Safe Spaces and the politics of vulnerability
Image credit: the author
In her recent essay, “Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Time of Resilience,” Sarah Bracke identifies a clash between what she calls the “Look I Overcame” narrative and a culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces on University campuses. For Bracke, the former epitomises an enforced character trait of resilience within neoliberalism. Subjects are expected to be resilient to the harsh threats and dangers of life, to respond with overcoming rather than vulnerability, and thus those subjects who are not perceived as resilient - those who call for safe spaces, for example - are denigrated and belittled.
As both an activist and a social movement researcher, the concept of safe spaces has long interested me. My research focuses on gender discrimination and sexual violence within socialist movements, many of which are ideologically hostile to gendered ideas of vulnerability. Safe spaces, in some ways, are an attempt to explore this vulnerability. So I’d like to consider in this blog post the role of safe spaces, and why, in my opinion, they are vital spaces for the politics of vulnerability.
Safe spaces. Who'd have them? A fair number of students unions and leftist campaigns would, but the list of people who wouldn't includes, in no particular order, Stephen Fry, the Guardian, and Theresa May. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to speak for safe spaces, but the list of people to speak against them is long and acerbic in their condemnation. If you knew nothing about them, you'd think that safe spaces were some sort of ungodly bogeyman responsible for all evil in the world; Theresa May brands safe spaces as "self censorship" and even went as far as to blame them for potential problems in the UK economy. More commonly, we hear the claim that safe spaces impinge on freedom of speech, and are the product of "molly coddled" or "snowflake" students who want to live in a bubble, isolated from the sober realities of the world. It's funny, really; one of the principles of free speech, as I understand it, is that you try to understand your opponent's rationale, and it seems in the majority of cases, the free speech advocates haven't bothered to do this with safe spaces. So, now, let's speak for safe spaces, and why, in my opinion, they are a sometimes clumsy, but vital part of enriched public discussion and political participation.
Let's begin with a few distinctions. People have a tendency to elide "safe spaces" with "no platform" policies. While these are correlated, they are not the same. "No platform" (a refusal to permit someone a public stage or forum) as a political concept originates from the anti-fascist movement, as a way of preventing the dissemination of racist ideas. This in itself is not a concept which is divorced from wider societal expectations - we do, after all, have a legally enshrined concept of racial hate speech, and provision within law to take away the liberty of those who racially abuse others. Since the 1980s, no platforming has spread to prevent those who advocate hate or violence to marginalised groups from gaining a platform, and there's a separate debate to be had about that and the concept in general. Safe spaces, on the other hand, arose from the LGBT movement. It was, in essence, a policy proposal to allow LGBT students in particular to find "spaces" (whether these be physical spaces such as rooms in a university building, or metaphorical spaces like a social movement) where they could escape from homophobia and transphobia. This is principled on, for example, encouragement to modify language, to think before you speak, to never presume experience on another person's behalf, and to be reflexive and supportive. From there, the concept of safe spaces has grown to be incorporated by feminist movements, BME movements, leftist organisations, and beyond. I, for example, attend an alcohol support group which isn't remotely connected to any university environment, where we are reminded that within that space of a church hall in South Leeds for one hour every fortnight, we are in a safe space, a space where we can talk about our addictions, where we will not be judged for them, and where we must not judge others. At least in principle, safe spaces are based on the idea of consideration and solidarity. What's so wrong about that?
Part of the criticism of safe spaces is that people who want them do not want to engage with the difficult issues of life, and instead live in fantasy. This is a rather simplified way of looking at things. It has been argued that safe spaces are an excuse for individuals to wallow in their own vulnerability. This buys into a dichotomy, articulated by Bracke, that vulnerability is opposed to resilience, with the latter being an essential virtue of neoliberal subjectivity, and the former being a barrier to resistance. However, as Judith Butler has argued, this binary is not quite so simple. Vulnerability can empower agents and become a catalyst for resistance in certain contexts. If anything, people use safe spaces as a method of engaging with difficult issues, often to do with deeply personal topics such as discrimination, rape, ostracism and so on, in a different way. Feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that we tend to think that there is only one "public sphere" which we are all part of, and this is fundamentally incorrect. While there is a "public sphere" each individual and group forms their own "counterpublics" where the rest of the actors in the public sphere are not, necessarily, welcome - your home, for example, is a counterpublic in this sense. Fraser argues that social movements, feminist organisations and the like, function as counterpublics for people with some shared political aim or experience of discrimination. These counterpublics, however, are not separatist organisations but spaces for recuperation, a place where individuals and groups can think about how best to face the issues in the public sphere. Within certain forms of psychiatry, there is a similar concept of the therapeutic community. This is a place, or group, outside of the usual therapeutic setting (i.e, the hospital or the counselling service) where individuals may find some sort of escape from the issues which affect them in daily life. This may be a gym, a community group, or even family. These communities are not separatist, but, rather like safe spaces, are positioned as a place of temporary withdrawal, and recuperation. Fraser writes:
Perhaps the most striking example is the late-twentieth century U.S. feminist subaltern counterpublic, with its variegated array of journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centers, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals, and local meeting places. In this public sphere, feminist women have invented new terms for describing social reality, including "sexism," "the double shift," “sexual harassment," and "marital, date, and acquaintance rape." Armed with such language, we have recast our needs and identities, thereby reducing, although not eliminating, the extent of our disadvantage in official public sphere.
Safe spaces, in this sense, allow for groups to come up with new tools for political engagement in the public sphere, new strategies of resistance. Consider, based on Fraser's example, how our public discourse is vastly improved for the fact that we have concepts of sexism and so on. Are safe spaces perfect in implementation? No. Rather like political correctness, they are a clumsy, but ultimately well meaning attempt to build a more inclusive society. What's so bad about that?