
ures, and race and racialization as mechanisms of subjectivity and power, to
name a few. In making these links, students can deexceptionalize Palestine
and learn to link it with broader conditions and phenomena. They can also
experience how learning about people they understand as the other can
teach us about ourselves.
A third strategy is to insist on antiracism as a shared goal. This insis-
tence infuses the room with a mutual accountability to name, own, and
tackle Orientalism, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and antisemitism. Students
and scholars of Palestine who are invested in the Palestinian demand for
freedom can shy away from engaging antisemitism because of how it has
been weaponized to silence critique. This is not a viable strategy, neither
pedagogically nor politically. The history and present of antisemitism are
crucial to understanding the history of Palestine. Antisemitism is inextri-
cable from historical and contemporary iterations and experiences of race.
I devote considerable time in each Israel/Palestine course to learning about
antisemitism and what it can tell us about European nationalism and the
failed promises of the Enlightenment. I also engage how Jewish Americans’
relationship to whiteness is historically shifting and contingent. Finally, I
return to the idea of radical empathy I mentioned above. While adminis-
trators and lobbyists often speak on behalf of Jewish American students to
silence critique of Israel, they do not and should not ventriloquize these var-
ied experiences or concerns. In this vein, it is important to teach the Nakba
(“catastrophe” in Arabic) not in opposition to but in conjunction with the
Shoah (“catastrophe” in Hebrew), or the Holocaust. The Shoah and the
Nakba are not comparable or similar. Teaching them together, however,
does show us how catastrophe is central to both Jewish and Palestinian his-
tories and experiences.

El-Tayeb: I would argue for an intersectional, bottom-up approach as our

best chance to push for change and avoid being instrumentalized by the
institution and integrated into a neoliberal model of securitized diversity
that was always harmful but is especially so now.
This understanding is in part based on my experience as faculty at
UCSD during the 2010 student protests against the so-called Compton
Cookout, one in long line of racist, misogynist, and queerphobic events
met with no or tepid responses by the university administration. On a sur-
face level, the undergraduate-led activism could be seen as successful: as

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 a result of months of actions and negotiations, the university created a
vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion position and three new
student resource centers (for Black, Latinx, and Native students, in addi-
tion to existing women’s, LGBT, and cross-cultural centers), introduced
campus-wide diversity requirements, and increased funding for the African
American studies minor. Nonetheless, many activists — especially the queer
and female students of color who sustained the movement with their tire-
less work — look back on their struggle with an acute sense of failure. While
I agree that they did not achieve their major goal, namely, a campus hos-
pitable to and representative of California’s diverse population — in other
words, a safe space for all students — I believe they have little reason to
blame themselves. Rather, it was pressure from both administration and
progressive faculty to be pragmatic that led to internal divisions and to the
abandonment of the intersectional, grassroots approach developed by the
undergraduates, which in fact had been quite successful. UCSD’s Student
Affirmative Action Committee was established in the 1970s as part of the
struggle for the Lumumba-Zapata College, meant to represent students
of color and working-class students. This coalition of progressive under-
graduate groups was at the heart of the response to the 2010 Black Student
Union’s declaration of a state of emergency at UCSD. The activists saw the
anti-Black and misogynoir Compton Cookout frat party not as a scandal-
ous exception but as symptomatic of a neoliberal public university increas-
ingly excluding the public. The students’ demands thus were driven by an
understanding of safe space that required the fundamental transformation
of the campus. Their list of demands, while centering Black students, acted
in the tradition of the Combahee River Collective’s realization that “if Black
women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free
since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of
oppression.”15
The undergraduate activists succeeded in transforming the campus
and in mobilizing enough resistance to force the administration to engage
with all of their demands. These successes were undermined, however, by
pressure to be “realistic” and “pragmatic,” to focus on a single issue (inci-
dents of anti-Black racism that would be resolved while leaving the larger
system of exclusion intact), and to keep this private to UCSD (rather than
continuing to build ties with local communities of color from which the
campus usually is willfully isolated) and by the claim that effective negotia-
tions require the designation of powerful leaders and the exclusion of the
grassroots coalition driving the activism.
This pressure came not only from the administration but also from
nominally radical male faculty taking on leadership roles. Unsurprisingly,
this led to the increasing marginalization of female and queer activists who
had done much of the exhausting and unglamorous work that had made

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 the movement possible. The end result of this pragmatism was a super-
ficial diversity that could be used by the administration, while hiring and
retention of faculty of color, especially Black and Native, remains abysmal
and there are consistently low numbers of Black and Native students and
a growing hostility toward identity politics and political correctness (also
known as anything that would empower people of color). In retrospect, I
am still deeply impressed with the students’ commitment, political insights,
and strategic smarts and utterly disheartened not so much by the adminis-
tration’s reaction, which was as expected, but by the failure of progressive
faculty of color to support the students’ radical vision, instead using their
supposed expertise and power to force them back into a system beyond
whose limits most of us seem incapable of seeing, even while it is implod-
ing. If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that the current, seemingly
individualized understanding of safe spaces is in part a reaction to a fail-
ure of imagination not of a new generation of apolitical students but of our
generation of faculty.

Dutta: I want to reflect on contrasting right-wing utilizations of safe space

discourse with reference to the aforementioned student-led #DoesUIowa
LoveMe campaign. The immediate trigger for the campaign was an anti-
immigrant demonstration on campus in February 2019 organized by the
student group Young Americans for Freedom, which displayed a banner
with the “Build the Wall” slogan on a campus walkway. Facing student
backlash, the university administration restated its commitment to diversity
but also cited its inability to curtail free speech and sanction student groups
based on political ideology. During a meeting of a collegiate diversity com-
mittee, one of my colleagues, Naomi Greyser, pointed out that the group
was looking for precisely such action. Young Americans for Freedom, sup-
ported by the right-wing Young America’s Foundation (YAF), consciously
baits universities into free-speech-related litigation. As the YAF states, “Are
your free speech rights being curtailed on your campus? Of course they
are! . . . especially if you want to promote conservative ideas. Well, we can
help you push back.”16 This points to the imbrication of campus conser-
vatism with right-wing organizing and capital, which selectively oppose
the university’s surveillance of “free speech” while extending national-
ist logics of securitization and border control into the campus, all while
positioning conservatives as putative victims. YAF’s strategy of “pushing
back” parallels the right-wing tactic discussed by Neel above, which “effec-
tively trolls the department into performing its relation to the institution
as one of sovereignty, surveillance, and policing.” However, both admin-
istrative and student response at Iowa frustrated the desired binarization
of “free speech” and safety/diversity discourse (“political correctness” in
YAF’s words) that such baiting or trolling feeds on. The campaign did not

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 emphasize punitive action but, rather, used the incident as a lever to critique
broader systemic issues, pointing out how support for the “free speech” of
this right-wing student group is not matched by infrastructural support for
underrepresented groups: “Many students said the quick defense offered to
Young Americans for Freedom seemed in contrast to a lack of support cam-
pus minorities felt.”17 The baiting strategy was dodged without letting the
administration off the hook, pushing the university beyond the liberal logic
of free speech to address inequities in voice, representation, and systemic
support that characterize the campus.
Meanwhile, ironically, campus conservatives have also utilized insti-
tutional mechanisms meant to further diversity and equity when it suits
their purposes. For instance, recently the university released the results of a
comprehensive campus climate survey meant to assess the state of diversity,
equity, and inclusion, which predictably exposed significant experiences
of gender, racial, and class bias faced by minority students, faculty, and
staff. One suggestive finding was that conservative students claim the most
discrimination in terms of political orientation but also state that issues of
diversity, equity, and inclusion are overemphasized. In other words, the dis-
course of discrimination is all very well as long as it does not disturb exist-
ing configurations of power on campus and beyond. I want to suggest that
perhaps such contradictions in discourses of diversity and safety might be
used as a lever to question right-wing tactics without falling into the afore-
mentioned trap of reinforcing securitization and surveillance. The lure of
diversity and safety discourse as a bait for free speech trolling, on one hand,
and as a mechanism for articulating white/conservative victimhood, on the
other, might serve to undo the dichotomy of liberal freedoms versus politi-
cal correctness that the right-wing machinery relies on. The very slipperi-
ness of safety/diversity politics that permits its uptake by the Right might
also frustrate conservative deployments of these terms. Such ambivalence
demonstrates the lack of any singular socioeconomic logic behind safety/
diversity discourse seen in my previous response, and its inability to guar-
antee a liberatory or reactionary politics by itself.

Recognizing that you are not all identified with queer studies, do you see your
theorization of security and campus politics as fitting within new or long-standing
directions in queer studies, such as subjectless and queer of color critique, or, if not,
what other frameworks resonate and why?

El-Tayeb: My responses here and my larger research grapple with the ques-
tion of pragmatism and radicalism: How much do we internalize the risk
management logic of neoliberalism in our imagination of what is safely pos-
sible? How many risks are we really willing to take? Much of my work focuses
on activism by queer people of color that falls out of common understand-
ings of the political, or at least the politically effective, but that for me offers

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 examples of subversive practices imagining radically different socialities.
Part of the challenge is to find modes of theorization that can appreciate
these practices on their own terms, instead of measuring them against a
model of progress that tends to fail multiply marginalized communities.
Rather than favoring either so-called pragmatic approaches claiming to
focus on what is achievable (as opposed to supposedly unrealistic radical
demands) or allowing radical demands to stand in for the less flashy work
of creating institutional change, queer of color critique for me is a mode
of analysis and action that requires us to remain flexible and attentive to
context. At the same time, it allows us to connect seemingly disparate or
failed struggles to create a more complex and accurate — and ultimately
more hopeful — picture of global resistance.

Ahuja: It was necessary to move away from a unitary sexual subject for
queer critique to construct new accounts of the racial violences of neoliber-
alism and imperial war, especially in the early 2000s when the United States
launched its new long wars in Southwest Asia. Those events have done
much to produce our current moment of rising fascism, wherein minori-
tized identities form the archive of enemies central to fascist aesthetics.
From this vantage, it is necessary to consider how our rendering as enemy
is accomplished in part through our apparent success at institutionalization.
So if queer theory continues to be generated primarily in the university, the
hierarchical structure of its intellectual production will continuously pose
the problem of who is situated to do critique, of who is excluded from the
scene of intellectual production, and thus of whether critique can in any
case be subjectless.

Amar: Going against the parochialism of certain conventional American

studies or area studies work, my research examines how southern regimes
of security shape power in the global North. I am particularly interested in
how racialized and sexualized populations are rendered as targets of arma-
ment, punishment, and security — and simultaneously as the subjects of
protection and rescue. This security trap makes unrecognizable the politics
of redistribution or autonomy demanded by targeted/rescued populations.
To help unlock this trap, I trace how resistance movements and projects
of radical autonomy subvert these dynamics of securitization in order to
expose the social prerogatives and material interests of security regimes and
to enable politics of redistribution rather than protection, sovereignty rather
than dependency or debilitation.
I generate subjectless critique by identifying and theorizing these tac-
tics of desecuritization. Desecuritization constitutes a particular breed of
materialist deconstruction, elaborated by activists in the sites I study. These
activists expose and turn inside out security-state logics that render subjects
stable or spaces safe only in accordance with the interests of militarized

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 capitalisms that dispossess and render dependent. These inspiring projects
of desecuritization via participatory redistribution remind me a lot of the
classroom-scale alternatives generated by my colleagues above — Neel in his
discussion of students recoding Islamophobic CVE safe spots, Sherene and
her students’ deconstruction of barriers and redistribution of empathies,
and Fatima’s reimagining of trigger conversations as a collective labor of
repositioning and sense making.

Holmes: In this roundtable, I’ve attempted to model a method for historiciz-

ing collective feeling through a cursory reading of objects (smartphones)
through which we experience emotion and systems (emergency alerts)
that manage emotions en masse. My analysis is indebted to affect theory,
but that category of analysis remains too narrowly defined. My thinking
about the relation between alert systems and my experience of terror when
caught within a field of networked safety owes as much to Frantz Fanon and
Hortense Spillers as it does Brian Massumi.
Indeed, we too easily forget that the political movements that pro-
duced Black studies, women and gender studies, and various iterations of
queer inquiry were themselves in a generative (though often uneasy) rela-
tionship with psychoanalytic therapeutic methods. Well, to be fair, the we I
am referring to here are my fellow historians. Yet as history expands its pur-
view from telling the stories of queer subjects to incorporating queer theory
as method, modern Americanists will need to return to the emotive origins
of the social movements we study. What happens to our studies of Black
Power, when we take seriously Fanon’s career as a practicing analyst? How
can we better narrate the conflict between white and Black feminisms if we
don’t take seriously Hortense Spillers’s discussions of the impossible subject
position of Black women in the West? Can we make sense of the origins of
modern homonormativity without always keeping in mind gay liberation’s
preoccupation with shame? I guess I’m saying, no, we can’t.
Until now, historians have primarily narrated those once-marginalized
identities as launch pads for political activity that can be measured by the
success or failure of legislative agendas. However understandable, the field’s
reluctance to engage emotion as a material structure, as a means through
which police and market forces manipulate the public over time, has left a
range of topics — histories of campus alert systems being only one exam-
ple — without a disciplinary home. If we, for example, engaged moderate
centrism as an ideology that strictly regulates emotion, in order to stifle
radical politics, we can tell a range of new stories. Suddenly, the ascendance
of objective markers of character, like credit-rating systems, merit-based
affirmative action, or the use of DNA results in the criminal justice sys-
tem can be woven together as exogenous bulwarks to centrist supremacy.
Thinking about historical emotion and, more pressingly, about the way cen-

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 trism squeezed emotion from public view can help us understand the popu-
larization of Donald Trump, who offers an affectively starved nation an
endless buffet of rage, fear, projection, and absurdism that cannot coincide
with capital’s efforts to make the populace ever more predictable. Queer
theory, and its willingness to move away from subjects and their agency,
opens an opportunity for us to write about those waves of collective feeling
that have an anything but ephemeral impact on society.

Dutta: This question evokes for me a rich moment in the politics of field
formation in South Asian academia. Tensions at the intersections of South
Asian studies, feminist studies, and queer studies became apparent after a
list of sexual harassers in academia (LoSHA), comprising male academics
of mostly Indian origin located across India, the United States, and Europe,
was circulated on social media in October 2017.18 The LoSHA, which par-
alleled lists like “Shitty Media Men” in the United States, was crowd-
sourced and posted by Raya Steier (formerly Raya Sarkar), a US-based
Dalit genderqueer feminist. The list withheld the names of the accusers and
didn’t spell out the specific charges for many of the accused, which Steier
later clarified was meant to prevent reprisals against student complainants.
The LoSHA prompted passionate debates. A statement by fourteen senior
Indian feminist scholars and activists castigated the list’s methods, arguing
that anonymous complaints reflected a lack of accountability and under-
mined feminist efforts to institute “fair and just” forms of due process.19
LoSHA supporters argued that due process had repeatedly failed survivors
and that the list pointed to the need to tackle institutionalized hierarchies
that prevented survivors from coming out and accessing justice. Given that
Steier and many of her allies were young Dalit or Bahujan (varied oppressed
caste) feminists, while the statement signatories were older and mostly
Savarna (“upper” caste), the debate soon came to be described as both
generational and between Savarna and Dalit feminisms. The statement sig-
natories and their allies accused LoSHA supporters of vigilante justice and
of splintering the feminist movement. Commentators such as Shreya Ila
Anasuya responded that South Asian feminist academia and activism were
highly hierarchical and exclusive to begin with, echoing the long-standing
critiques of white, Western, and imperial feminism by women of color and
postcolonial feminists.20 Dalit Bahujan writers and activists such as Shivani
Channan and Kuffir Nalgundwar argued that Savarna feminists were, in
effect, protecting their Savarna male friends and maintaining close-knit
elite academic networks.21 LoSHA allies contended that this was a moment
for the Savarna-dominated fields of South Asian feminism and postcolonial
studies to interrogate their own hierarchical exclusions.22
These debates evoked safety in contradictory ways. Some scholars
launched a familiar mode of queer critique that saw the LoSHA as a mani-

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 festation of a morally upright liberal feminism that was replacing risky,
subversive struggles for sexual freedom with a conservative identitarian dis-
course of safety that essentialized women as victims, attempting to make the
university into a sanitized space.23 Even as this critique was castigated for
missing power differentials for an idealized antinormativity, some LoSHA
supporters charted a very different relation between the list and safety, see-
ing it as a disruptor of the institutional status quo and silences that made
academia safe for harassers while denying safety to survivors.24 Concepts of
safety may be deployed in highly divergent and inconsistent ways, and here
we see how this fundamental ambiguity positions the LoSHA and related
struggles of field (trans)formation. Is the list promoting safe space, disrupt-
ing safe spaces, or doing both but for different constituencies? Does the
LoSHA strengthen institutional mechanisms of control through the evo-
cation of student/campus safety or is it fundamentally anti-institutional? A
key potential of the LoSHA might lie in precisely in how it troubles some of
the binaries (safe/unsafe, institutional/anti-institutional, normative/antinor-
mative) it evokes. For the stakeholders who seek to influence the future of
South Asian academia through this debate, antinormativity and subversion
remain key values, but the norms they seek to subvert (Savarna hegemony,
institutional structures, liberal feminism) shift, resulting in a contestation
over the anti/normative status of the list and its relation to discourses of
safety. This contestation, like my previous examples, exposes safe space dis-
course as a noncoherent object and the multiplicity of subjects and geopo-
litical determinations driving its manifestations, suggesting the continued
salience of the subjectless and objectless modes of critique traced by David
and Jasbir in their introduction to this issue.

Seikaly: Palestine studies and queer studies have rich intersections that
embolden political and intellectual visions and possibilities. My colleagues
Laila Farsakh, Rhoda Kananneh, and I edited a special issue on queer the-
ory and Palestine studies in the Journal of Palestine Studies, titled “Queering
Palestine.” This flagship journal of Palestine studies has aimed to attract
academics and policy circles. Farsakh, Kananneh, and I sought to break
new ground by highlighting the work that scholars of queer theory were
doing on and with Palestine. For the last decade, scholars in American
studies and ethnic studies have been grappling with Palestine in rich ways.
Yet, Palestine and Middle East studies have not been typical venues for this
scholarship. We sought to transgress what at times appear to be mutually
exclusive fields. We hoped to expand the boundaries of Palestine studies
while pushing scholars who work on Palestine from queer and ethnic stud-
ies to engage more thoroughly the theories and findings of Palestine studies.
Puar’s Right to Maim is a formative text that puts Palestine studies in
conversation with queer studies. Here biopolitics of debilitation foregrounds

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 the slow wearing down of people, the maintenance of precarity of certain
bodies, and a persistent attenuation of life. This attenuation in Palestine and
far beyond is not an event but a process. Puar suggests there is an ongoing-
ness of getting by, living on, in the midst of dispersed structural violence
and inequality. In Palestine, this process is the ongoing Nakba, the continual
process of settler dispossession. In conversation with Gayatri Spivak and
Sylvia Wynter, Puar reenvisions the mute subaltern and the genres of the
human. She calls for resisting the fantasy of queer exceptionalism and con-
necting the regulation of queerness to the regulation of sexuality and bodies
write large. She argues that we must refuse the exceptionalizing mandate of
the Israeli state that props up homosexuals as sexual citizens par excellence,
and she ties this homonationalism to the nation-building project of rehabili-
tation, reproductive biopolitics, and the capacity and debility of bodies. In
this way, ableism is intertwined with hetero and homo reproduction.
One of the most powerful questions the book asks is how we envision
the day after we get what we want. This call to imagine the day after a rev-
olution or a liberation to come is one way to think about redefining safety
and security to forge brave learning spaces. Puar’s instruction here is to
distinguish between rights and justice in order to imagine a world where
bodily capacities and debilities are embraced and not weaponized, and to
remember that justice does not have to equal sameness or assimilation. Or
in the powerful words of Mia Mingus, the disability justice activist that
Puar thinks with: “We don’t want to simply join the ranks of the privileged;
we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them.”25

Conclusion

One of our main interests in putting together this roundtable was to pro-
vincialize US-based queer studies by insisting on a geopolitically inflected
contextualization of the debate on safe space. Rendering classrooms and
other places on campus as intrinsically embedded in global relations of mili-
tarization, securitization, dispossession, and risk management, safe space
is elaborated in this roundtable in material, administrative, and pragmatic
terms: from the conceptualization of alert systems to the racialized fears
driving insurance calculations for international study programs. Amar’s
remark that US university campuses are now security labs for the honing
of technologies of control all too eerily resonates with the use of Gaza as
a laboratory for testing weaponry and defining the supposedly uninhabit-
able. Given the uneven accessibility of higher education within the United
States, these kinds of material and ideological connections are important for
destabilizing the monolith of the neoliberal student consumer subject that
too often takes center stage in debates about campus safety, sexual assault,
trigger warnings, and the like. The turn in queer theory to subjectless cri-

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 tique has been crucial to excavating relations of affect and bodies and the
harnessing of emotion by technologies of control. And yet, as Neel reminds
us, the subject producing the subjectless critique is nevertheless mired in
the self-reinforcing privileged circuits of knowledge production.
That said, connections among these fields of knowledge, institutional
sites of power, and modes of political organizing are proliferating. As this
roundtable was being conducted, we participated in the campaign to remove
Warren Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Kanders is the CEO of Safariland, a company that produces, among other
items of warfare, tear gas canisters that have been used at the US-Mexico
border as well as in Gaza. Decolonize This Place, the activist group leading
the effort at the Whitney, argued in one of their many pieces of visual pro-
test material, “There is no safe space for profiteers of state violence.”26 This
redeployment of the term, like other examples showcased in this roundtable,
refuses the safety of unchallenged power for those who deny safety for oth-
ers and demonstrates that the flexibility of the concept can be used to chal-
lenge dominant formations of power on a global scale.

Notes
1. See Rabaia, Saleh, and Giacaman, “Sick or Sad?”
2. See Wolf, “UCLA Students Seek to Counter Extremism.”
3. Martin, “Blackboard.”
4. Sayre, “Help Is a Beep Away.”
5. See Birmingham University, “University to Launch Europe’s First Black
Studies Degree.”
6. See CollegeSimply, “UCSD Demographics and Diversity.”
7. Ahmed, On Being Included, 116 – 17.
8. Bauer-Wolf, “#DoesUIowaLoveMe.”
9. Mileti and Peek, “Social Psychology of Public Response.”
10. Whitmer, Torres, and Sims, “Change in Memory of Emergency Warnings.”
11. Rob, “Tracking Campus Crimes.”
12. Wong, Jones, and Rubin, “Mobile Text Alerts.”
13. Amar, “The Street, the Sponge, and the Ultra.”
14. See Makdisi, “Push to Quash Criticism of Israel.”
15. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement.”
16. Young America’s Foundation, “Campus Activism.”
17. Bauer-Wolf, “#DoesUIowaLoveMe.”
18. Firstpost, “List of Indian Academicians Accused of Sexual Harassment.”
19. Menon, “Statement by Feminists on Facebook Campaign to ‘Name and
Shame.’ ”
20. Anasuya, “Response to a List of Sexual Harassers.”
21. Channan, “ ‘The List’ Is a Time’s Up Moment.”
22. Dwivedi and Mohan, “Amid Changing Nature of Sex as an Activity.”
23. Bose and Sen, “Liberal Vertigo, Eros, and the University.”
24. Pal, “Why Raya Sarkar’s List Is Not Vigilantism.”
25. Puar, Right to Maim, 16.

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 26. This poster was designed by Decolonize This Place (DTP) member and
artist Kyle Goen in collaboration with other members of DTP. To see more go to
kylegoen.net.

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