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Sarah Schulman

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair Paperback – Oct. 1 2016

by Sarah Schulman (Author)

125 ratings

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Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction winner

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways in which cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behaviour and Traumatized behaviour resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

This important and sure to be controversial book brings insight into contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial and geo-political difference, as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, African Americans at the hands of police, people with HIV, and Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, revealing how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to avoid facing themselves.

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Product details

Publisher : Arsenal Pulp Press (Oct. 1 2016)
Language : English
Paperback : 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 1551526433
ISBN-13 : 978-1551526430
Item Weight : 454 g
Dimensions : 15.24 x 1.91 x 22.86 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #119,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #97 in LGBTQ+ History
- #98 in History of Gay & Lesbian
- #356 in Family Abuse

Customer Reviews:
125 ratings

Product description

Review

Conflict's publication could not be timelier ... A sharply observant and relevant text that is already getting its wish for action granted. -Lambda Literary

With awesome brilliance and insight, Sarah Schulman offers readers new strategies to intervene on all relations of domination both personal and political. The core of this book provides ways to think and move beyond blaming and/or assuming victimhood -- so that each of us may come to understand the role we assume in creating and sustaining conflicts in all our relations. Sharing myriad ways, critical vigilance can help us all understand that conflict need not be viewed as abuse, that essential distinctions may be made between the hurt we experience in conflict and the violence of abuse, Schulman offers a vision of mutual recognition and accountability that liberates. -bell hooks

It's impossible to be invested in the world and not be invested in this groundbreaking and challenging book. From a position of artist and social critic, Sarah Schulman gives us a detailed and considered reading of some of our most overly determined and venomous conflicts. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a book to interrogate, ponder, and discuss. -Claudia Rankine

Conflict is Not Abuse should prove to be essential reading for people interested in psychology, group dynamics, and social justice activism. -Global Comment

A compelling call out of call-out culture and everything that it messily dredges up, brings forward, and shunts away. -Canadian Art

Schulman's book could not have come at a better time ... Conflict is a balm against comforting explanations for violence and abuse, ones we know aren't true, just easy. -Village Voice

Schulman's new work is a provocative rethinking of intimate and civil discourse for a rapidly shrinking world ... a rallying cry for civil engagement and engaged civility. -Gay City News (Gay City News)

Conflict Is Not Abuse presents a gestalt shift in thinking about conflict, power relations, harm and social responsibility. -The Globe and Mail (The Globe and Mail)

About the Author

Sarah Schulman is the author of eighteen books: the novels Maggie Terry, The Cosmopolitans, The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness To a Lost Imagination, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, and the plays Mercy and Carson McCullers. She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of the movies The Owls and Mommy is Coming, and co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project.

Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Award for "Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies" from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Publishing Triangle, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow a

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Top reviews from Canada

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Francesca

undermines herself

Reviewed in Canada on March 22, 2018

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This book is not bad; Sarah Schulman is member of a very specific community, perhaps best described as 'highly political' and group oriented with personalities of a specific type: extroverted, impulsive, black-and-white thinking, superficial relationships.. hopefully you get the idea. It's a community having its moment in the sun now since the mindset has gone totally mainstream in the last few years. Schulman has written a critique of much of this culture, basically pointing out a lot of the exaggeration underlying it, albeit in a compassionate way, saying that many of these people also belong to oppressed minorities and are pretty much just trying to defend themselves, even though in a highly misguided way.
She provides a lot of lucidity and understanding to anyone who (like me), has been on the receiving end of the bullying and accusations of these folk.

Unfortunately, I found my enjoyment of the book ,as well as Schulman's credibility, was undermined by the fact that she often does the very thing she is supposed to be writing against, ie. exaggerates for sympathy or to prove a point. For example, she writes that emailing someone to say 'don't contact me' is "assaultive" ( her word), and being on the receiving end of group bullying is "potentially life threatening". There are more examples, but.... sigh. I appreciate the insights but I won't be looking to Schulman or her friends for any further "wisdom".

3 people found this helpful

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Luke

Great read

Reviewed in Canada on April 11, 2019

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An incredibly compelling fresh take on our collective common understanding of conflict and abuse. Great read.

Helpful

racine

Dense read

Reviewed in Canada on November 17, 2018

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I wish I had read more of a sample before ordering. It's a dense text and writing is not as clear as I expected.

Helpful

Alison S

No easy answers

Reviewed in Canada on February 16, 2021

I loved this book, and I am using "love" here to mean not unquestioned acceptance of everything in the book, but a conviction that the core ideas of this book are absolutely vital and well laid out and the book's flaws do not cancel that out. I think this is an understanding of love that the author would support.

I've referred to flaws in the book, but every time I think of a potential flaw I realize it is more about incompleteness than something explicitly bad in the book. I think many of the flaws identified in other reviews are more in the readers' expectations than in the book itself. Most importantly, this book is not really about abuse, or even much about healthy ways of dealing with conflict. I don't think it attempts to offer a comprehensive solution to the problems it explores. Instead it is quite focused on understanding a pattern of behavior where people overreact to conflict, both on small interpersonal scales and on larger societal scales.

This is not a comfortable book to read, but it doesn't try to be, and neither does it take delight in readers' discomfort. It asks you to consider whether your discomfort comes from an external source or from your own past experience, and whether certain kinds of reactions are justified in either case. For my part, the bits of this book I sort of disagree with are extremely minor, not enough to detract at all from the rest of the book, and in fact merely serve as encouragement to engage and share perspectives that I think can improve those tiny flaws.

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on December 21, 2016

Fantastic book. Sarah Schulmans' attack on narcissism on the left is so needed at this time.

5 people found this helpful

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D. N. McLEOD

Creating conflict is abuse.

Reviewed in Canada on July 24, 2017

Addresses things in a sort of truthful way. Conflict may not be abuse, but creating conflict is abuse. Responding to things as if there is always a reason for conflict is abuse.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

M. A. Ellison

Emotionally engaging but possibly simplistic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2017

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I really love Schulman's outlook and her politics, and I really do share her views on the intifada topic. But throughout reading this book I thought of so many situations that are much more complex and impenetrable than she suggests in her anecdotal evidence. For example: it's sometimes completely unclear who has Power Over, and sometimes a long history of abuse means it's simply impossible to figure out clear roles. And though I want to believe apologising to Supremacists to diffuse an abusive situation might work, Schulman herself gives an example of this making the situation worse and also reinforcing their worldview that they were correct to shun her. It seems callous, at some points, to consider forcing a traumatised person to face a trigger when they aren't ready: aren't they entitled to set some bodily/psychological boundaries when they are recovering from the effects of something awful? There's much more of a psychological burden there than for a Supremacist who typically experiences no constant revisitation of negative effects on them, as they are the powerful party who controls many aspects of the confrontation or lack there of.

I'm still thinking about this book, because it's a territory that sorely needed treading, and I think it's good enough to continue to make me think about how to parse these situations.

10 people found this helpful

Mr Alan Miller

Essential critical reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 22, 2018

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This is one of the most compelling books about our contemporary communication experience. Schulman is an uncanny critique of our social interactions, and the value of the strategies and observations of this book have a far reaching benefit to both academic and every day social discourse.

One person found this helpful

Phoquess

Victim-blaming, anti-email, pro-stalking

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2020

Verified Purchase

I regret buying this book. I was expecting to find a read that would challenge me and push the envelope on my existing views. I got to page 67, where she defends stalking (apparently if both people don't consent to a cease of contact, it doesn't count), and had to quit. Overview up to that point:

- The author is not a psychologist and doesn't seem to have much understanding of psychology. Her insistence that we will only fix the world when EVERYONE is willing to be self-aware to a very extreme extent is uttetly unrealistic. Apparently everyone is supposed to be aware of things that they are shielding from themselves. There's really no discussion or expectation that you'll be handling situations with people who aren't up to the level of self-awareness and openness the author advocates, or that you'll ever interact with thoughtless people or outright jerks.

- The author's threshold for abuse is extremely high. Either your life is in imminent danger, or you are SO psychologically abused that you literally "are unable to exercise separation or independent action". Anyone else who behaves badly toward you is apparently just trying to get you to realize uncomfortable truths about yourself. See above, apparently no one ever interacts with outright jerks.

- People who feel uncomfortable as a result of romantic overtures, threatening or not, need to examine their own contributions to being hit on, according to the author. That is, if a guy hits on you and you turn him down, saying you have no interest, then you're just playing the part of the perfect victim. You were probably putting out signals you WERE interested, you just aren't willing to accept that about yourself. "When I hear 'when a woman says no, she means no,' I know that that is too simple." Sorry, Ms. Schulman, but no means no. It IS that simple.

- Apparently email is a great evil among humankind. There was a long screed against email. Also, "there is no reason why people do not return phone calls except for the power-play of not answering."

- Setting boundaries appears to be highly discouraged. You certainly must never send an email (the horror) saying "do not contact me." Relatedly, "refusing to be shunned for unjust, nonexistent, or absurd reasons is not 'stalking'." This, combined with "no doesn't always mean no," above, suggests that Ms. Schulman has been rather predatory in the past and seeks to defend her own past behavior. The rest of the book is probably even more problematic, but I'm not going to keep reading to find out.

54 people found this helpful

Isabel Youngs

Profound book that is necessary to read, but there are a few areas of concern

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2017

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This book was easily one of the most validating and challenging books I have ever read. I think this is a must-read for anyone who wants to make their community a better place. I found so much of this book uplifting and reassuring. Many of the observations she made were poignant and spoke to a truth I could never articulate. It was a deeply moving book that has changed the way I see the world and friend groups.

The only real problem I had with the book was the discussion on mental illness. She can be extremely harsh and use very judgmental language around certain mental illnesses, and it seems that she believes "mental illness" = "distorted thinking," which is reductive. She clearly didn't do enough research or talk to self advocates about how to talk about mental illness. She also has a habit of using stigmatizing language for certain mental illnesses (she calls BPD & depression "childish" and "narcissistic"). She often armchair diagnosed the people in her life, and said she had a right to do so because 'she did a lot of observing.' I didn't get the impression that she understood how stigmatizing her discussion of mental illness was, but I think it would have been a better book if she didn't totally throw mentally ill people under the bus to make her points.

That is a small section of the wider book, though, and I can deal with being a little angry, so I would still highly recommend it.

119 people found this helpful

Daniel Björkman

A push in the right direction - but I don't like the intended destination

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2018

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It's a frequently noted fact that a major problem with our current society is that people have entirely stopped listening to each other. We declare ourselves triggered and traumatised any time we happen to hear something we don't want to listen to, we demonise people with a different perspective, and we lock ourselves into homogenous groups that must agree about everything - and anyone who is found to be in insufficient agreement, or who does anything remotely bad, is instantly exiled from the group.

This book feels very relevant, then, as it argues for communication and understanding, for trying to get to the root of a conflict instead of assigning blame as a knee-jerk reaction, and for admitting the two-sided nature of most disputes. Schulman points out, with many examples from her own experience, that overreaction and the refusal to examine one's own emotional responses rarely leads to anything other than unnecessary harm. She also makes the sad but accurate observation that in large part, our inability to accept blame comes from living in a society where you are afforded no sympathy or support unless you can convincingly argue that you are an innocent victim of malice - which is unfortunate, since in the real world almost no one is ever completely innocent, and almost everyone could use some help from time to time.

Schulman's criticism of our current society, then, feels spot-on. The reason why I nonetheless gave up on the book halfway through was that I can't see how her proposed solutions are any less absolutist and unreasonable. The world she argues for appears to be one where everything must be endlessly poked and prodded and examined, where wanting safety and comfort is entirely unreasonable, where every single person must take it upon themselves to play police, judge, therapist and social worker (having actual professionals perform those functions is something she openly scoffs at - involving the state, in her view, is always a recipe for disaster), regardless of whether they feel qualified, regardless of whether they have the time or energy, and regardless of whether they have a slew of problems of their own. It would certainly be nice if we were all strong enough and wise enough to live up to Schulman's expectations, but nothing I have seen of the world indicates to me that most of us are.

The book may be worth a read for its description of our social ills, but I would not trust its proposed cures. It seems to me that they are simply calling for the polar opposite of our current society, blithely assuming that because what we have is bad, something entirely unlike it must per definition be good.

82 people found this helpful

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Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair Paperback – Oct. 1 2016

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