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Winner of the 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship

Analyzes the rhetoric of contemporary sex panics to expose how homophobia, heterosexism, and transphobia define public, political, and scholarly preoccupations with sexuality and gender
 
In Sex Panic Rhetorics, Queer Interventions, Ian Barnard makes the counter-intuitive argument that contemporary “sex panics” are undergirded by queerphobia, even when the panics in question don’t appear to have much to do with queerness. Barnard presents six case studies that treat a wide range of sex panic rhetorics around child molesters, sex trafficking, transgenderism, incest, queer kids, and pedagogy to demonstrate this argument. By using examples from academic scholarship, political discourse, and popular culture, including the Kevin Spacey scandal and the award-winning film Moonlight, Barnard shows how homophobia and transphobia continue to pervade contemporary Western culture.
 
Barnard is concerned not so much with looking at the overt homophobia and transphobia that are the more obvious objects of antihomophobic and antitransphobic critique. The author’s focus, rather, is on excavating the significant traces of these panics in a neoliberal culture that has supposedly demonstrated its civility by its embrace of diversity, renunciation of its homophobic past, and attentiveness to the transgender revolution that has swept popular media and political culture in the United States and elsewhere. During a time of increasing conservative backlashes against advancing LGBTQ rights and human rights discourses in general, this book shows why it is important to attend to the liberal covers for sex panics that are not too far removed from their rhetorically conservative cousins.
 

How do instructors navigate the tension between facilitating safe spaces for students while also challenging students intellectually in increasingly politicized classroom settings? How can trigger warnings be used to empower and/or support students and facilitate antiracist, queer, anticolonial, and other social justice-oriented pedagogies? 

Trigger Warnings: Teaching Through Trauma brings theory and praxis to examine the ideological underpinnings and pedagogy around trigger warnings and trauma, offering multiple heuristics for classroom implementation. The ongoing interest in trigger warnings is partly a result of trigger warnings and trauma becoming more inextricably interwoven in the past few years in the wake of COVID-19, mental health crises, right-wing attacks on educational institutions, climate change, and attempts at political redress and educational equity. Critiques of trigger warnings come from all sides of the political and pedagogical spectra, and even scholars and practitioners who offer a trauma-informed approach to the topic are not unified in their view of the benefits or drawbacks of trigger warnings.

Trigger Warnings: Teaching Through Trauma provides insights through a range of forms: research articles, personal essays, long and short teaching narratives, student perspectives, memoirs, vignettes, autoethnographies, reflections, case studies, manifesto, theory, and history. Not only does this collection create a more varied engagement experience for readers, but, in line with recent scholarship in “counterstory,” it also allows for a wider variety of voices to be heard and for the articulation of experiences that might not be well accommodated by traditional scholarly essays.