Riese: I want to talk a little bit about Trump. As you touched on earlier, his entire platform is overstating harm while simultaneously insisting that the left is full of crybabies and special snowflakes. How do you think we’ve evolved or devolved as a country to get to this place? Are there any elements of the situation with Trump that you find particularly alarming that you think are being overlooked or aren’t being talked about enough?
Sarah: Well how he got elected is very complex, right, because it’s all these different elements. There’s international intervention. There’s media being irresponsible and exploiting him for ratings instead of critiquing him. There’s an electorate that does not understand how our society works and thinks that you vote for people because you like them instead of what your policies are. There’s the fact that a lot of people don’t like Hillary Clinton, that she didn’t communicate well with people and even though she probably was the most qualified person to ever run for president in the history of the country, she was also a warmonger and a lot people didn’t have good feelings about her. There was the manipulation by the FBI. There was profound sexism which is a huge factor. And then there’s the way that Trump manipulated racism. So there’re so many elements here.
I think the category “how Trump manipulated racism” is probably the most appropriate to what we are discussing now. Because if you take working-class white people who’ve been in this country for 200 or 300 years for whom immigration is a distant memory, and who have worked in factories and mines multi-generationally, and have had no upward mobility, and have problems with addiction, and have not gotten educated, and then their jobs are taken away from them because the factories are globalized, and they lose their social role. The people who are the source of their problem are the white one percent. But, because of racism, the white working class identifies with that white one percent, and then projects their anxieties onto the wrong party. This is traumatized people overstating harm, misplacing blame, and they blame immigrants. Trump is going around saying immigrants cause crime. Immigrants do not cause crime! There’s no evidence that immigrants cause crime. Crime is caused by poverty. So this construction — the inability to challenge racial identification — is really the manifestation of what my book is about.
Riese: Are there parts of what he’s doing now that you don’t think people are paying enough attention to?
Sarah: Today it looks like he’s in trouble, but who knows. There’s so much we don’t know. But we do know that he’s attacking everybody. He’s building an enormous coalition of Muslims, trans people, journalists, judges — it’s remarkable how many different kinds of people he’s uniting so the chances of a popular resistance… the popular resistance is there. The problem is in the Democratic party, which has been sentimentally attached to a system that creates their status and that system no longer exists. The society we lived in under Obama and before this — this neoliberal, dysfunctional, unequal society — we are never going back to that. It’s over. And we can only come out the other end of this. He’s already dismantled so many protections — I mean we’re looking at having to imagine another way of living. So, the Democratic party or whatever party is gonna come up has got to understand that and move forward. Retrogressive nostalgia is not gonna be productive.
Riese: When you’re observing the resistance against Trump, is there anything from your experience with ACT UP or Lesbian Avengers that you think the resistance should be employing?
Sarah: One thing that is bothering me is that students are not responding appropriately. We’re not seeing as much campus activism. We have seen in some ruling class schools and also in some UC schools, this emphasis on the idea that stopping fascists from speaking is somehow gonna move things forward, and I can understand people’s frustration but I don’t think that that is necessarily the most productive strategy. I’m looking for students to have dramatically powerful organizing, especially around questions like sanctuary campuses. And that has not emerged yet.
Riese: Things like protesting Milo speaking or Chick-fil-A opening a store on campus or spending a lot of time jumping on various established smart people saying problematic things about trans folks or gay people or women, and the extensive processing of those statements and the eventual shunning of that person from discourse — is that a distraction?
Sarah: It depends on the example. If it’s a person who has legitimacy in that people are really connected to them and have struggled with them and there’s a relationship and then there’s something that they “don’t get,” I think there is a value in arguing with them. And also there are generational things that are just not gonna be overcome. But if it’s someone who’s created by the media and who is a corporate icon and never had grassroots relationships, that’s something else entirely.
My fear about shutting people down is that as somebody who’s pro-Palestinian, I’ve been seeing a move to equate criticism of Israel with hate speech. And this is the danger of these hate speech rules, because what matters about them is who controls them and if we see legitimate political analysis called hate speech then I think it’s clear that that frame needs to be heavily dismantled, because unless you can guarantee that you’re gonna control its application, which no one can guarantee, it’s quite dangerous. […]
Riese: Okay, this is a question from my friend Natalie, who is a big fan of your work! In Gentrification of the Mind, you take up the “privatization of the family” as reflected in the nuclear family, marriage, monogamy. Though arguably important in de jure equality, this is a narrowing of a queer politic and a shrinking of space for plurality of political projects/struggling together against dominant hegemonic culture, values etc. Could you expand on how this (narrow) construction of family continues to shape and and undermine collective structures of social support, including funding for public services?
Sarah: I don’t know if I can answer that. In the current book my thinking has gone a little bit farther … all studies show that children who are raised in queer families have almost no experiences of violence. I mean this is parents who decided to have children in the context of queer relationships. You know, “chosen children.” Studies show that these families benefit children. So children are doing very well in queer families.
What I’m worried about is the mothers. The mother role in the queer family appears to be the same as the mother role in the straight family, which is one of martyrdom, sacrifice and guilt. And because so many lesbian mothers end up as single mothers, I mean this is a trend, but anecdotally, their lives end up being completely controlled by the fact that they are mothers but also their legitimacy is completely controlled by the fact that they are mothers. It’s almost like a “psychological prison,” especially in my generation, where simply to be a girl was a problem and to be a lesbian was the worst thing you could possibly do, but perhaps later if you had a child then your family would forgive you and bond with you, and then gay people get more legitimacy as gay people. Even though the system does nothing for mothers and undermines families that don’t have money! But anything that has to do with familial normalization has benefited queer people in terms of legislation. So the only grounds on which you matter are that you’re a mother, but you’re still stuck in this system where you’re a martyr in order to be a mother. I’m very concerned about my generation of queer women who are mothers and who are caught in this bind and particularly the role — now that adult children are much more dependent on their parents emotionally, especially in the middle classes and higher, and that there’s this psychological expectation that independence and autonomy is delayed, I fear that this generation of queer mothers are enslaved to their family units forever, and that their own personal happiness and their own personal evolution, separate from being a mother, is something that has really become not just second place but no place. So I question how good the queer family structure is for women. Especially in a country where women are earning so much less than men.
Riese: Which you talk about in Stagestruck also, the double negative —
Sarah: A female income vs. male income.
Riese: — so if you’re looking at these women that you’re concerned about, what can be done to make them not slaves to this paradigm?
Sarah: I don’t know the answer. But I think that the fact that we have legalized gay marriage, for example, but we don’t have legalized protection from anti-gay discrimination, just shows that social legitimacy exists only in the realms in which we resemble straight people and their concerns. In the realms in which we do not resemble them, the realms in which we are different, we have no legitimacy at all. And I think that that’s psychologically harmful.
Riese: Also in Stagestruck you talked about how lesbians are expected to go home and care for elderly parents, which I’ve definitely observed, like the straight people are allowed to go off and get married and have kids but if the lesbian is single then she’s expected to take care of the parents —
Sarah: It’s like you don’t have a life if you don’t have a child! Especially if you don’t have a son. If you have a son then you have a life because you’re doing something important which is you’re raising men.
Riese: Pivoting a bit — in Gentrification of the Mind, you express some degree of hope that there might be an alternative and independent art scene building up as a departure from the then-current state of art and literature. Do you still feel that way? Do you think it has improved?
Sarah: There’ve been a few queer female works that have really broken through and have gotten a lot of corporate approval lately. But what’s interesting about them — to look at Transparent, Fun Home, and The Argonauts — is that they’re all about family. That is not to denigrate those works; that has nothing to do with their inherent value or the achievements of those artists. But none of them are about difference.
Riese: You don’t think Fun Home is about difference?
Sarah: It’s about a family that has contradictions and tragedies, but the relational construction is the familial one and that’s the one that the straight world likes. I have yet to see a work embraced by corporations that actually shows, for example, the real way that homophobia functions or real queer sexuality. There are works that show ultra-religious people being homophobic, just like there are works that show ultra-white people being racist. But there are not works that show how it actually functions or how these systems function, because the pieces that get picked out to be rewarded on some level reinforce the dominant culture’s image of themselves as tolerant. They’re comfortable with the image. If you go back to AIDS representation, there was the same issue. Philadelphia, the film that won an Oscar, is based on the idea that a gay man has AIDS and he’s being discriminated against, so he goes to a homophobic lawyer because in the psychology of that film there are no gay lawyers.
Riese: I remember seeing that in the theater — I guess it was in the early 90s, so I was 10 or 11? I totally bought that narrative and assumed it was real.
Sarah: It’s absurd. Not only ahistorical, it’s the opposite of the truth. It’s a fantasy. Of course that person would go to a gay lawyer, that’s what those people did. But they have to construct that the straight person is the savior. And why is he the savior? Because he bravely overcomes his prejudices. And that’s how they construct straight heroism. The whole thing is insulting.
Riese: As someone who has written extensively about the difficulties lesbian playwrights face to get their work produced, were you surprised by the success of Fun Home?
Sarah: No.
Riese: No?
Sarah: I’m a playwright and I understand how the theater works, and the forces that decide decided on that one.
Riese: Do you think Dykes to Watch Out For would’ve made a better musical?
Sarah: That’s funny. […] If you look at it from the book side of the book business … it’s a graphic novel. Interestingly, there is a history of queer work being allowed to thrive in forms that are not considered the blue ribbon form. You can’t have a lesbian novel be a national bestseller, but you can have a lesbian graphic novel. You can’t have a multi-character play in a traditional format, shaped like an O’Neil play or a Miller Play, but you can have things that are sort of performance arty or solo, in a form that they don’t consider to be “The Form.”
Riese: Do you think that’s true in poetry?
Sarah: Poetry’s different because it doesn’t sell. I mean that’s not always true, because Claudia Rankine’s Citizen has sold 200,000 copies, but that’s very rare. Poetry’s different because there’s no money attached.
Riese: Who are your favorite writers right now?
Sarah: Claudia Rankine. Rabih Alameddine, I’m very loyal to him, I think he’s a great writer. I just read Sex Museum, an LGBT studies book by Jennifer Tyburczy, a very very smart highly interdisciplinary book about the display of sexuality in museums that i thought was really smart. I just read Emily K. Hobson’s Lavender & Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left, about the gay left in California during the Nicaraguan revolution and the whole thing about queer solidarity groups.
Pages: 1 2 3 4See entire article on one page
Thank you so much for giving us this window onto your conversation, Riese- the things you talked about are incredibly important, and about half a dozen things from my own life just clicked into place in my head. I’ve always found progressive circles’ lack of discussion of grey areas frustrating- like you, I experienced things which might have been labeled assault, and there was no room to talk about the fact that, drunkenness and my later regret aside, they didn’t feel like that. There was almost no room to talk about them at all, in that context, so I’ve largely pushed them down in an attempt to avoid the issue altogether.
This article was so enormously helpful, and I feel like I need to read this book posthaste. Thank you so much again!
Please talk for at least ten more hours! Ultimately, this was just a really incredible read. So many interesting thought points. I’ve always felt that there are necessary and unnecessary discomforts, and while I believe wholeheartedly in the designation of safe spaces and have high expectations for my social groups to be affirming, tolerant, and considerate, i am frequently disappointed by demands for comfort in times of conflict.
If I’d never been afforded the space to make mistakes and have those mistakes called out as they were, I genuinely feel like I’d have a real lack of understanding on why those mistakes caused harm, how my actions affect others, and how I can navigate resolving issues and taking accountability for things about myself that have been inherently problematic. I further also think it only agrees to a hostile group mentality, and encourages elitism within communities. While I think it’s a slippery slope re: when a felt violation should or shouldn’t be labeled as abuse, I do think there’s something to be said about a need to read the context of situations, and how and why we feel violated when we feel violated. That feeling is valid, it’s important, and it’s important to have care around it — but I think a part of that care is in assessing and processing what it is that happened in its entirety, in search of an authentic resolution.
…and blah blah blah. This was great. I’m obsessed. Thank you, thank you.
I was planning to start reading this book this weekend and so what perfect timing. Super excited to loop back in for this conversation once I’ve finished.
This was so fascinating and I am thrilled to see Sarah Schulman on Autostraddle.
I don’t have anything else to say except that I love love love this, please do this some more!
I devoured the whole interview. Fascinating conversation. Thank you for transcribing and sharing it! There were so many ideas/concepts/life-changing things touched upon or dissected here, that I’m going to be processing this for some time. This book has been on “my list” to read ever since your original article about it, and about foisting it upon your co-workers. And the discussion has helped somewhat to clarify some things in my mind about how things can be “good” or “healthy” but also “taken too far” or really end up being harnessed out of their intended context to cause more harm to the populations they ostensibly were meant to protect.
Also really appreciated the AS context bits.
I would read 10,000 more words of this! This was a great article and interview. When I finished the book I had so many questions and highlighted passages and things to talk about but none of my friends have read the book, so I’m really glad for this.
This is a riveting subject, plaudits for your questions as well as Sarah Schulman’s answers. I wish the transcript would have been the size of an encyclopedia. I can’t wait to read the book.
I have some reserves about treating the (US or other) government as a coherent entity, as a monolith, but otherwise gee what a lucid and powerful description of the state’s takeover of services for victims of violence.
OH MY GOD THIS HAPPENED TO ME. And I don’t even work for AS, in any way. A woman I went on <10 dates with just took against me and started telling everyone we knew that I abused her. (I didn't. This is not the place for specifics, but I didn't, and I've discussed every possible detail with therapists, friends, everyone, for years, and, I just didn't abuse her. She also has a known history of doing this.)
Including, she knew I was a fan of AS and she emailed Riese trying to get me kicked out of my local AS group (I know cuz she CC'd me) and it was horrible and awful and I thought my whole community would turn against me and I wanted to die.
I'm really sorry for everyone else this has happened to, but weirdly I'm glad it's not just me.
Also thanks Riese for the way you handled that situation, as far as I know, you let it defuse by just not responding (or at least you didn't respond to me), and I've always appreciated that.
That sounds like triangulation, and if it’s a known pattern with her I’d say count yourself lucky you didn’t get any more deeply involved.
oh wow i’d totally forgotten about this but i remember now! you’re welcome, and i’m sorry that this happened to you. that was a REALLY special case because I was like “wow, you are asking us to intervene in your private facebook group and local meet-up community???” we are not qualified to mitigate your interpersonal conflicts, we have no jurisdiction over any of this! and even if the accusations had been true, i don’t think her proposed solution would be considered productive by any means. anyhow, i hope things have settled down for you, nobody should have to deal with that kind of thing.
Thank you <3 This incident really fucked me up at the time, and totally exploded my group of friends, and I can't say that the fear has completely gone away, but things are much, much better now.
And J.L. is not my real name–I'm actually an A+ member who's a fairly regular commenter. Which just goes to show how scared the accusation and the shunning still make me, years later, even though it's fairly demonstrably untrue ?
I recently left a queer Facebook group for a comedy podcast I like because some members started a Google Docs sheet to keep track of all the problematic things one of the hosts does. I love that these online spaces provide a place for marginalized people to voice their frustrations, but sometimes it feels like there’s no room to mess up or disagree.
Looking forward to reading this book, as well as People in Trouble and Stagestruck. This was a cool interview, thanks Riese!
I just spent an hour and a half reading this article and the talk transcript – thank you for a ton of stuff to think about! I don’t feel nearly clever enough to grasp all of what was being said, but it really makes me want to try, you know
Fascinating interview. I need to read her books!
Thank you.
This is just so sorely needed. Thank you for putting it out into the community! I hope that we begin to see a paradigm shift in how we deal with conflict.
Also Schulman is so impressive?! I need to get into reading her stuff.
I decided to comment for the first time just to say thank you for posting this. I think this is an important conversation in our community for all the reasons people have mentioned. I would only like to add that this sort of thinking and marginalizing creates an impossible situation where we expect everyone to be perfect. What we should instead expect is that if someone makes a mistake they grow and learn and become better. Safe places are important as well as protecting victims and preventing abuse but none of those goals are achieved by jumping to conclusions, preventing conflict resolution and ignoring the fact that people are flawed. Sometimes there are good and bad people. But other times there are just a lot of confused, hurt, vulnerable, flawed human beings in gray muddy waters. And while those situations can surely cause a world of pain, it helps no one to pretend those waters were crystal clear.
Thank you Riese for opening Schulman’s ideas up for discussion in an AS-specific context. This was a great conversation to read and I would certainly read 10,000 more words of it. These are nuanced issues that our community should absolutely be discussing and working out with ourselves. I think especially the point you both have made that sometimes the actions taken to try to protect people do nothing to actually address the problem merits a lot of pondering.
Next stop: Schulman’s book.
This immediately took me back to that time as a freshman in college at Evergreen in 2001 when the lesbian vice president (or perhaps the title was different–regardless, she was in leadership) pulled me aside at my first meeting to ask me how I identify (“I’m not sure. Bisexual, I think,” I told her.) and that I’d have to pick a side if I wanted to be welcome in the Queer Alliance. After all, they wanted to create a safe space for trans people. (The implication, of course, being that as a maybe bisexual, I was somehow inherently dangerous to trans people.) She went on to say that well, actually, I couldn’t identify as an ally and still be part of the club either. It was lesbian or nothing. It was lesbian or dangerous.
They proceeded to shun me for the duration of my time at Evergreen, which made my social life pretty difficult. Pretty much none of the women on campus would talk to me, and while I eventually made friends, it was with other locals, other shunned people, all of us somehow ‘dangerous’ for being bisexual, or fat, or lower class, or disabled, or people of color, or god forbid multiple of these.
It took me years to even begin to put words to this experience.
Hmmm. This is incredibly interesting. I had a couple of odd experiences in a feminist group where I was presumed to be interested in more than one member (I was not, I was happily partnered). Bafflingly the leader of the group seemed to think I was interested in her. Not my type at all. But interestingly, I was only shunned after gaining a significant amount of weight. I was also the only member who had to work full time and didn’t have a Post-graduate degree. Make of that what you will.
This was extremely thought-provoking and I hope this is just the start of these conversations on AS.
I’m really looking forward to reading Schulman’s book. Several of my goodreads kin have read it recently, and they’ve posted intriguing reviews as well. Excellent interview, also. It seems like the book really addresses a lot of what I’ve been questioning/contemplating in regards to social media and group dynamics over the past couple of years.
This quote “People should be overjoyed to learn that they are contributing to a problem! Because if they understand how they are contributing to a problem, they have the power to resolve it” truly exemplifies the approach I’ve tried to take within communities over the past several years. Or what I’ve aspired to, at the very least. I’ve found a kind of freedom in that, since it grants me, or I grant myself, a path forward.
What a great interview! I have been avoiding reading this book because I know I will probably really like parts of it and really dislike other parts and I don’t want to deal with that. The way this frames it makes me kind of excited to have more complicated feelings though, which seems like part of the point!
One thing that is strange and interesting to me, although I might be wrong b/c I haven’t read her books, is that Schulman seems to kind of have the idea that like “OF COURSE there are some people who just really are real abusers, WE ALL know THAT!” and i just am not sure that is true? Like, the mandate to believe survivors no matter what seems to obviously be partly a reaction to the fact that we mostly DON’T all know and believe that some people are abusers. Like she is ready to just say “yes obviously” and move on to more interesting questions and seems less interested and more vague about like, how to deal with actual clear situations of abuse? Riese seems to be trying to get at this somewhat. I don’t know what I’m asking exactly, I guess I will have to read the book. I wish the interview was longer!
Yes! I loved reading this, but I think the biggest hole in this discussion has been the unwillingness to examine why liberal culture has swung the pendulum so far in the direction of a blind-acceptance of victims, or a willingness to use shunning or similar punishment tactics at the drop of a hat.
If we want to make a real change towards honest, challenging, and fruitful discussion we need to talk about the way that such discussions can be abused(no pun intended) to oppress minority groups.
We can’t ignore the fact that the rights and dignities of minorities, alongside people like abuse survivors, is in large part NOT ACTUALLY TAKEN AS GRANTED. That we have had to fight and claw our way to those rights and dignities. And that there are people who will use our desire for more open and less black-and-white discussions as an entry point for hate, and a way to try and regress the progress we have made.
As a trans lesbian, the biggest concern I have over Sarah’s ideas in our community has nothing to do with her or them. The biggest concern I have is that people will just swing the pendulum in the opposite direction, and that people who don’t understand or don’t want me in the community will take advantage of their newfound ‘freedom’ to stomp me right back down because “open honest discussion.” That in the end I will increasingly be unable to simply feel comfortable in the community because basic acceptance of who I am is not guaranteed.
Minorities are, well, minorities. The disenfranchised are, well, disenfranchised. The playing field isn’t level here, and left to a more open environment a lot of groups will get their rights and dignities trampled on almost by default as a result of that. The black-and-white, “shun and call-out if your views are even slightly questionable,” tone that has come to define some strands of liberalism, I think, arose in the first place to fix that and even out the playing field. Obviously it has gone too far in some ways. But how do we pull it back, without giving people like TERFs or racists a blank check to promote hate and discrimination in the name of ‘open discussion’?
In other words, how do we remain steadfastly opposed to the oppression of any group, and make everyone feel welcome on a fundamental and basic level, while also allowing an open, honest, and challenging discussion?
This is the biggest challenge we face, I think.
Yeah! This is a lot of what I was trying to get at. I wonder if the book addresses this more?? Also the thing that Schulman mentions a couple of times about like, it’s better to just call someone up, it’s better to ask the accused person why whatever it is is happening – it just seems like she is not thinking about the type of situations that I am thinking about? Like yes, there are friend/social groups where I could see that, ideally, happening. And I REALLY really like the idea of AS and other online places taking a more restorative and less black and white approach. But at the same time it sort of assumes the good intentions and willingness to engage honestly of everyone involved? Or something? Which makes less sense to me in certain contexts, especially ones where like you said there is not already a somewhat level playing field. So right, how do we do both, have a less reactionary and more nuanced approach but also take seriously protecting those most vulnerable.
I think ‘calling someone up’ really has to occur on a case by case basis, and we have to be aware that dialogue doesn’t take place on an even playing field. Part of this comes down to what someone is accused of. I don’t think Schulman wants to call Bill Cosby for his side of the story. She has a bunch of stories of lesbians doing nasty things to each other in community settings. Riese’s example of people making abuse claims seems to call for the dialogue approach, especially when accusations are made over the internet. Abuse certainly occurs in queer communities but there also appear to be people who throw out that label to settle scores or to turn ‘she was a shitty girlfriend’ into ‘she was a monster’.
Victims are not blindly believed. Certain victims, those with power and privilege, are *sometimes* believed in liberal communities.
I recognise your concerns, because I think a huge part of transphobic discourse is fuelled by rich, white, transphobic straight women using their privilege to enact both male violence and female shunning.
But as a survivor myself… I can assure you, many of us are not believed and no one gets shunned on our behalf.
Thank you so much for sharing this, especially for linking to “Queer Suicidality, Conflict and Repair”. I read the whole thing and really absorbed it all, as (like so many of us) I have too many suicidal friends, and it often seems inevitable that I’ll slowly lose them one by one.
I just bought this and would love to have some kind of AS-based discussion group on it. I’d be willing to help organize it — maybe we could do it on twitter or something? Anyone interested? Anyone want to help organize?
This was a really thought provoking article, thank you for it! I particularly appreciated the discussion of how the overuse of the term ‘abuse’ tends to tie into the idea that you are only eligible for compassion if you are a “pure” victim. That overuse actually does a lot to feed into larger cultural tendencies to require survivors of abuse to perfectly fit a narrative, or else be blamed for their own abuse.
I do, however, have one isssue which I’m not sure was fully addressed here and I would love to see more robustly discussed: While I am largely in agreement with both women here, how do we address the misuse of this discussion we’re having?
How do we delineate at what point open, functional, and challenging dialogue becomes a tool for discrimination and oppression? When do we say enough is enough, and that a particular ideology an individual is espousing is harmful and toxic to the community?
I think we need to more fully examine *WHY* the pendulum has swung so far in our community towards this black-and-white viewpoint, and to address those issues in how we will find a more moderate position.
From where I’m sitting, I think the biggest issue the black-and-white ‘you’re with us or against us, there is no room for discussion’ culture was meant to address is the way that groups pushing hateful and discriminatory ideas tend to take advantage of people’s openness to disagreement and discussion. Give them a foot, and they’ll take a mile.
We can see this in the wider culture already in the way that the conservative world has pushed back against SJWs and Safe-Spaces so hard that they are demanding a sort of hyper-tolerance for their own bigotries. Think of the sort of person who sees Trump’s behavior and thinks “THANK GOD! Someone finally had the balls to say it, after we’ve all been shut up and oppressed by those special snowflakes!” The sort of person who mistakes the unacceptability of hateful words and actions, as oppression.
More specific to our community, how do we handle people who simply will not come to an understanding? This article was nerve-wracking to get through as a trans lesbian, because I was very much expecting to see the points made as a defense of TERFs. This is exactly the dialogue that usually brings them out of the woodwork, complaining about how unfairly maligned they have been and how it disgusting that they have to accept us as a part of the wider wlw community or become pariahs.
How do we open up discussion, then, and rely less on shunning and other punishment tactics, when there are groups whose only motivating reason to stop stomping on various minorities is PRECISELY THOSE PUNISHMENTS? When these are people whom you can’t simply ‘agree to disagree’ with, because to do so is to legitimize their views and accept a culture where my status as a full member of the community cannot be assumed?
I’m concerned that, if we don’t have very serious discussions on how to distinguish hate and discrimination from disagreement, and how to deal with one versus the other, we will see the pendulum swing too far in the other direction again; towards communities where exclusionists such as TERFs take root in the name of free-speech and open discussion, but whose actions do little more than act as yet another institution against minority groups.
yes, these are tough questions and valid concerns. i guess what I’ve come to about this is that there are no blanket answers to any of these questions — each situation is its own beast, to be tackled by whichever group comes upon it. if the pendulum has swung far enough in the opposite direction that we’re seeing accusations of abuse over-applied, then i feel it stands to reason that those who are over-applying it should also be capable of applying reason and compassion to adequately assess situations as they arise in pursuit of the same goals the over-application had — which is, as you say, to even out the playing field for groups and people who are often not listened to or believed. if we aren’t able to do that then we better learn how real fast. more often than not, it’s poc and trans people who end up being shunned or kicked out of groups over these types of accusations, and i think part of sarah’s work, at least, is to rectify that. (also, sarah schulman’s work with/for trans folks is extensive enough that i don’t think any self-respecting TERF would ever pick up this book or any of her books)
i have been reading people writing about this book extensively for the past several months and fwiw, have not come across anybody using it in the way you describe? which isn’t to say that’s not happening, but.
As a cis person, my read was that this invalidates TERFs. They consistently overstate harm.
Disgusting rhetoric likening common courtesy to rohypnol, or bathroom use to rape – they are the literal queens of pretending a marginalised group is causing harm when they are not.
This is fantastic and reminded me of how much I appreciate the critical thinking going on behind the scenes at Autostraddle. I don’t think Schulman’s argument is above critique (or that she would claim it is), but it does speak to a general discomfort I have with punitive tendencies within queer and radical communities and loose definitions of abuse. I remember being really mystified by a conversation I had with someone a while back who claimed that infidelity is abusive. Having been really hurt by an ex who cheated, I think that’s really hyperbolic and would never describe my experience that way. It seems like a wide range of negative/hurtful experiences are often distilled into a nebulous concept of abuse that isn’t fair or accurate and can harm others when they result in widespread shaming or community excommunication.
I fear that we defer to trauma without considering that it can be twisted. Schulman’s example of Israeli right wing nationalism shows how past trauma is used to justify present violence. I also keep thinking back to the development of TERF ideology among cis women who had actually been traumatized by cis men’s violence. Taking essentialist ideas about biology and identity for granted, they translated their trauma into a movement that has done immeasurable harm to trans women, all in the name of protection from patriarchal violence.
this is a really good example that i hadn’t thought of, and it’s so true —> “I also keep thinking back to the development of TERF ideology among cis women who had actually been traumatized by cis men’s violence. Taking essentialist ideas about biology and identity for granted, they translated their trauma into a movement that has done immeasurable harm to trans women, all in the name of protection from patriarchal violence.”
“It seems like a wide range of negative/hurtful experiences are often distilled into a nebulous concept of abuse that isn’t fair or accurate.”
This. I have been cheated on and it was painful. It wasn’t abuse. I’ve experienced abuse from parents and a platonic ‘friend’. Someone being hurtful isn’t even in the same ballpark.
Following this conversation with lots of interest – at times like this I really miss being able to afford new books/having access to an academic library :/
I actually totally agree. This book is really just a heap of gaslighting toxicity framed in theory. Being told that you’ve taken your reaction to experienced abuse too far and that you’re in the wrong for shunning your abusers does not promote a healthy mental climate for survivors. Abusers need rehabilitation, yes; but why is the burden placed on those they’ve victimized or been in conflict with? For me personally, why am I responsible for being the bigger person when my abuser is the adult and I’m the child in the equation?
Maybe I didn’t get the point of this book, and maybe it just flew over my head with all of its theory: the point remains, however, that reading this book sent me into a tailspin and undid months of therapy I’m still trying to recover. If I had known that $1000 in counseling could go to shit so easily I could have saved myself all the hassle and bought myself my weight in tacos twice over instead.
I’m so sorry – that sounds really awful. Internet ((((hugs)))) if you want them.
I am sorry you had such a bad experience with this. I can see how the book is difficult and may remind people of situations in which abusers have tried to frame abuse as conflict etc. As someone who no longer talks to someone who abused me as a kid when he had power over me and then gaslit me about it as an adult, I caught myself a few times thinking that I was being pushed to talk to him or take responsibility for his personal growth. Upon a second reading, I realized that I don’t think that’s what Schulman is arguing. I don’t think she wants us to be pals with adults who abused us when we were children. She accepts that there are situations that really are cut and dry. And while she is keen on the restorative justice model, I think those of us who don’t talk to abusers can certainly reconcile this book with the decisions we’ve made to protect ourselves. Restorative justice also requires that the abuser show remorse. Mine doesn’t, so I don’t talk to him, and I still found value in this book.
Most of her examples are about abuse accusations between queer people, often made by the person with more social power to marginalize the one with less, as demonstrated in cases of HIV criminalization. She is also talking about situations like the ones Riese describes, in which abuse accusations are levelled at a community level where the details are not cut and dry, or we are invited to shun people with zero information about what happened between them. It’s not that abuse never happens in queer spaces, but that we need to name and contextualize what happened before leaping to conclusions about it. Sometimes behaviour that is hurtful/toxic/selfish/unethical but not abusive is labeled as abuse when that’s not the right word for it.
I’m not sure why you would try and stymie discussion by labelling it irresponsible? This head been a really interesting read and thought provoking article and all you can do is to say shut up because some people in our community experience abuse?
Did you really read this and think it called for survivors to be disbelieved? I read this and thought it was a call for people to bring a lot more self-analysis into their lives and to think about whether their experiences are abusive or otherwise.
Great interview so far. I haven’t read this all the way through yet but I want to comment while my thoughts are still fresh.
Call out culture in particular is something that I’ve always been intrigued by. I see it for the most part taking place on tumblr, but I’ve also seen a few cases on twitter and facebook as well. It seems to me that call outs often stem from one of two places: previous trauma/victimization, or the need for validation.
Example 1: a few months ago (more or less, I think – time is fake and I’m bad at it), a twitter user called out Cameron Esposito for (essentially, I’m paraphrasing) allowing a stand-up featured in her podcast to make a joke about trans people (or perhaps the person used the t-slur, something to that effect). Anyway, the assertion being that Cameron Esposito was being an insensitive a person and shitty ally for allowing such as thing. The tweet was very accusatory in nature – they wrote something like “wow, Cameron just raised all this money for Trans Lifeline, and then she goes and lets this person shit on trans people on her podcast?” Cameron responded, asking the person to please give her the time stamp of the joke so that she could ask her producer(s) to edit it out of the show. She then explained that she and Rhea are often in the back during the sets, chatting with the other comics, and that they were not aware that such a joke had been made. In my view, this twitter user jumping to the conclusion that Cameron (& Rhea, I’d guess) were being complicit in transphobia is likely due to trauma. When people have been victimized in the past, they often begin to assume the worst in people because that’s how they keep themselves safe. It’s pretty basic as defense mechanisms go.
Example 2: I have a friend on facebook who, fairly frequently, will post screencaps of “problematic” comments made in the groups she’s a member of and pick them apart, explaining why this person is a shitty human. In this case, it seems very clear to me that what she is looking for is validation. It’ very much like, “Look at this person saying ugly things. I feel the opposite of what this bad person feels, therefore I am good a good person.” She makes no attempt to begin a meaningful dialogue with the person in question – she’s posting screencaps, and often it seems as though the “bad person” is someone she doesn’t know personally. It all seems very masturbatory, with many of her friends chiming in so that they can all pat each other on the back for being so unlike this awful person they’re talking about.
Similarly, I also have a lot of feelings re: “toxic” becoming a buzzword (I’m thinking this is largely a tumblr thing, but I might be wrong) and having lost much of its meaning. It seems like you can no longer ask people to think critically about their views or why they feel a certain way without being labeled as toxic. “Oh, you don’t take everything I say at face value? You’re toxic. GTFO.”
I don’t mind telling you that when Riese first read and started talking about this book, I gave the whole thing some serious side-eye. I suffered physical and emotional abuse all throughout my childhood and well into my early 20s. Like you, I felt like: “No way am I taking responsibility for rehabilitating my abuser, no way am I softening my language. I’ve spent a decade in therapy working this shit out.” HOWEVER, when I actually sat down and read the book I was: 1) shocked by how far off the mark I was in my assumptions about it, and 2) chastened because by writing it off as harmful before I even read it, I was behaving exactly as the book predicted I would!
One of the many things I came to appreciate about Conflict Is Not Abuse is that it shows how labeling everything that upsets us as abuse actually dilutes the the word abuse to the point that it loses its power. This book isn’t about excusing real abuse; it’s about figuring out how and why we see a normal conflict and register it as a threat, the repercussions of that process in our communities, and advice for how to change some of those destructive patterns.
I didn’t agree with everything Schulman wrote (which makes sense because thinking people hardly ever agree with *everything* a writer has to say), but I did agree with a lot of it and it opened my eyes in really revolutionary (and sometimes uncomfortable) ways.
Thank you for the interview and thoughtful conversation. I haven’t read Schulman’s book yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
I’m working through a lot of childhood trauma in therapy and I’m curious how it could relate. I’ve learned about a behavior called “offending from the victim postion” which was a concept I felt a ton of resistance to at first, but now recognize within myself and my family and definitely the world around me. I wonder if it’s what this book is about. I understand people’s concerns that people who have experienced or are currently experiencing actual abuse may be silenced or not heard properly. But I’ve learned in the last couple of years that I have a lot of trauma to work through and my initial instinct to blame other people for the pain I experience is the last thing that’s going to actually help me. The healing of the trauma is the only thing that can.
I know I’ve been on both sides of the equation, being blamed for others’ pain I didn’t create and accusing others of causing my own. It feels like a really complicated thing when I look beyond my own personal experience that only touches me and those close to me and I’m the one doing the healing, towards a broader community of people bumping into each other’s trauma and triggers and reacting out of that place unaware within themselves it’s even happening. I feel like the only thing that could ultimately solve the issue is better programs and systems in place for people to learn about and heal their trauma because without that the cycle just tends to repeat itself.
Working with young teens gives me a very easy way to simplify the idea that “conflict is not abuse”. Young teens, after learning about what bullying is, will come forward and say that they are being “bullied” when it is not the case that they are being bullied. Often a friend does not like them anymore, or they are being teased, or a rude game between friends went to far. This happens multiple times per school year to multiple kids.
I think S. Schulman is applying this problem to adult situations. We can always explain to a kid that not all actions are bullying (abuse) and I think she is asking us to apply it to adult life as well.
Whereas I’m side eyeing this, because the vicious bullying I went through – physical, emotional, sexual – was routinely dismissed as teasing. And like a lot of kids, I lacked the ability to articulate just how bad it was. But it was bad.
Thanks for this; It was helpful and interesting. Forwarded it to some friends too.
This was an amazing article that kept me engaged in the middle of an airport with two eight year olds wheeling suitcases around me.
Thank you a million times over. Not just for this piece but for all the experience you brought into it. And the way these ideas are informing the work you’re doing now. And planning to do in the future.
Disappointed to see this book still trending. Queer POC activists have told me to stay away from this book and to be honest, I know only white people who like it. I get that she wants people to move past call out culture and for women and queers to be open about their complex desires. But I would never, ever, recommend this book to any sexual trauma survivor. The books reads like Sarah had a bad breakup in which she called exe’s even after they told her not to- which has been proven in real life! We need prison abolition and we need restorative justice. We need a Black leader to write this book way, way better than Sarah did. I get that she wants to be proactive but people need to be aware that conservative academics and press also LOVE this book. Stay critical you guys!