Le conflit n’est pas une agression

by Sarah Schulman, Julia Burtin Zortea (Translator), Joséphine Gross (Translator)

Des relations intimes aux politiques globales, Sarah Schulman fait le constat d’un continuum : individus comme États font souvent basculer les situations conflictuelles dans le registre de l’agression, criminalisant leurs opposants pour couper court à la contradiction et échappant ainsi à leur propre responsabilité dans les conflits. En distinguant conflit et agression, l’autrice interroge notre culture de la stigmatisation. Ce travail profond, aussi courageux qu’impertinent, montre comment la sanction et la répression prennent le pas sur l’auto-analyse à l’échelle individuelle et collective, et comment l’altérité sert de justification à la violence et à l’exclusion. Ce livre intentionnellement polémique offre un aperçu des dynamiques contemporaines et historiques qui prennent les différences intimes, raciales et géopolitiques pour des éléments déclencheurs de la course à l’injustice, à l’exclusion et à la répression. Le conflit n’est pas une agression est un virulent plaidoyer contre le phénomène culturel de l’accusation, révélant combien les personnes en situation de pouvoir exacerbent et manipulent la crainte de l’« autre » pour éviter toute remise en question.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Politics, Feminism, Queer, Social Justice, Philosophy

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 2016

About the author

Sarah Schulman is a longtime AIDS and queer activist, and a cofounder of the MIX Festival and the ACT UP Oral History Project. She is a playwright and the author of seventeen books, including the novels The Mere Future, Shimmer, Rat Bohemia, After Delores, and People in Trouble, as well as nonfiction works such as The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, and Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. She is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island.

Reviews

[Merritt K.]

The response to this book was determined in part before it was even released, and I suspect many potential readers will dismiss it on hearsay about the author, which is both a shame and deeply ironic considering the book's topic. Or, people may encounter the audacious title and believe this is an apologia for violence, which it isn't. In fact, many of the book's claims seem pretty uncontroversial to me, and I expect would to many of these potential readers: the state has become the arbiter of various forms of conflict; people claim the language of abuse because to be conflicted is seen as not worthy of pity or assistance; and, perhaps this is somewhat controversial, that there are similarities in traumatized and supremacist responses to normative conflicts or situations which provoke a need to self-examine.

Actually, my main issues with the book lie in that it doesn't go far enough at times. For instance, Schulman posits that 'bad groups' are behind most shunning behavior, whether those groups are on the level of the nation-state or small circles of friends. There's ample sociological research on why and how groups expel individuals to enhance solidarity that goes back to Durkheim, but very little of this is present in the text. The repeated solution we're provided with is to 'stop hiding behind technology' and to have transformative, face-to-face interactions with those with whom we are in conflict.

Again, I'm sympathetic to Schulman's position, but the dynamics of mediated versus face-to-face communication are sketched out here in a way that ignores the huge amount of research and theory that's been built up around information technologies and social media. In place of evidence, we're given echoes of Sherry Turkle: we 'all know' email and texts let us hide and stifle real, human contact. It's an unsatisfying approach that will likely further alienate young readers, who will probably also be turned off by Schulman's dismissive gloss on the complex politics around trigger warnings on college campuses.

Which is a shame, because there is a lot of value in this book. The chapter on HIV criminalization alone represents decades of firsthand experience with the topic, and that's probably why it's one of the strongest parts of the book. Much of the text is more polemic, based on the author's personal experiences with occasional bits of historical or scientific evidence tossed in to strengthen these anecdotes, which is perhaps why they read as a little thin. But the chapters on HIV, Palestine, and the history of the women's movement let Schulman play to her strengths as a knowledgable, persuasive activist in these areas, and paint a compelling picture of the dynamics of shunning her thesis revolves around.

Perhaps because the chapters on more interpersonal dynamics are more, well, personal, they don't hold up in quite the same way. Many of the examples Schulman describes resonated with me, also a queer woman, but they may ring hollow to those outside these communities. It's tough, because the thesis of the book is clearly meant to be of broad generalizability, but so many of the examples provided are from specific communities that the evidence doesn't seem to line up with the scope. The link between interpersonal dynamics to large group dynamics also isn't quite as smooth as it could be. I expect some readers will easily accept Schulman's portraits of shunning around Palestine and HIV while contesting the depiction of many interpersonal abuse claims as fundamentally about conflict.

I've been hitting all this book's weaknesses and maybe that's a hedge against the accusation that by even considering it in detail, I am also, by transitive property, an apologist for abuse and violence -- a dynamic included in the book's analysis. To be sure, this is a somewhat uneven book that's more of a passionate and wide-ranging expostulation than an academic inquiry. But that argument, that intervention, is timely and worth making, and my hope is that enough people will read it to allow for a discussion of it on its own merits, rather than the whispered claims that surround it -- the kinds of claims the book itself so boldly takes on.

[Micah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before the actual review: IF YOUR ACQUAINTANCE SAYS THEY HAVE GONE THROUGH AN ABUSIVE SITUATION PLEASE DO NOT FUCKING SIT THEM DOWN AND ASK THEM IF THEY'RE SURE IT'S *REALLY* ABUSE BECAUSE ONCE SARAH SCHULMAN SAID TO DO SO.
JUST
DO
NOT

PLEASE

Figure shit out in a way that doesn't involve questioning a potential survivor's narrative to their face, thnx

Okay, so the next thing about this book: FuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

I originally found this book through the Autostraddle interview and was curious. One of the issues (among many) in switching from a megalithic government to something representing an actual direct democracy (community-based, and, ideally, less able to fuck over everything) is justice reform and prison abolition. 'What will replace our prisons?' is a valid question. There are models that work and models that don't and I'm still grappling with which is which. I came to this book hoping for a ground work on how to differentiate conflict and abuse.

Did this book do that?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

MEH


I do like her framing of abuse as a conflict with uneven power distribution, but she doesn't go any further with it (and she focuses much of her interpersonal abuse only on physical abuse of men against women and doesn't discuss emotional abuse, which is an incredible oversimplification.) The irony of her begging her reader to pay attention to the nuance of an argument and then oversimplifying almost all of her arguments is just sloppy debate.

This said, it's one of the first time's I wasn't into a queer framework - it scares the shit out of me that someone would get out of an emotionally abusive relationship and have to demonstrate that it's actually abuse and not normative conflict to every single one of their friends.

As I was saying initially:
Please do not approach your friends about abuse allegations unless you are very tight with them and they are trying to process their experience. Please do not say "well, lets see if it was conflict or abuse, because I don't know if I believe this whole "abuse" thing." It's harmful to the person going through the experience. Oftentime when attempting to call out someone for being abusive, controlling or manipulative the people attempting to do the call-out lose social capital and end up pushed aside and unheard. Sarah repeatedly insinuates a survivor needs to get over their victim mentality and take responsibility, which feeds into this. Like, yes, we all need to take responsibility, including abusers.

Look, when you have a friend who is going through some shit you offer to be there for them, right? You offer to talk them through it, to listen, to support as you can. (At least I hope this is what you're doing, bc going through shit alone is the worst). And when someone says your friend was abusive, you sit down with that potentially abusive friend and effing talk about it. You make them talk, you listen, and you call them on their shit. If they say she was a crazy bitch, if they say none of it happened, if they say she's being dramatic and you find yourself saying "no way! This isn't an abuser, this is my buddy and they would never do that!" You fucking stop right there and put on your big kid britches and really fucking question your assumptions and why you choose to believe what you choose to believe. Whose narrative do you trust and why? What does it say about you and what does it say about this person, sitting in front of you, who may have great intentions, but is trying to talk their way out of accountability?

And if they decide to work on their shit? They say 'wow, I didn't know my actions could have these effects, I'm gonna listen and work on it.' and then they do? Tight. Support the shit out of them for that as well. We all fuck up. It's good to have each other's backs and be working on ourselves.

Schulman also repeatedly mentions that socially shunning an individual out of a community/friendship is the actual equivalent of what has been done to Palestinians and incarcerated prisoners. It's not and it's a really shitty false equivalency (one might say...having a victim mentality?) Prison destroys families and lives, while not wanting to talk to someone can range from emotionally hurtful to annoying. It doesn't mean social shunning doesn't suck, but it is not the same as prison.

On that note, I'm not responsible for someone being shitty over and over. There comes a point where it's not on me to take care of them or their feelings and I'm better for it to take space from them. We do not owe each other anything, and telling someone they shouldn't cut people out of their lives because of normative conflict reeks of entitlement. No one is entitled to my time but me. I do not owe Sarah repeated conversations and emotional labor if she is not treating me well. I feel for everyone who has been close to her, pushed her away and been lashed out at as not compassionate enough.

Random notes I took while angry:

-Why are we comparing borderline to people overreacting? I just - why? What is the point? Are you saying everyone who struggles with figuring out conflict is...literally psychotic? Or the psychosis is a metaphor? For...Something? EDIT: Psychosis in itself isn't a bad thing, it's a part of the human experience to be navigated and supported, but please don't compare the lived experience of borderline to someone being emotionally sensitive.

-And calling entire groups of people "bad groups" and "good groups"? What the fuck kind of shit is this? Like - who is the god doling out these oversimplified moral labels? Oh, it's Sarah? You don't say.

-Finally this quote: "Brach is an attractive, healthy, but somewhat bland woman in early middle-age..." My personal goal is to one day be described as attractive, healthy and BLAND by Sarah Schulman.


tl;dr:
10% Agree completely with what she says, 40% is Old man yells at Cloud, 50% absolutely wanted to burn it in a fire.

Edited for clarity

[Finn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarah Schulman says this in the introduction, but in order to get anything out of this book I feel I must stress it: This is not a book that is to be treated as "right" or "wrong."

I say this mostly because I'm afraid many will read some of the more disagreeable notions and dismiss the whole project. I, personally, found many ideas within the book "wrong" and others spot-on "right" and a lot more that I would have worded differently to accommodate readers' feminist code of ethics and/or political correctness (which I wager much of her readership is feminist and/or politically aware/sensitive).

What I want to tell my friends to do is read the Intro, Chapters 3, 5, 6, and the conclusion first. Chapters 4, 7, and 8 next. And then if you must, Chapter 1 and 2. I read the book in order, but half way through chapter 2 I was dismayed. There were too many offensive turn-offs to struggle through. Or too many examples of conflict that were petty and hard to take seriously. I also disagreed with some of her premises, like her assertion that there is a cut and dry distinction between "conflict" and "abuse," or that refusing communication with someone you're in conflict with is, by matter of fact, cruel and childish.

But as I settled myself into the book I became much more compelled by a lot of what she was saying and let my critical self go a little easier on her. The truth is she hits the nail on the head over and over again in illuminating the trend of those in conflict escalating the situation to avoid facing the whole truth of the matter, particularly if the whole truth requires self reflection. Perhaps her most controversial point in the book was the one that resonated the most with me: The people who are most likely to overstate harm are those who are triggered and reminded of past abuse or those who stand to lose certain social or political privileges. The tactics used to escalate conflicts and avoid accountability are strikingly similar between a person suffering from untreated or unprocessed PTSD and someone from a privileged position ("supremacist behavior" is what she calls it). What's going on internally is totally different of course, but externally both are known to overreact to a conflict, refuse any knowledge that may threaten their version of what has happened, and portray themselves as a victim and the person (or people) they're in conflict with as an abuser. The supremacist does this to maintain power and privilege. The traumatized does this because they're stuck in a past nightmare.
In both cases though, Schulman advocates for community intervention that seeks truth and reconciliation. And she also cautions against socially dysfunctional groups (be they family, friends, nation, clique) who unquestioningly "support" the person overstating harm and join in and escalate conflict.

This book is problematic. It also is what I've been waiting a long time for. I really want my friends to read it so we can talk about it together and tease out some of the weird parts and expand on the ideas that do put words to things we've experienced or done.
Really, it's just a relief to hear a firm argument for conflict resolution! For years I've felt so frustrated that the culture in my political community of how to handle conflict is to either stick your fingers in your ears and ignore it or to humiliate or banish someone. Even though I think these responses are sometimes warranted, I think they've become our only go-to's. Why does it seem so off the table to consider righting wrongs in a way that doesn't involve shunning, that might include reconciliation?

For those of you in the Bay, I heard she's speaking at Alley Cat books at the end of this month. Hit me up if you want to go!

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I had checked the author, considering how much I hated Gentrification of the Mind. The premise of this book is solid: individuals and groups often overreact to perceived or minimal danger and claim abuse and/or accuse others of abuse when the situation is more nuanced and reciprocal than that.

The problem with the way that the argument is presented is that it gives a very broad overview, invoking governmental power and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, while relying on personal examples from Schulman's acquaintance group. I don't come from the same background as Schulman, so a lot of the anecdotes that were meant to represent universal societal trends didn't ring true to me. I'm not saying that those things didn't happen, but that Schulman has a very specific context and doesn't try to analyze other contexts.

Schulman always ends up looking noble in these examples, in a way that I kind of distrust. Wait, I should amend that to say that there are times when she's very much does not look noble, like when she's discussing people who have rejected her romantic advances where I wanted to shout "Just let it go! She's just not that into you!" Maybe it's because I'm a youngster who's been through online dating, but I don't think anyone owes you an extensive explanation (never mind friendship) if they don't want to date you. On that same thought, no one owes "transitional" affection to someone they've already broken up with, no matter how sudden the split.

I will say that one of the good points of this book is the thought-provoking chapter on HIV criminalization, but really I wish I had read about this from a different author with more thorough analysis. But mostly this book got me to do a lot of cleaning so I wouldn't have to read this book.

[Bryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am going to do exactly what Schulman says humans being should never do; I am going to decide that Schulman's beliefs about how to treat other human beings are so pernicious and unpleasant that rather than remaining in relationship to her book, I am going to quit reading it and do something else with my time. She may have excellent points about community responsibility, but I will never know, because I am going to withdraw, withhold myself from the book, and in doing so profoundly harm this text by refusing to engage with it, thus proving myself to be a pathologically traumatised person who is not leading an integrated life.

Ahem.

Here is my problem with this book. These quotes are from pages 40-41 of the Kindle edition.

“There have been times in my life when I was attracted to someone and didn’t want to admit it, or that I was attracted to or even in love with her, or at least loved her, and had no awareness of this. It is not that I was lying, but that I was defended. I blocked access to my own real feelings. I did this to defend a story about myself that I felt safe maintaining, even if it wasn’t true. But sometimes the other person saw the truth that I was unable to access or be accountable for. Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can’t know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept.”"

Yes, that is true, but if we are not ready to accept them, the other person does not have some right to attempt to force them down our throat, just as if we want to do something but are not ready to actually do it (climb a mountain, go paragliding, have sex, bake a cake), in most cases other people do not suffer harm when we choose not to do it.

But Schulman isn't actually saying that they do, is she? Well, no, that's true, she isn't saying that. Not exactly. What she's saying is:

"Certainly this dynamic of defended refusal is a normative part of many people’s coming to terms with their sexual imaginations and can in fact continue after sexual identity is well in place. Is the act of honest pushback a kind of “harassment,” or is it a gift? Of course, people come to themselves in their own time, but what if the denial manifests in something harmful to the other person?"

In other words, what if person A is attracted to person B, but isn't ready to act on it yet? Isn't it a gift if person B pushes them to act on it anyway? Because, after all, person A denying her attraction to person B is "something harmful to the other person."

WTF? This makes absolutely no sense to me. How am I possibly harming someone by not admitting that I'm attracted? I mean, yes, someone might want to have sex with me, and then I won't have sex with them because (even though I'm attracted, in this imaginary scenario) I'm denying my feelings. This does not in any way harm anyone. Lack of sex is not harm.

As far as I can tell, Schulman is basing all of this in some idea that a person's emotional/limbic state -- their feelings or desires -- are more real than their mind deciding what to do about those things. Go back to that first quote above -- the 'defense' of not wanting to act on desire "blocks access to my real feelings." Desire is real, but thinking better of it, or not being ready to act on it, that's... unreal?

This was the point in which I started to have serious doubts about my ability to be in the room with Schulman. I have had a very large number of experiences in my life when I have been, let's say, 98% certain that I knew what someone was really feeling, no matter what it was they were presenting, and you know what? In most of those cases, the ethical thing to do is NOT to go poking around in their emotional state insisting on my truth, because either they are deliberately choosing to present something different than what they feel, WHICH IS THEIR RIGHT AS A HUMAN BEING, or they are not aware of their feelings because they are not capable of dealing with them in that moment. Yes, there are exceptional situations in which I judge that the disconnect between their emotional state and their presentation might create an unsafe situation for me or for people I am responsible for, and in those situations I will in fact verbally shove people, but they are vanishingly few and far between.

I will finish up with this quote, from pg. 49, which is around where I stopped:

"I remember one person saying to me, “You shouldn’t say you aren’t attracted when you are.” She was right and it has stayed with me. Now when I hear “When a woman says no, she means no,” I know that that is too simple, because I have said no when I didn’t mean it."

Again, WTF? People do not owe the fact of their attraction to other people. And if a person says no -- any person -- then one treats them as though they mean no, because we need to privilege what people are saying over our own perception of 'what they really want'. To do otherwise is to overwrite our own reality onto the other person, to insist that what we think/feel/perceive about them is more real than what they are telling us they think/feel/perceive about themselves. It doesn't matter if we're right and they're wrong; we act on what they give us, not on what we think we know about them. Of course there is room for nuance, there is room for shading, there is room to ask again later and listen harder and try to understand, but I believe the bottom line is that we listen to what people are telling us about how they want us to treat them, and to do otherwise is wrong. Period.

[31 Jan 2018]

[Justin Goodman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just read (or listen) to David Graber's "The Bully's Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination." Follow that up with Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese's "Radical Care." Then read the Audre Lorde cited in the latter essay.

This book is profoundly harmful in its confusion. Instead of pointing out how it reinforces the culture of shame victims of trauma go through (as done in this review from The New Inquiry), or how it reads like an attempt to target college deans' curriculums and conservative Democrats who quickly adopted progressive label (like Magally suggests), or focus on how a memoirish style doesn't work when you're trying to conflate apartheid states and relationship disputes, I want to quickly say why my two short recommendations are better than this book.

This is a book completely untethered from a historically grounded analysis or an analysis of power, and feels like it would sit comfortably on a shelf with consultant-oriented books like White Fragility and Lean In.

By understanding supremacy as a collection of individual actions, Schulman misunderstands power, and so can make the (frankly parodical sounding) claim that trauma and supremacy are equivalent in any manner. It leads her to misunderstand that the actions she claims are similar between them (e.g. shunning, which she calls, without clarification, a form of harassment) aren't both informed by a desire to dominate - and have that desire "in order to feel comfortable," whatever that means - but by a relationship to oppressive systems. Those who identify with the system want to preserve that relationship, and those who are oppressed and traumatized want control in an attempt to gain autonomy from it.

In that sense they are clearer, more concise, and provide actual practical ways to respond to the situation. And they don't trip over themselves with such outrageous statements like "Email creates repression and anxiety" and "We are no longer allowed to drop by unannounced when things are fraught," as if changes in social norms and communication tech are the cause of generations-long conflicts.

If you're looking for something more personal, something therapeutic-oriented, and found this book a helpful description of conflict in trauma, I also genuinely recommend reading bell hooks' essay "Revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves Subject" which details the same concept (how trauma can create repressive mechanisms) but in a way that affirms the experience of trauma and envisions self-affirmation as both interpersonal and politically revolutionary.

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a prime example of a book that I enjoyed for how much it made me think, not necessarily because I agreed with everything the author was arguing. I'm not entirely this frame is the right one for every kind of conflict, but I think particularly for online communities who are wrestling with the balance of accountability versus "cancellation," these notions of overstating harm and shunning could be useful jumping off points to help move a subcommunity forward after a conflict

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Alright. The chapters I’ve read independently in this book showed me enough to know that this was abuse apologist garbage. But I went ahead and read the full thing, so as to break down all the fucked up shut that’s going on here. I especially encourage survivors of abuse to read this, ESPECIALLY if people around you are citing this book in your conversations about ~harm~.

So, have my rant. I don’t expect this to convince anyone, because I’m a Mad survivor and therefore suffering from hysteria, ergo my testimony is invalid. But here are my ~crazy supremacist self-victimizing~ rantings anyhow.

Enjoy???

1:
-claims that saying “do not contact me anymore” after trauma is “supremacist behavior.” Also excusing those who continue to violate boundaries after being told no.
-equates those who expect their boundaries to be respected to…Stalinists?
-“no doesn’t actually mean no because deep down I didn’t mean it.” If you see a future and your poor pathetic object has obscured vision, simply try cajoling them a little more and see what happens.
-listening to survivors is restrictive. Calling them survivors is also bad, because they’re probably overstating the “abuse” they experienced. They were probably not abused at all!

2:
-outsiders, including social workers, know better whether someone is “unsafe” or “just uncomfortable” than individuals themselves.
-unsafety and discomfort can be confidently delineated in enough circumstances to warrant extensive discussion in this text.
-someone expressing anxiety over her partners temper is the same as being islamophobic because of 9/11.
-you can tell if someone’s actually being abused by asking the abuser about the context of the situation beforehand. This totally has nothing to do with victim blaming. Sometimes, she really *did* bring it on herself!
-if someone is harassing you, you need to understand where they’re coming from. No, really. If you work hard enough and are a Good Enough Queer, you can pretzel your way into understanding that you’re not really being harassed at all.
-Schulman is enlightened because instead of being like “dude don’t obsess about my appearance, track me, dedicate pages of writing to inane details of my life on your blog” she had Enlightened Queer Conversations with an internet random until she convinced herself that she was not being stalked.

3:
-I can decide that women who feel ambivalent about sex are never being coerced into sex. I know this because some other women actually secretly want their ambivalent sex after all.
-a very annoying and cringe-inducing spiel about how trigger warnings are a restriction on muh freeze peach and also because being reminded of harm isn’t the same as actually doing it we shouldn’t use tws for those special self victimizing snowflakes
-some people are too traumatized to talk about trauma, so we should avoid them. They’re just hysterical!
-women who openly discuss their experiences of abuse, and seek recourse for it, actually have daddy issues.

4:
Here’s the chapter where she shoehorns a needed discussion about AIDS and homophobia into a discussion about sexual violence in order to give a Good Queer Veneer to the abuse apologia in the first three chapters.

5:
-if traumatized people know that they correctly recognize that they have been wronged, they’re actually supremacist. Truly traumatized people feel shame!
-we should try our best to cajole people into talking to people who hurt them. “Backing off” when someone establishes boundaries is bad. Boundaries are bad!
-people escalate “conflict” when they “assume the role of the abused.” They should be convinced to stop self victimizing, because that is supremacist behavior.
-gleeful ignorance as to why it could possibly be bad to call a psychiatrized survivor “unstable”

6:
-“triggers are overrractions” is the base assumption of this chapter. Right there on the first page.
-harassment isn’t harassment, but expressing a desire to cut off contact is harassment. Cutting off contact with your former friend group = “shunning.”
Just all manner of hackneyed theories and explicitly pathological language to explain why trauma and supremacy mirror each other.
-POSITIVE CITATION OF STOP WALKING ON EGGSHELLS?!?????

7:
Lots of pages explaining why family is bad, including chosen family.

8:
-referred to US reactions to disproportionate coverage of kidnapped Israelis as a “borderline episode.”
-just the absurdly sloppy and willfully ignorant equation of state-level settler colonialism and genocide with individuals experiencing abuse.
-page after page of Facebook comments isn’t an argument

9:
-men rape women over and over, and I guess that sucks, but who can blame them? Women are confusing.
-internet communication bad.
-a survivor’s anger was irrational. I managed to convince her that she was being irrational and later on she agreed that I was right. Epic win!
-abusers are actually being group-bullied and we have a duty as Good Radical Queers to intervene!!!!

—

TAKEAWAYS:

If you read all that (no pressure, it’s a lot), congrats. If you didn’t, I don’t blame you. If you come away from this review with anything, let it be this:

you are not irrational, crazy, or hysterical because you were traumatized.

You are allowed to set boundaries, including boundaries others don’t understand.

You are never, under any circumstances, obligated to “have a conversation” with your abuser. Your decisions to go no-contact are to be respected.

Your abuse was not your fault.

Your abuse was not your fault, even if you have a psychiatric disability.

You are not a bad person for asking for trigger warnings. You are not a bad person for being triggered.

You are not a bad queer for being open about your lived experiences. You deserve to be trusted and cared for by people who believe you. You do not deserve the testimonial injustice meted out to you under the auspices of radicalism.

Coercion is not consent. Maybe is not yes. No means no, and a “yes” in a different circumstance does not negate that.

You are a person worth protecting.

[C.E. G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started out being really into this book, feeling personally challenged by it and writing down some quotes like, "Refusing to be self-critical in order to solve conflicts enhances the power of the state." I found it valuable to look at how both Supremacy and Trauma can lead to unhealthy responses to conflict.

However, the more I read, the more I felt like this book was Sarah Schulman intellectualizing her obsession with past rejections. Like, the title of the book includes "the duty of repair" but I never felt like she made the case for why it's our duty. I definitely agree that it's unhealthy to label someone abusive/threatening and then call the police on them or ask everyone you know in common to start shunning them. But we have limited time, and to me it feels like an unreasonable expectation that every person who crosses your path should process conflict with you. Like, sometimes, a relationship just isn't worth maintaining, and I don't think that's a violence.

It's definitely a book that should be read more in the spirit of self-criticism rather than externally focused criticism. I found myself drifting into the latter at times, but realized that's what was irritating me about Schulman's stance (most of her criticisms were of how other people treated her, rather than how she was behaving). It was worth reading for me and I'd love to discuss it more with people. It helped me articulate and draw connections between certain phenomena in my world.

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sarah Schulman's remarkable Conflict is Not Abuse offers a nuanced look at conflict, group behaviour, and the consequences of overstating harm. Her book - which examines conflict and overstatement of harm on the local, national, and international scale - couldn't be more well-timed in an era of increasingly hostile responses to difference across culture. Whether it is the ceaseless flamewars of the Tumblr generation, the national scapegoating of people living with HIV through HIV criminalization, or the occupation of Palestine - we are living in a time when ordinary differences are catastrophized with increasingly brutal consequences. Schulman, rather than turn away in disgust, dives deep into the underlying individual and group psychologies that allow people to shun, scapegoat, and dehumanize others in order to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.

This is a book that will begin thousands of conversations, and will likely be debated for years to come. It is absolutely essential reading.

[akemi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Holy fuck, this was a trip.

So, general premise:

We need to differentiate conflict from abuse. Conflict is a situation that generates discomfort, anxiety, anger or fear. Abuse is a situation where one's body or being is under threat.

Too often we conflate conflict with abuse. This is bad, because once the other is marked as an abuser, they are often cut off from their social circles, harassed, arrested or, at extremes, killed. Our culture of believing victims of abuse, without hearing the other side, is, in the long term, damaging to both the accused (who are cast out) and the victim (who are never made to reflect on their own potential culpability).

The issue with traumatised people is that they traumatise others. That which was abusive in their youth has instilled, in them, a hypervigilance that marks their present circumstances with past affects. They may unwittingly conflate their partner entering into a conflict with them, as their partner abusing them. In other words, their partner may trigger in them their memories of their abusive father, and they, subsequently, act out on these memories rather than in the present conflict at hand.

This is why we need to hold our abused friends accountable, so that they may heal and open up, rather than lash out and close off.

Ok. This is the thing. Schulman isn't wrong about trauma being a cycle; what she is wrong about is her belief that trauma victims can, somehow, simply look at themselves and go, you're right Sarah, I should have listened to you all along, you're the best friend I never had.

Like, despite all the poststructuralist thinkers she quotes, she treats the traumatised as if they were fully rational agents who deploy their hypervigilancy as a weapons against those that resist their control. It's fucking gross. It's a bad faith argument that goes completely against her own cries for us to understand the other.

She doesn't understand PTSD and expects everyone to be as resilient as she is. Those who aren't as resilient as she is are labelled as the real abusers, as vindictive and petty children who can't stand reality. Them not answering their phone? That's a power move!

Story time: a few years back I was an anxious wreck. If I got a phone call, even from my gf, my entire body would shake. I would hide in a dark space and whimper inarticulate sentences. It wasn't something I could control and I fucking hated it. I just stopped answering my phone for 3 years. Having such behaviour labelled as a mechanism of power is one of the most revolting things I've read in my life.

Story time 2: on the other hand, Schulman is right about PTSD priming you to see trauma everywhere you go. I've been there. There was a year where I had to drop out of uni because I literally couldn't walk the twenty minutes it would take for me to get to class. I couldn't meet anyone's eyes, I constantly felt like I was persecuted, and I knew I was crazy, but I couldn't fucking help it. I lashed out at friends who tried to help. I believed everyone despised me, no matter how nice everyone was; or, rather, because of how nice everyone was. Trauma rendered all reality suspect.

So yea, I can understand Schulman's concerns, especially in her own context, where it sounds like calling the police or reporting students and colleagues to upper management is the norm. That is disgusting, unempathetic behaviour. The consolidation of power over others through institutional mechanisms that are meant to protect victims, not generate new ones, is something we should fight against. It is a new McCarthyism.

Shit's fucked. Overreacting sucks, but sometimes we can't control it. I'm glad my friends stuck with me. I'm glad I didn't call the police on the person who hurt me (who the fuck does that shit?) I'm glad we talked it out years later. But I needed that fucking space first.

I think Schulman has the best intentions with this book, but the amount of responsibility she places on trauma victims is awful. I completely agree that we should address these issues at a community level, through horizontal power structures, rather than through vertical ones of state domination. Talk shit out. But respect trauma victims. They're called fragile for a reason. it takes time to learn to love again.

P.S. In ch7 Schulman compares the Israeli state (and their genocide of Palestinians in Gaza) to someone with borderline personality disorder. I don't see how a state with military grade weaponry and a history spanning centuries is remotely comparable to a single person suffering from borderline who (probably) can't get the treatment they need. Let's not psychologise institutions which exist at a different level of organisation from individuals. Conflating genocide with mental illness is ignorant, reductive and abject.

Original review after finishing ch1 (yea, skip ch1 and ch7 unless you want to be triggered):

omfg i thought this was going to be about trauma politics, about how when people are traumatised they become increasingly fixated with purity — political, gendered, racialised — tankies, terfs, fascists, whatever.

but it's just about poor wee sarah whose text was never returned — owie zowie, aren't u the victim? that person over there who doesn't want to deal with you? they're the true abuser!

eugh, whatever.

like, trauma politics is a thing. i've been on both ends of it — persecutor and persecuted.

i've lashed out at my friends, especially when they were getting into jordan peterson. i closed myself off to them instead of talking about my anxieties and fears. it took the christchurch mosque terror attack for them to realise i wasn't just freaking out. but at the same time — i was freaking out — and i could have dealt with that better. i'd been sexually assaulted the year before and had only begun working through my own internalised racism from growing up in a settler state.

on the other hand, when i was trying to help my femme friend last yr, who'd been sexually assaulted by their boyfriend, they started projecting a lot of his traits onto me. it was awful. anything slightly masculine became problematic. i tried to ignore it — because i knew it was them getting triggered and triggers are fucking real. but the amount of gender dysphoria from being constantly called masculine by someone assigned-female-at-birth was disgusting. 2nd wave rad femme bullshit. i cut my ties and i'm glad. i hope they got the help they needed elsewhere.

i wish this book was about that — that messy awful place where love, care, trauma, terror and politics collide. where social critique and self-reflection go hand in hand and everyone benefits. i think this is what sarah wants — but her first example is so petty it reads like a self-absorbed teenage blog.

i agree, we need to transform fragility into resilience and ptsd into love. i disagree that calling the fragile delusional, infantile and shallow is the way to it.

'unblock mee owo is ur bestiee saraaa~'

[Murtaza]

This is what you can describe as an anti-cancel culture book written from left, drawing upon the author's own experiences as a left-wing, gay, Jewish academic operating in progressive circles in New York City. I think you can sum up her argument as being that its possible to be a progressive without being vindictive or operating purely on emotional reasoning. That seems like an obvious point but the negative reaction to the book from many of the people it is intended to reach seems to suggest that not everyone welcomes this perspective. Schulman argues that a lot of what people perceive as abuse or aggression is often just normal conflict between human beings or even simply unhomogenized difference that can be mediated in a healthy manner. Abuse does exist, but she takes a more traditional view of it as as something that creates intentional harm and danger for another person rather than the progressive academic conception of it where "violence," need not refer to any concrete act. She also makes the point that people rush to use the language of abuse to describe their experiences because that's the way to get help in this society, though in reality almost everyone needs some sort of help navigating life whether they have been abused or not.

This book consists of a lot of case studies and examples from the authors own life. Although the book has a cult following it doesn't seem to have shifted the stream of progressive thinking in the years since it was published since the trends that she appears to be warning against have gathered steam since that time. Still, she makes an argument for treating human beings as complex rather than as binary figures of good and evil. Shulman wants people to pause and reflect on their actions and attitudes before escalating conflict into abuse, a call for sobriety which is welcome to hear coming from a figure whom progressives might listen to.

[Jess Owens · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 rounded up.

Discussion: https://youtu.be/feUX4dhMr4Q

[Matthew Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to even begin. Not a single day has gone by in the last 3 months that I have not thought about some idea from Conflict is Not Abuse. I don't know if it's because of the profundity of the material, where I am in my life, or the fact that I don't often read books about trauma, emotions, interpersonal conflict, and activism, but this book stuck with me in a way that few do. I have *many* thoughts, but there is no substitute for you going out and reading this yourself. I hope you will find it complicated, challenging, frustrating, and enlightening, as I did.

This book has like a dozen central theses. Here are a few that most stuck with me:

1) People in power often overreact when confronted with the harm they are causing others. They treat the accusation of harm as an act of aggression, and then retaliate disproportionately. In other words: the powerful over-react and act to accusations of harm, and act as though they are now the victims. Once you spot this pattern, it’s impossible to unsee. A recent example that came to my mind is how many prominent tenured university professors started acting like they were the victims of a witch hunt when students expressed grievances about certain jokes or uses of language. Professors with immense influence adding to the moral panic of “cancel culture” is a classic overstatement of harm.

2) Conflict is very normal. Conflict naturally arrises from difference, and we live in a world of people who are different from each other. We should therefore get used to conflict as a natural part of life, and not overreact to its presence. ​I am by nature an EXTREMELY conflict-averse person. Abstract philosophical conflict, I can handle. But real, messy, political human conflict: not for me. I’d rather exit most situations than start arguing. But I often need to remind myself: conflict is not abuse. Conflict is OK.

3) On the flip side, we live in a society that dramatically under-reacts to actual abuse. What differentiates conflict from abuse is the power differential. Conflict is power struggle; abuse is power over.

4) If you have a conflict, do not shun, do not scapegoat, do not silence, do not bully, and do not stonewall. Talk it out. The only way to hash out conflict and disagreement is through conversation. Don’t bring in the authorities, certainly don’t bring in the police, and don’t retaliate with shunning, or worse, with violence. In some ways, the book is a radical defense of free speech. Its most audaciously optimistic premise—and one that I very much buy into—is that people can sit down with each other and resolve their differences if they only take the time to listen.

Hopefully you can see the general idea here. Perhaps this all seems obvious to you, and rightly so! None of these ideas are necessarily complex, but for some reason, this packaging just hit different for me. Another variant on the theme comes from a meme that was popular on Tumblr but which I only came across recently, which says something like: “When people who are used to being treated like an authority say ‘if you won’t respect me, I won’t respect you’, what they’re often saying is ‘if you don’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person’, and that’s not OK.”

For every insightful and profound point in Conflict is Not Abuse, there was an equal and opposite idea that I could not quite get behind. There were two general categories of ideas I was skeptical of. Let’s call them “over-generalized advice” and “being a Nazi is not a mental disorder”.

First one first. Throughout the book, Schulman presents straightforward advice that makes sense only for a very particular target audience. For instance, she describes situations where gay men would express sexual desire at straight men, and the straight men would feel threatened and react violently in return. The advice? “Desire is not harassment”. This is true as an abstract principle, but I know many straight men who actually need to hear the precise opposite advice, namely “please stop publicly expressing desire to so many women, because it actually is in fact verging on harassment”.

Another example: I recently saw a tweet from a black woman scientist that said “Just because you *feel* intimidated doesn't mean I'm intimidating: A Memoir.” (https://twitter.com/JennMJacksonPhD/s...). This makes good sense. White people often experience black people as threatening when in reality that’s just a response from decades of racist social conditioning. Schulman would extrapolate this to a general principle: “Just because someone scares you doesn’t mean they’re actually harmful”. Again, this is true, but there are equally plenty of cases where the power dynamic is reversed, and one should in fact trust one’s fear. It would be unfortunate if powerful, intimidating people read this book and took home the message “yes, if people are intimidated by me, that’s on them”. Maybe there’s an assumption that those people won’t be reading the book though—fair enough.

The second category of thing I took umbrage with falls under the heading ““being a Nazi is not a mental disorder”. Schulman argues that the dynamics that cause people to overstate harm and retaliate aggressively on an interpersonal level are the same dynamics that lead to interstate violence. So, the argument goes, given that interpersonal conflict is caused by people’s feelings, we should equally understand perpetrators of state conflict—like, say, the Nazis, or Benjamin Nettenyahu—through the lens of their trauma and emotions.

There is surely truth to this, but it cannot possibly be the whole story. You can’t just give Hitler a therapist then assume everything will be OK. If you remove a violent individual from a relationship, that relationship will cease to be violent; if you remove a violent individual as head of state without dismantling the systems that got that person there in the first place, little will change. Moreover, I am not a therapist, but my sense is that psychotherapy is the realm of understanding and coming to terms with one’s inner mental life and deals with issues like self-esteem and relationship difficulties. I am trying to find a therapist right now, and none of them profess expertise in fulfilling religious ideologies, protecting honor, preserving national borders, appealing to the voting public, exerting power on the national stage, and playing complex roles within vast systems of geopolitical and socioeconomic power.

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to this argument. I do believe that most people are profoundly out of touch with their own feelings, and if they had a more sophisticated window into their own mind they might do less harm. But it does not follow that Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people is best explained by Jews re-enacting their collective trauma at scale. This fits in with another argument Schulman makes, which is that trauma and supremacy behavior are two sides of the same coin. I don’t know enough about trauma to really weigh in, but on a gut level, I’m suspicious.

Another thing I struggled with the entire book is the fact that Sarah Sarah Schulman is coming from a context that I found hard to relate to, since she spent most of her life as an AIDS and gay rights activist. I do not run in activist circles, but my understanding is that among activists, there is a common practice of militantly policing the boundaries of who is allowed in the movement. If someone dares express a “wrong” opinion on some matter, their transgression might spread through gossip, and they might be shunned and bullied for daring to violate the party line. This is clearly no way to build a movement and stand in solidarity. But again, the book silently assumes that I am familiar with these contexts, and takes it as obvious that I am at risk of being shunned by my friends for my thoughtcrimes. I have great friends and am not at risk of this; in fact, I’d say one of the definitions of a good friend is someone who will let you make mistakes and say things you might come to disagree with later.

This has been a lot, I know. But clearly Conflict is Not Abuse struck a chord. Like I said, I have thought about the ideas in this book every single day since I read it. Part of me feels the book is almost a Rorschach test of sorts. It could be read as an “anti-campus-cancel-culture” polemic just as much as it’s an “anti-state-enforced-supremacy” polemic. It could be used to argue that people are too sensitive and can’t stand up for themselves, or that systems of supremacy make it difficult for the marginalized to stand up to their oppressors. The main thing I took from it is its title: conflict is not abuse. Disagreements and differences are a normal and healthy part of human life, and with genuine effort and real listening, it’s possible to talk things out.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have so much to say about this book. It was frustrating, radical, oversimplified, deeply complicated, powerful, provocative, brilliant, problematic, insightful and self important. I really do believe it should be widely read mostly because I want to talk about it with everyone.

Highlights for me include resisting the idea that people are disposable, emphasis on reparation, the importance of taking DEEP accountability, and the linkage between community shunning and privilege/White supremacy.

For me it was also missing a more nuanced understanding of trauma (particularly complex trauma), the rights of a victim/survivor to draw a hard boundary around communication with the person who harmed them, how to hold accountable (with compassion) an abusive member of a community.

Worth reading.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conflict is Not Abuse is a book I suspect many people will hate. However, it says some important and astute things about how society deals with conflict and abuse. Specifically, Schulman is writing a call to action for people to sort out problems with communication rather than label them as unworkable too quickly. She differentiates situations where one person abuses their power over another from situations where parties are mutually encountering difficulties with one another. She argues that conflicts are too often labelled as abuse, and that overuse of shunning and communication prevents people from working through solvable problems.

Schulman's greatest weakness, however, are her examples. In particular, the last chapter on Israel and Palestine, most of the writing are just examples of Tweets and Facebook posts rather than analysis. I think she had an interesting point, but I would have preferred she have gotten to the point rather than show me how horrible people were online. She also uses some... questionable personal examples which, admittedly, are thought provoking, but possibly more complicated than she gives them credit for.

Overall, not a perfect book, but an interesting one.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, a story:

eHarmony's infallible personality matching system introduced me to a man, M, around 12 years ago -- about 2010 or maybe 2011. He seemed nice and we both liked some of the same things, so we dated for a while.

Past Andrea was kind of a pushover. Those of you who know me primarily here on GR may find this very hard to believe, but I assure you it is true. For evidence I present:

- He showed up every day at my office to drive me home without asking if I wanted a drive or was intending to go straight home. After a few weeks of this, I asked him to stop, and call me first to check. He called first sometimes and on other days just showed up; I did not dump him.

- He called a dozen times a day when I was at work. I said the ringing was disruptive to my colleagues and could he please just call once a day? He reduced his calls, but not to one. I did not dump him.

- He dropped by my house unannounced when my child was with me to give me things because he was "just in the neighbourhood." I told him that was sweet but I didn't want him meeting my kid yet and he'd have to call first. He didn't. I didn't dump him.

This took, maybe, about six weeks. Six weeks of not-dumping someone with extremely controlling and boundaryless behaviour because he seemed nice, I didn't want to be mean, and adults should communicate.

Then one day, I went for a run in the park close to my home, and came back to a ringing phone. It was M.

M: so, did you go for a run?
A: Yeah, just got back.
M: In ____ park?
A: Yes.
M: Because I didn't see you there.
[long pause]
A: You went to the park to watch me run?
M: Yeah.
{long pause]
A: Doesn't that seem ... a little ... stalkerish ... to you?
M: I'm not a stalker! Don't call me a stalker! I'm not a stalker! You can't call me a stalker!

So, we broke up. You will be shocked to learn that he did not stop dropping by my house (usually when I wasn't there, to leave things in my mailbox), emailing (extremely long messages of love song lyrics and musings), voicemails (cut off by the machine because he just went on), dropping by my office -- you name it. The kicker was a few weeks later when I got back from a date with someone else, and M dropped by my house on a Friday night at 11 pm.

A: M, this has got to stop.
M: What?
A: The dropping by, the emails, the gifts, the phonecalls -- it's all got to stop.
M: Ok.
A: All right then. [Goes to shut the door]
M: Well can't I at least talk to you?
A: NO!

So, he goes home and writes me an email, to which I reply saying that if he doesn't knock it off, I'll go the police with a harassment complaint.

Did he stop? Dear Readers, did he?

No. He stopped doing things I could document. Instead of emails, packages and voicemails, he would --and I am not exaggerating, I promise you -- go to the places he knew I liked to go on my lunch break, wait in a shadowy spot, and jump out when I walked by to shout "Hi Andrea!" in my ear and walk away. For six months.

Now: at no point was I afraid of M. Maybe I should have been, but my fear response has been more or less permanently tweaked by an interesting childhood of the likes Schulman alludes to as "traumatizing" in her book. I have had one stalker who scared me, but then, he also assaulted me and brought other people into his campaign of harassment, and preceded the stalking by telling me for months about how he could use all of his family's money to destroy his ex-wife's life. (Hindsight. Ugh.) My problem is traditionally that I am not scared of things I should really be scared of. I was not afraid of M, only frustrated and annoyed.

I'm including this story because it is exactly the kind of grey area Schulman's weaknesses and harms show up in most clearly. Because, according to her analysis, I am the bad actor here. M wasn't really stalking me. I was never unsafe. This was conflict, not abuse. Therefore, I am not allowed to cut him off. I am certainly not entitled to resort to the police. I need to keep communicating with him as long as he wants to communicate, I guess, which is forever. My cutting him off is harming him -- punitive and controlling. In fact, I have a Duty to Repair, because apparently we don't need to distinguish between a brief acquaintanceship and longstanding community in how we relate to others or maintain relationships.

Oh, and I should likely mention that M sexually assaulted me while we were dating. It wasn't, as women often classify these things, a major or significant assault; and I wasn't afraid or damaged by the experience. Just annoyed.

So, the book, and one of the anecdote Schulman begins it with, which is: she has a platonic lunch with a new acquaintance and would like to turn it into a friendship. Said woman agrees. Sarah then keeps suggesting dates which the other woman doesn't reply to. Sarah feels put out: said woman said yes, why did she say yes if she didn't mean it, doesn't that yes mean forever unless it's unsaid, and she shouldn't be able to unsay it anyway!

Don't people have some responsibility to be accountable? Or does the new victimology require me to interpret yes as no, and silence as "I changed my mind"? No answer is not an answer. It is unreasonable to expect other people to interpret our silences. ... we could have talked through the anxiety. You know, helped each other. But there was no answer....

Why not have a common value of resolution? Let's imagine that this person did become accountable and in the end chose mutual kindness/accountability over accusation. She realized that she was mad at me for no reason caused by me, that this was old stuff acting itself out in new places, and so she did the right thing and picked up the phone. WE talked. We saw each other and the friendship was allowed to become important.

Let me reiterate that she knew this person beforehand for the duration of a single lunch. There were no accusations of any kind. And from this, and from two text sentences indicating the this other woman might like to get together again sometime, constructed an entire worldview in which she could only be acting in bad faith out of an over-reaction to old news, must be angry, and if only she could get over it they'd be lifelong besties.

There is so much projection going on here, and one of the significant flaws of the book is that while Schulman is quick to decry what she considers "disordered thinking" from other people (on the basis of one-side testimony, which theoretically she is against) she never sees her own.

As she writes earlier:

In another example from other people's lives, sometimes angry, supremacist, or traumatized people send emails commanding, "Do not contact me." I want to state here, for the record, that no one is obligated to obey a unidirectional order than has not been discussed. Negotiation is a human responsibility.

How much negotiation? For how long? On what basis, and to what end? This grants all the power to the person who does not want the relationship to end and none to the person who wants out.

More significantly, she herself is committing the exactly the same fallacy she spends the entire book railing against in others: The point of the book is that, well, conflict is not abuse; and that we shouldn't escalate conflict into abuse claims because of the harms that causes. Which is fine, and I sure have seen situations that from the outside look like that's what's going on, but!

Schulman spends the entire book claiming that someone not wanting to have a friendship with you or spend time with you is "shunning" and "HARMING" you.

This is not harm. Rejection is a normal part of human experience. No one is entitled to the time and energy of other people.

Another story: The time my mother stole her sister's piano.

Now. You may spend some time imagining to yourself, GR, how much time, effort and money you need to spend in stealing a piano. It isn't something you can stick in your pocket and walk out with. You need to hire a truck, and even if you were to sell it, would never be able to recover the costs. It's not something you do for financial gain. In this case, it was purely punitive: my mother wanted to hurt my aunt, and it worked.

However, in my mother's broken mind, my aunt acting hurt was construed as an attack on her. (This aunt did not report the theft to the police or even ask for the piano back, out of concern for the relationship.) And she hasn't spoken to my aunt since. This was almost 30 years ago.

This is, I think as close to a personal anecdote as possible demonstrating the very dynamics Schulman writes about. My mother acted out to harm someone, and then when called to be accountable, called that conflict "abuse" and escalated beyond all reason into shunning. So yes, it does happen.

Now let's examine the application of Schulman's ideas about how to approach that situation:

1) My aunt should simply disregard the shunning and continue to talk to her sister, my mom.

How on earth would this benefit anyone? Even if you were to argue that it's not stalking (and I wouldn't agree), what would my aunt get out of it? Why would you want continued contact with someone who could treat you that way? Who could ever suppose my mother would respond well, and that anything like a relationship could resume?

2) The family -- the good family she writes about later in the book -- should intervene and talk my mother through her issues to a resolution, so that she can resume a relationship with her sister.

Oh yeah. There's a revolutionary idea. No one has ever considered talking to my mother about it.

No, wait. They have. Many times, over decades. And then she shuns them too. So.

One problem here is how to intervene with a person who is overstating harm, hiding behind technology, shunning or otherwise escalating. In some cultures we are trained not to assist directly, saying we are "non-confrontational," that indifference is polite. Instead, we can learn to be accountable, to ask, "How can I help you and X to sit down and talk?"... The next step is to come as a group. "Hey, now there are five of us here together, with you. We can to help you an X sit down and talk. We find what you're doing to be very disturbing. We won't shun you, we won't punish you, but we also won't be co-opted into silence. How can we find an alternative?"

What an absolutely terrible idea. I'm imagining, say, my Dad, aunt H & her then-husband B, uncle L and either his first or second wife, sitting down and trying to talk to my mother about her cutting off of aunt S. It too would have been construed as an attack and each of them would have been punished. This kind of folk-treatment of serious personality disorders would be disastrous. That she is taking ideas meant for professionals (social workers and other front-line staff dealing with abused people and perpetrators) and encouraging lay people to apply it to their friends and family is horrifying to me. That it is dressing this up as political activism (in several interviews claiming she doesn't understand why people are taking this book as about personal issues and relationships when literally all chapters but two are about her own experiences and in-group phenomena) is just beyond.

One more story:

My mother has cut me off--shunned me--for periods ranging from a few days to several years over the course of my life, starting in early childhood and continuing to this very day. Once she didn't talk to me for three days because I disagreed with her when she said Gillian Anderson was prettier than Pamela Lee. Once she didn't talk to me for three months because I forgot to sweep the floor when I got home from school. Most recently, she hasn't talked to me for going on seven years because I refused to drop everything -- my job, care for my disabled kid, etc. -- to take on full-time care of my father when he got sick so she wouldn't have to take time off work.

Let's say I missed her. I don't, but in the spirit of pretending so we can examine the ideas in Schulman's book. My mother's behaviour is a clear illustration of what she is talking about: the person with power-over, engaging in abuse, responds to normal conflicts as if they are abuse, and with shunning. It sure was extremely painful. As a kid growing up, intolerably so.

Refusing to be shunned for unjust, nonexistent, or absurd reasons is not "stalking.

No, it is.

So, sure, according to Schulman I could theoretically continue a relationship with my mother against her wishes because her reason for cutting me off was unjust or absurd. This would be stalking, in my opinion; while I reasonably had a claim on a relationship with her while I was growing up (food, shelter, all that stuff), as an adult living independently this is no longer the case, and her rejection of me, while excruciating, is not harm. I do not have a right to force myself on her no matter how ridiculous her reasons for not wanting me.

Furthermore, why would I want to? What benefit would it provide to me to force someone to be in my life who so regularly causes me and everyone around her so much pain?

The idea that people do things for reasons, and that these reasons are worth trying to understand, can be a normative assumption. It certainly is mine. That this understanding process is productive and generous becomes implied.

I love how she thinks this is a) rare and b) not something abused people are conditioned to automatically wrt their abusers. And actually a good chunk of the problem, and a significant barrier to leaving (wait -- are they allowed to leave, Sarah? Or is that shunning? How many times do they need to ask their abuser to stop before they're allowed to sever contact, if at all?).

I don't know how Schulman arrive at this point in her sixth decade, with so much self-ascribed expertise and observational acumen, while totally avoiding the obvious: abused people are conditioned to take on the perspective she encourages and it keeps them trapped in abuse for years or decades. Maybe they didn't mean it! They must have had a reason! I should be more understanding! We should negotiate the relationship! We need to talk more! Leaving or ending contact would be mean!

If someone wishes to alter a relationship, they must discuss it with the other person, negotiate the change, and listen to the other person's account. There is no ethical way around it.

Really? Even when that other person will never, ever agree to any change?

This supposedly "radical political" book is just the same old, same old codependency and enabling dressed up in leftie speak, and will harm victims.

You can see this in my opening story: spending decades in a family where we all pretended that this time the conversation with my mom would be different, she would see what she was doing and change, she must have a reason and be acting out of trauma, we didn't want to be mean to her by doing to her what she was doing to us, and negotiations never went anywhere because she wasn't negotiating in good faith, left me precisely vulnerable to these boundary violations in adulthood from bad-faith actors in other domains, and not just M.

If someone wanted to be friends with me, we were friends. I never asked myself if I wanted to be friends with them, liked them, or enjoyed their company; I didn't want to harm them, you know.

If someone wanted to date me, I said yes, unless and until they behaved so egregiously that I finally felt justified in cutting them off, which rarely went well because someone who behaved so egregiously was not going to respect my boundaries, were they? I mean, if I didn't want them, didn't I have to have a good reason? And didn't that have to be about safety, or harm, and not desire or pleasure? It wasn't ok for me to just not want to be around someone anymore, was it?

I had to separate from that family (how cruel of me!) over a period of several years and spend a lot of time and energy explicitly unlearning those very messages she is trying to teach here--and which are keeping those family members still locked into cycles of abuse themselves. It amazes me how often these old, tired ideas of codependency are regularly peddled through political or spiritual spaces as "revolutionary new paradigms to resolve conflict." They're not.

Schulman (since she so ardently advocates for psychological language, I will indulge it here) seems largely unaware of her own actions and how they come across, unwilling to face consequences for her behaviour or even feedback, much too confident in her assessments of others' psychological and emotional states (not to mention reasoning and motivation), entirely self-favouring in her conclusions. Even the slanted anecdotes from her own life that she includes are troubling; as other reviewers have noticed, she always comes off as the noble one, and that is disquieting and I mistrust it. The anecdotes she includes from friends and acquaintances always seem to favour the one who violently lashes out due to serious provocation, which I also distrust; Schulman's world is apparently filled with unconsciously vindictive people, and she assumes this is true of everyone, but it's not. Somehow she's convinced that this is a book about politics and the state, and is very confused about why people take it as a book about cancel culture and relationships. If only she had one of those 'good friend' groups she spends the book arguing for, who could have pushed back on her ideas, insisted on more development of whatever connections she seems to believe are there, and introduced other points of view, but alas: even her friend group is apparently beset with destructive loyalty.

I wanted this to be a good, thorough explanation of how to balance the needs of traumatized people (including their valid need for a level of safety in their lives that would be unreasonable in other contexts) who seem to be lashing out unfairly and overly-rigidly in political spaces, with some desire for solidarity and commonness of purposes in achieving aims and recognizing the fallibility and complexity of human relationships and motivations. What I found was an overly simplistic, self-indulgent and harmful full-throated defence of codependency that will make life more dangerous for victims and quite likely prevent the healing of those who are traumatized. It was disappointing and I can't recommend it.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

* some gorgeous writing and really helpful correctives on the politics of victimhood. as someone who has been thru trauma it was so helpful to read about the narrative that when u face trauma ur expected to become a "virgin" who has done nothing wrong. that narrative also hurts people who have faced harm as they feel they can never live up to it.
* this is supposed to be a pragmatic book on how to communicate across difference within activist circles. but it's discussion on trigger warnings, like most leftist critiques of trigger warnings (even from my fav jack hablerstam 3) is totally in the hypothetical. trigger warnings are a practical way of being like "just fyi this book is kinda fucked up." they are not mechanisms of shunning (as she theorizes), they offer guidance that can help readers best engage with ideas. i mean i know that schulman can be a polemcist. the title of the book is in itself polemicizing (and prob why so many ppl dont want to read it-- i think that sometimes conflict and abuse do not have such clear delineations). but the pages on tws very much felt like all they were indulging was this polemicist urge.
* schulman uses a lot of anecdote to get her points across. this can be helpful as it is a "practical guide to tackling conflict" but can be frustrating as she herself says she has never experienced violence and all of her examples are of times she got things right in moments of conflict. i'd love to see instances of ways that she fucked up, ways that she absorbed the punitive mentality her entire book challenges, and how she coped then.
* the best chapters are the first couple chapters where she lays out catherine hodes's theory of conflict and abuse and the chapter on HIV criminalization in canada!!!

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the political book club we decided March's read would be Sarah Schulman's Conflict Is Not Abuse, a book I had heard recommended before. I had mixed feelings going into it because, while I'd had it recommended to me by a variety of people, many of whom are perfectly lovely, I had also had it recommended by a non-zero number of people whose understanding of conflict not being abuse was transparently "When I do it it's conflict and when you do it it's abuse," so, yeah, that's awkward.

The book was always going to be an uncomfortable read. It's specifically about an uncomfortable situation--watching somebody conflate conflict and abuse is also uncomfortable as fuck to witness. Whether it's seeing someone who was plainly an aggressor pretend to be the victim, someone who was plainly the aggressor absolutely hand-to-god believe they're the victim, someone in a messy situation where everyone's been not their best selves try to spin things so that they're 100% innocent and the other person's behavior is purely malicious, or someone in a situation that may or may not actually be a situation where something may or may not have happened because there's literally no story being told and no accusations of anyone actually doing anything but they're insisting they were victimized anyway, watching someone try to take advantage of whatever commitment to taking abuse seriously might actually exist in a space (which is not guaranteed to be very much) in order to insist upon a moral high ground, unquestioning community backup, or to not have to engage in conflict resolution. I have seen it happen and it sucks unbelievably, especially in a community where you are already struggling to develop procedures to take abuse and harassment more seriously and having folks pop up like "BY THE WAY, that guy I called an idiot called *me* an idiot, this entire organization should ban him immediately and if any of you ever speak to him again you're Not Taking Harassment Seriously" really muddies the waters! It can feel like a betrayal of political principles to even acknowledge to yourself what you're seeing and hearing, let alone discuss it.

On that front, Conflict Is Not Abuse is an essential read, because it looks into why some people do stuff like that in a much more reasoned and compassionate way than "I guess some people are just absolutely fucking shameless," which is what my reaction tends to be when I run into people whomst can dish it but can't take it. In organizing and in life, there's a sometimes exhausting balance to be struck between recognizing why some people overreact to things and understanding that overreaction happens and is a common part of being human, and, you know... overreactions being overreactions, and the importance of not letting overreaction run the show. It is, after all, very easy to see things from one's own perspective, but requires effort to see things from another's, so it's always easier to dish things out than to take one, and to justify one's behavior to oneself (if we couldn't justify our behavior to ourselves, we wouldn't be engaging in it, after all).

That said, there's a litany of Problems I have with this book that might be longer than the book itself. Some are substantive, and some are aesthetic, and some I'm not quite sure which it is, maybe a little of both.

Problem number one is that INTERPERSONAL FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TWO INDIVIDUALS ISN'T THE SAME THING AS AN ORGANIZED COMMUNITY. Nobody owes it to you to put time and effort into building and maintaining a positive, purely social relationship with you, personally for any reason at all. Far too many (meaning more than zero) of Schulman's examples of "unjustified shunning" or "people cutting someone off for incorrect reasons" are just plain old declining to make friends. It sucks to not have friends, and it sucks when someone you want to be friends with doesn't want to be friends with you, but the whole goddamn point of this book is basically that just because something sucks doesn't mean it's objectively ~inexcusable~. At one point she spends like half a page meditating upon how many times she should try to make plans with someone if they don't respond, and how this all points to some larger old-man-yells-at-clouds type of point about how technology is ruining everything, and that this person owes her a response and is incorrect to not make plans, and I was like, "Two. The number of times you should try is two. After that the ball is in their court and they will get back to you someday or not. Please put the keyboard down and go read Captain Awkward." She also refers to any attempts to draw no-contact boundaries as "illegitimate" and says that it's fine to keep contacting someone after they've said not to contact you because "adults don't follow orders from other adults." To this, I say that Sarah Schulman should consider reading some Sarah Schulman; her book Conflict Is Not Abuse contains some great explications of the pitfalls of referring to a reaction or resistance to something as the action or attack in order to render it illegitimate. For the record: If someone explicitly tells you they don't want to hear from you again, just leave them alone. Even if you think it's wrong and they are only hurting themselves by giving up the pleasure and deep life fulfillment of a relationship with your wonderful self, other people have the right to make their own decisions even if they're bad ones. If a third party really, genuinely, and with actual knowledge of the situation really thinks that this is a conflict that can and should be resolved--and "You sought out this third party and begged them to triangulate" doesn't count--then they can broach trying to resolve the conflict with the other person after everyone has cooled off a bit. Other than that, it is the year of our lord two thousand and twenty and everyone has tons of shit to do and only 24 hours a day to do it in; if someone does something shitty to you that's probably by mistake it's good to let them know what the problem so that at some point they can learn to stop doing the thing, but no other grown-ass adult owes it to you to repeatedly spend chunks of their precious and likely very limited spare time hanging out with someone they don't actually like just to make very, very, very certain they actually don't like the other person and trying to mold them into someone who they like better. I don't know how much leisure time Schulman has, but it's obviously a lot more than I do. I can barely find the time to hang out with all the people I actually like. Maybe I know too many cool people.

So, yeah, except for the bit where Sarah Schulman appears to not believe that you should be allowed to stop hanging out with annoying people unless you have put in enough work and your reasons are good enough, which is kind of a big huge glaring thing and I think I can see why some of Sarah Schulman's acquaintances didn't want to hang out with her anymore, the book is very insightful. God, that feels fucking weird to say.

Other quibbles I had with the book included the use of Significant Capitalization, which give the whole thing an uncomfortably judgmental, black-and-white air that belies the calls for nuance that the text is advocating for. Something is either Conflict or it is Abuse, Sarah Schulman is here to tell you precisely which one it is, there is no gray area, and apparently Conflict cannot escalate into Abuse, it can only Escalate into more Conflict. At times, the insistence upon the utter separatedness of these ideas reads like it's reducing conflict to "merely Conflict," as if the dividing line was that Abuse is harmful and Conflict is not, which comes off as callous and downplaying the fact that some conflicts are in fact very severe and damaging, even if they do not fit the dynamics of abuse. Other parts of the book do a much better job of addressing that conflict can be severe, harmful, and even violent, and yet still have different dynamics at play than abuse cases, therefore necessitating different solutions. The Significant Caps also just made the very serious tone of the book, which would otherwise have been perfectly appropriate given the seriousness of the subject matter, come off as more self-serious than regular serious, possibly because it reminded me of all the Discworld jokes about Significant Capitalization.

The last third of the book was about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more specifically about the 2014 war in Gaza. The parts of this section that consisted of original writing were extremely good; unfortunately, that was about 40% of it. The other 60% were reconstructions of the author's Twitter and Facebook feeds at the time, thus defeating my intent to get off Twitter and read a real book. The good bits had a great discussion on the pitfalls of ethnic loyalty and settler-colonial mentality; to me, the parallels to Northern Ireland were striking, but that's likely just because I know more about Northern Ireland than I do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I know this review is like 90% complaints but that's because the flaws in the book end up being really, really outsizedly disappointing when occurring in the same work as all the important stuff about self-image and defensiveness and eligibility for compassion and... well, really, there's quite a lot. I'm very interested to see how book club will go; there's a ton in there that is really useful that we could spend discussing about how to apply it to our own lives, and especially to not purely social spaces where "just stop hanging out with people if you don't like them" isn't the only consideration, but I honestly don't know if we'll have the discipline to focus on that--because it'll be real, real fucking easy to spend the whole time complaining about the various things that drove us nuts. Focusing on the negative is just one of those human tendencies, and, perhaps somewhat ironically in this case, tends to be one of the things that fuels normal conflict--there is some evolutionary just so story about it that makes a lot more sense than most evolutionary just so stories, but whyever we do it, it appears that we do, and it'll take a good deal of conscious effort to not do it.

Basically I wish that the Catherine Hodes person that Schulman took classes from had just written the damn book herself; the stuff from her social work is by far the best and most useful stuff there in terms of how to actually manage conflict and try to figure out what's going on when you're a third party who is being asked to take action in someone else's situation.

Originally posted at Organizational Rashomon, plus some lady who's bad at email.

[Bookworm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Made me think, don't agree with all of it. "Snowflakes." Liberal college campuses are denying speakers freedom of speech. Oh, don't like what I said? Do you need a safe space? Are you triggered? Are you upset over the election?
 
While this book is not specifically about any of the above, I definitely thought of some of the ongoing discussions/arguments (depending on how you put it) and the conflicts that arise. Author Schulman takes the reader on why and how things like texting and emails are harmful for communication, the difference between conflict and abuse (and how to resolve them), how this dynamic can manifest on both the personal level and within the public sphere, and so forth. 
 
I was not familiar with her background prior to reading this book but despite some of the mixed reviews I thought this would be an interesting book that would be good reading. And it was, but I'm not sure how helpful this can be since I couldn't help but feel the author is writing very much from her own personal experiences (which in itself is not terrible but not always applicable to other people) and may not fully realize some of the complex issues that go on in many of the situations she writes about.
 
For example, I honestly wondered if she's had bad experiences with the silent treatment or ghosting. She blames the person who refuses to talk for "withholding" and that it's detrimental to everyone involved. Or she talks about an example of receiving an email cancellation for a lunch date and says "Email creates repression and anxiety" (pg 45). She honestly reminded me of anecdotes that I've heard where the romantic relationship ended yet one partner insists on "hashing it out" or "working through our issues" or whatever but it becomes a long, dragged out process where's clear that partner just doesn't want to let go and often doesn't accept it until the other party deliberately puts up barriers (cutting off all contact, blocking on social media, sending a third party to communicate to leave them alone, etc.).
 
Or, in another example in the introduction, she talks about how her high school guidance counselor warned her not to tell her parents about her sexual orientation due to their homophobia. She writes that by doing so "he upheld the distorted thinking, unjustified punishment, and exclusion." Schulman continues to write that if she is in a similar situation now with her students, she offers to speak to the parents, to provide alternatives, "to intervene and stand up to brutality in order to protect its recipient and transform their context" (pg 27). 
 
I honestly found that quite misguided. She made it about her and what she would do but what about the students? What is their background, could they be in danger if they were outed to their parents/peers/community, do they have resources, do they WANT to come out? I do not share her experiences but this made me incredibly uncomfortable. Certainly there are many situations where having someone like a professor speak on your behalf can be quite helpful but I was puzzled by the lack discussion on the possible dangers too. 
 
That said, I think there is merit to the book. I can agree that sometimes there is a reaction for too quick of a judgment in situations that really could be resolved by an honest conversation where both parties do want to resolve the situation before it escalates. Email and texting are handy as forms of communication but sometimes there is an essence lost when communicating that way. 
 
But in the end, I feel the author thinks there should be a greater level of engagement and assumes too much: that both parties want to resolve the situation amiably, that there is an equal dynamic (the want for communication *can* become abusive by demanding someone's time, emotional labor, maybe even money if it requires travel or phone minutes, etc.). On a personal level I can respect that and have encountered people who feel the same way that Schulman does: more communication, that people should be willing to educate, etc. But I do thinks she projects a little too much of her own personal preferences and feels entitled to something that not everyone wants to give.
 
People also liked her chapter on HIV and the chapter on Israel and Palestine but honestly I can't help but be a bit jaded as to how much of her own personal biases may have played a part after the initial chapters. They were also not topics that interested me (and quite frankly felt out of place--sometimes the author really didn't do a great job in switching/transitional between the personal and the not so much). At times it also felt like the author put down a lot of words but didn't actually SAY anything substantive.
 
Again, it made me think and I would be interested in reading more but at the same time it felt like the author is in a bit of a bubble. I'd borrow it from the library or get it as a bargain book.
 

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so thought-provoking. I can see how it would be controversial to many because she wades into every controversial topic that ever existed in the book, but it's a refreshing and fascinating take.

[Daniel J Truman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Socially inept person continually describes how she's unable to process basic social norms, then applies it to world politics.

[Amber Lea · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book that needs to exist. Because the point that "just because your feelings are hurt (or you're uncomfortable) doesn't mean someone did something wrong" needs to be made in an in-depth way. This could have easily been a super helpful guide on how to view conflict, what to do to resolve it, and what is productive rather than destructive. How do we evaluate the situation? How do we move forward? Please yes. I want this book so bad.

But this book is a disaster. The author actually makes all the points that need to be made, and she even makes some of them really well. But then. What is all this other noise? If you cut out half of this book, this book would be good. But the other 50% is the hottest of messes. The author explains this away in the introduction saying that this book is meant to be a bunch of different things (I would quote it, but I have the audiobook), but this just feels like an excuse to write a disorganized stream of consciousness disaster that touches on everything the author has strong feelings about.

My first inkling of an issue with this book probably came with the insistence by the author that it's impossible to have a productive conversation via text or email and that it's always necessary to call. The author is a boomer, and it's totally a classic boomer argument. But she spends a lot of time talking about this and brings it up over and over. And at different points she gets very personal and brings up times people didn't like her insistence on doing things via phone and resisted (she also says people who refuse to answer the phone are playing power games if that gives you some idea of the "uhh, what?" factor here), and the author very much gives me the impression she has boundary issues and can't hear, "Please leave me alone." She even talks about how sometimes people don't know what they want in relationships and thank god there are people who are pushy! It's…yeah. It's worse than I'm making it sound. She goes on to give the impression that she is anti-ghosting to the point that she thinks it's totally valid to pester someone who's ghosted you until you get a response. And that you shouldn't just take the hint and walk away, that the other person should have to explicitly tell you to fuck off. But also, if someone explicitly tells you to fuck off, that's not good enough either, you should harass them until they tell you why. There's also the implication that this person's going to feel real sorry when they need something from you later. Maybe. This has real "dude harassing you to respond to his messages on a dating website" energy. But her point seems to be that other people don't have the right to not give you closure.

THEN she repeatedly makes the point that apparently stalking isn't always stalking and sometimes people are just being dramatic? I'm like dear god, how many times has this woman been accused of stalking? It seems like maybe a few.

And YES, there is a point to be made about resolving conflict and not immediately writing everyone off and retreating to your safe little bubble where you're always right and other people are always wrong, and we all need to learn to get along with all different kinds of people and hear opposing viewpoints. It's not comfortable, but it's necessary for a healthy society and for growing as a person. This is a conversation that absolutely needs to happen. But again, this book is full of messy noise so she says so much more than that. Like it honestly doesn't seem like the author knows she's not entitled to other people's time and attention. That people should be allowed to say, "No, I don't want to put time and attention into this person/relationship anymore." Time and attention is a finite resource. You get to pick and choose what you do with yours. You also don't have to explain yourself. People should be allowed to say, "No, I'm done here. Leave me alone" and have that respected. I personally think you SHOULD tell the other person what they did so they can learn and grow from it, but I also think it's okay to be like "ain't nobody got time for that" because it's your life/time/attention/energy. It becomes a little more complicated if that person is a classmate or coworker or the parent of your children, sure. There is a point at which you're obligated to put in some effort and not just peace out, but still you have a right to boundaries around your time and energy and you have a right to not be harassed and stalked. I honestly can't tell if the author knows that or agrees with that point. It seems like no. I get the impression that no matter how minor the relationship she thinks you shouldn't be allowed to just bounce.

But aside from all that, the author also has several pet causes she really wants to shoehorn into this book. One of them is this idea that we shouldn't call the police, seemingly ever? (Which yes, I'm aware this is a political position.) But then that becomes this very specific point on how the author thinks it shouldn't be illegal to knowingly give someone HIV/AIDS. That she thinks that using the legal system to punish people for knowingly spreading AIDS is a grand injustice…in part because it's your own fault if you get AIDS, and also, drugs apparently make it a non-issue now so whatever. (yes! This is her argument!) And she compares catching HIV to getting pregnant. WHAT. I am pro laws that punish people for knowingly spreading AIDS. And newsflash, not everyone has health insurance or can afford treatment. The point isn't or at least shouldn't be criminalizing aids/being gay, it's criminalizing "Gift Giving" and "Stealthing" and otherwise knowingly putting people at risk. It's a consent issue and it SHOULD be illegal. It should also be illegal to try to get someone pregnant by poking holes in condoms. And yes Sarah, it is a kind of assault. I'm sure you could argue this law does more harm than good and the outcome isn't desirable no matter the intent, but that isn't what she's doing! Or at least she's not doing it well. She's arguing all kinds of other stuff and mucking it up. She makes it seem like giving someone AIDS is a total non-issue and STD disclosure doesn't matter, because you chose to bone, I guess? I don't even understand why she tries to say if someone gets HIV it's their own fault because that argument goes in a circle. So the person spreading AIDS (who themselves caught it) isn't at fault, but the person catching it is? So it's your job not to catch it but once you have it you have no responsibility to the people you fuck because it's up to them not to fuck you if they don't want to get the HIV they don't know you have? Err. Cool. I'd argue you're violating their consent by knowingly fucking them with AIDS and not telling them. (You know, if you had a disease that made your dick shoot bullets and you killed someone the "well they fucked me" defense wouldn't hold up.)

The last several chapters of this book are about the Israel/Palestine conflict and that just seems like its own book and not something that's super helpful here. I spent so much of this book being like, "How did we get here?" I THINK she's trying to make the point that Israel views the conflict with Palenstine as abuse, and therefore Israel thinks it's the victim and justified in attacking. But whenever she extrapolates like this it doesn't quite work and I just desperately want her to stick to interpersonal conflict and not be like, "Now let's see how this applies to genocide..." Like this book either needs to be about people in close relationships or governments/countries/large groups, not both.

I also take issue with the fact that she just seems to make up her own terms or she borrows terms from niche places that don't really convey her meaning clearly. Like she keeps talking about "supremacy and trauma" and people being "triggered and shunning" and I was like, "I feeeeeel like she's talking about borderline personality disorder without saying she's talking about BPD." And then it's like yes. She even says as much toward the end basically being like, "Frame it as BDP if you must." Well, it's better than "triggered and shunning."

And while I'm all for not immediately calling everything abuse and being very aware of the fact that there are two sides to every story, it does feel like the author goes too far in the other direction. She seems too skeptical and too willing to say things aren't abuse when they very well might be. Like you know what? If someone hits someone else and they're crying abuse and the other person is like, "yes, I lost my temper and I was wrong." SURE, maybe it was a one time thing and it will never happen again but like damn. I'm okay with calling that abuse, and I do get the argument but we're walking a thin line here. And again, it really feels like what she actually wants to talk about is her anti-police stance. It seems like she felt the need to bring up that sometimes abuse is a one off so she could be like, "Therefore, don't call the cops." And I'm like oh boy.

I say call the cops. Get a police statement. You're gonna need that shit because the next time your partner is terrorizing you and people are being skeptical about it you're gonna really regret convincing yourself maybe they didn't mean it the first time. And yes, the cops suck and it might go wrong, but also you might save your own life and you'll hopefully have proof that something really did happen. You know, or don't call the cops but do it for your own reasons.

And again yes, there is a point to be made about not using the justice system to further victimize and abuse people and people absolutely will overstate harm to punish others and get them in trouble, but again, the author is doing a poor job of making that point because she keeps insisting on making all kinds of other points.

I do have to say though, if you're looking for a book that will be a real conversation starter, this'll do it. I'm not even doing this book justice: If you read this you will have opinions about it. I honestly wish I had a copy to scribble all over. Maybe two. One for notes and one where I just cross out every point I think should have been left out.

___________________

Jesus Christ. I'm going to need a day or two to write a review for this one.

[Stacey McLarty · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow, this book is so disappointing.
I purchased this book because it was recommended by Natalie Wynn on the Ezra Klein podcast last week. While I love Natalie’s content and think she has a lot of important contributions to nuanced discourse, I think this book recommendation was not good.
The premise is fascinating and important and true - that people in power can conflate normal conflict (or less-powerful people just existing in a way that the powerful don't like) with "abuse" to justify the harm that the powerful inflict on the power-less. The beginning of the book promised a deep dive into this concept, from the family level to the global political level. She acknowledges the existence of “real abuse” in the introduction, but says she isn’t going to address that, just the “misuse” of claims of abuse.
But right away the book got terrible. The author spends the whole first chapter complaining about things that have nothing to do with the premise. She complains about email and concludes that you can *only* have meaningful conversations by telephone or face to face. She claims that a desire to communicate in text is the equivalent of abusive "shunning." She says that any form of one person unilaterally deciding to go "no contact" from another is abusive and wrong and that everyone should always be willing and available to discuss everything and repair/ build relationships. She places a lot of burden on the person being “hit on” or receiving friendship overtures to help the person hitting on them self-actualize, regardless of the person’s interest in being friends or romantic partners. She says that her own experience of not being able to admit her homosexuality to herself in early years and brushing off advances from women, means that people who receive unwelcome advances need to just open themselves up to the advances as an opportunity to transform. She complains about her busy friend cancelling on her lunch plans by email and insists that the “right” way for the friend to resolve this would be through telephone, not email. Not only does some of the conduct she is advocating for sound like “real abuse” (like ignoring an individual’s stated desire for you to not contact them), but by not addressing any distinction between her definition of real abuse and misuse of abuse, there is nothing to be gained by this writing – how would you even know if a situation calls for opening yourself up to mutual transformation and understanding if you can’t identify the difference between an opportunity for discourse and abusive power-plays? The author comes off as advocating for the person desiring connection to just force it on the object of their desire.
The book is entirely from the author’s personal experience and makes a lot of unsupported, conclusory statements, without even logical arguments to persuade the reader. I gave this author a chance to move past the initial terrible beginning, but I had to stop reading after the first full chapter (after the introductory chapter). I had such high hopes for this book initially that I bought the audiobook, too and this was 2 hours in to the 8 hour audiobook (read badly by the author at a snail’s pace). I do NOT recommend.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oof, I don't know how to rate this book.

The highlights of Schulman's Conflict Is Not Abuse are as follows: (1) Chapter 4, which deals with the criminalization of HIV-positive individuals in Canada, because it teases out what seems to be an inevitable dynamic of state control even within something as glorified by progressives as nationalized health care, as well as underscoring a serious point about an insatiable appetite for punitive response that creates a cascading clusterfuck of error and mistake; (2) a fascinating "case study" of how the occupation of the Gaza Strip unfolded "live" over social media (or, at least the way Sarah Schulman's filter bubble curated it for her), if only because it's such a fresh execution of the events as well as a way to create an effective, if a bit broad, analogy about how nation-states can shun, trigger, shame, react on trauma, react from Supremacy, overstate harm, or punish the people in the present for other people's sins of the past (just like people do on a small-scale); and (3) a brilliant section about how the integration of LGBTQ+ citizens into the traditional "family" model also makes them more susceptible to the pitfalls of statehood ideologies, of becoming more conservative and segmenting a vibrant community. Actually, the whole chapter on family is excellent because it argues the notion of a "good family" is contingent upon a definition of loyalty that involves being immoral to people in the "out-group", thereby aping a brutish form of tribalism; it also tells a stunning anecdote of a Hungarian mother who burned Monet paintings that her son stole so that he could evade punishment, a championed exercise in maternal protection that caused immeasurable loss to the cultural wealth of the world. I do think the gay community needs to be more careful about who and what it is giving up by diving headfirst into the eternally problematic mainstream, and that chapter outlines precisely why "family" is overrated and why "Arrested Development" had it right until it got it wrong.

On the other hand, there are still components of this book that are a little hokey: in Chapter 5, Schulman does a quick survey of different fields and domains who seem to be validating what she is saying about shunning and triggering: she does casual, broad-brush assessments of the tenets of mindfulness, of Alcoholics Anonymous, and pop psychology to demonstrate how they, too, get at what she's getting at. The problem is it's just not that impressive: the throwing around of borderline personality disorder has having similar symptoms to those experienced by both the Traumatized and those drunk on Supremacy ideology is too lax and free for my tastes; she uses a corporate, TED-talk-famous mindfulness expert and could have done a better job going into MBSR even if it were a quick introduction; and I'm surprised Schulman is onboard with something deserving of as much skepticism as pop psychology, or championing something as demonstrably untrue and incorrect as the fundamentals of Freudian psychoanalysis. She chases it with a bizarre and altogether incoherent comparison of her own "Conflict is not abuse" ideology with the "ownership of personal responsibility" component of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is fine if Al-Anon didn't have its fair share of reasonable detractors. This whole chapter is redolent of a very contrived rounding up of the cavalry, a desperate plea to underscore her own authority by extracting as many alliances as she can out of the literature available to her. Once it gets to Al-Anon you get the sense she's sucking blood from a stone. There is more literature available to her, but it seems she didn't reach that far beyond her own periphery for them.

This is not to say Schulman is altogether incorrect: I think she's doing the right thing by looking into some of the mythologies and knee-jerk reactions we have about personal responsibility, overstating harm, and drawing meaningful parallels between the practices exercised by both the traumatized and the bigoted. She's careful to emphasize that reflection on your personal responsibility in a matter is meant for personal growth, not for apportioning blame or fault. Thing is, I know she is correct about this because the only way I personally was able to get over my sexual assault was to liberate myself from blame, look into why I let myself get carried away with losing my virginity as soon as possible, and confronting my assaulter directly. I had been uncomfortable saying rape for so long but succumbed to it once friends told me repeatedly I should just say that's what it was, and I feel that I capitulated to the demand for a simpler story and an easier victimhood even though it didn't ring true to my experience. "I was invited to victimology, but I am very glad that I'd found the strength to resist the image of myself as being more aggressed than I actually was," Schulman (72) writes, and this sentence resonated with me hard. The first paragraph of page 89, too long to copy here, is a must-read for any curious survivors.

I always enjoy a read that brings nuance, alternative modes of thought, daring, and a potential freeing to the table. She lets us know that traumatized people will often ally themselves with Supremacists, and are allowed to so long as it's politically convenient. This is a great way to do the "we're not so different, you and I" speech that is demonstrated by the rise in visible homonationalism in the US and Europe. For that, I really like the basics of what Schulman is saying, but I still think that Conflict Is Not Abuse could be a better book. Instead, Schulman relies on her own momentum as a non-scholarly, non-theoretical writer too much: she quotes her own Gentrification of the Mind with unnecessary regularity. Her complaint about how e-mail and text message removes tone and capacity for understanding is repetitive, tired, and better sold by the closing example of her book - which is fantastic - than by the pontificating of the earlier chapters. She rightly appeals to her own subjective experience with the disclaimer that it's her personal experience, but she's still presenting the events as if they are objective demonstrations to her case. At other points the writing is long-winded, too informal, confusing, erratic, or something akin to that. The first 2 chapters only held my attention sporadically.

On the other hand, Chapter 3 is essential reading for why we shouldn't call the police, and why we shouldn't rely on the police to put punitive measures on a partner when it may just require two Conflicted people coming together and communicating reasonably. Schulman's assessments of the police are on-point and rewarding in this book, no doubt. In fact, most of the substance here is. But I felt like Schulman chose a very specific methodology for this book more out of convenience than out of specific principle or intent. This is how she wanted it, no doubt. Conflict Is Not Abuse is not always agreeable but it's always smart. I honestly don't know how to rate it because of the chasm between its content and its form (and my inability to pinpoint some of my reservations with the form). There are also parts of it that I simply don't know how I feel about them or how to find out what I should feel about them.

I'll punt it and give it 3 and will evaluate it with time; it definitely changed how I view so much in my relationships and the conflicts existing in them, and I do strongly recommend it. Sigh, I don't know.

[bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOTHING better than sarah schulman, from
sarah schulman, writing mean little sentences about how cowards send emails. nothing funnier than sarah schulman relating a story in which someone sent her a cowardly email and she replied "what is your phone number im calling u" and they said "NO DONT" except maybe the story in which someone at an event bad faith accused her of saying something insane she didn't say and she replied in front of 100 people "is it possible that you were feeling anxious while i was talking?"

also very funny that after all the email hit jobs she spends 50 page printing verbatim facebook fights she had about israel but that's boomers for you. sarah no one else needs to read that bcs we've all been somewhat alive in the last 20 years-- and you don't even have a new argument progressing from them! i also could have done without the random pathologizing chapter but it's a truth universally acknowledged that practically all nonfiction exploring the human condition could have stopped after the first half

anyway, terrific, she's right, tumblr wept

[Casey · Rating 1 out of 5]

The overall focus of the book is interpersonal relationships which is not what I expected going in. Schulman was right to preface the book by saying it isn't a book to be agreed with or disagreed with because there is a hell of a lot to disagree with, or at least seriously wonder about.

[ash | songsforafuturepoet · Rating 2 out of 5]

The problem with Sarah Schulman's Conflict is Not Abuse is that it makes a lot of haphazard claims with little relevant sources, one big source literally being her own brain.

In the introduction, she shares that she intends for this to be designed for "engaged and dynamic interactive collective thinking where some ideas will resonate, others will be rejected, and still others will provoke the readers to produce new knowledge themselves." This was discussed at one of my local queer book clubs. And to some extent, impressively, this was what took place. It was a very interesting discussion. I found everyone's sharing to be very different, stemming from different perspectives, ages, communities. We all agreed that while some of her ideas did resonate, they were sweeping statements that applied to only some situations and not others.

While I appreciate ideas and discussion outside of traditional science, which historically have erased different perspectives and spotlighted a dominant, white, racist and sexist one, I am not convinced that artists and creative writers in general, like Schulman said, can and should expand into discussions through non fiction. I appreciate her bringing a queer, activist, feminist perspective to the subject matter. Schulman is a pioneer activist and well-versed in queer and feminist issues. However, I doubt she understood trauma, which is a big part of this book.

I also think it's a fallacy to think that being undisciplined (as in, coming from no disciplines, which is one of my critique of the book) frees someone to observe "human nuance, contradiction, limitation" or whatever else. Because of this, Schulman brings to the table a mish mash of ideas with rich, preexisting literature, none of which was addressed in the book. Instead, she reimagines them with new terms like shunning, overstating harm. The current literature on boundaries (shunning) and conflict (overstating harm), I find, are already adequate.

She outlines a few micro and macro phenomena that she finds reflects this pattern of shunning and overstating harm. This ranges from victims of violence inflating their own trauma responses to actual harm, to HIV criminalisation in Canada, to the Palestine war (?). I find the act of putting these side by side reductive and makes no sense to me.

In fact, I find that this is a weird conflation. My background is in psychology and while I know less about macro policies and war, I know at least that the mechanisms for interpersonal conflict and violence are nothing like state violence, though they both stem from the same structures. Schulman says that the state overstated harm that HIV positive people might cause the rest of the population in order to justify the criminalization of HIV. This parallels someone, she says, who might overstate harm from a normal conflict because their past trauma experiences have impacted their current coping mechanisms in difficult situations.

I find this odd because in the first example, the state is the one with immense power to oppress. In the second example, there is no such power dynamics. How can these two phenomena point towards the same overstatement of harm then? Also, is shunning and overstating harm a real and relevant problem in interpersonal violence? Often harm is understated by the oppressor and the oppressor has the louder voice. If it’s a matter of interpersonal conflict, why not just use current literature on conflict and boundaries?

I find lots of points put forth by her to be insightful by themselves and it's actually a feat to make them sound more confusing than they actually are, put together. In her chapters on interpersonal conflict, she explores the use of the police institution by a participant in the conflict (ie. calling the police when someone does harm to you). She ties this to her stance that there should be “personal responsibility” towards prevention of harm towards self, by the person who experienced harm. I find that this is a massive conflation of justified (again, lots of literature on this already) criticism towards use of the police institution, especially in the queer and marginalised community and the phenomenon of overstating and escalating conflict (still at this point, of unknown prevalence).

Overall, I think she did meet her objective that she laid out at the end, to provide communities with a chance to have a thoughtful and engaging conversation through her book. Is this need not met before her book? Was it, perchance, already met with preexisting literature? Is this even a relevant need in the first place? Perhaps what I am asking is - is this book relevant, and will I recommend it in place of other books on the same topic? I am not sure.

I end this off with some choice quotes, both good and bad, and overall thought-provoking:

“Namely, false accusations of harm are used to avoid acknowledgment of complicity in creating conflict and instead escalate normative conflict to the level of crisis.”

“We are no longer allowed to drop by unannounced when things are fraught. She can’t call on the phone to deliver the monologue of persuasion with an open heart, because our heroine hides behind voice mail. She can’t send it by email, because it will either be deleted, or forwarded to thousands. If she has knocked, called, and emailed, she is now officially, in the era of overstating harm, a “harasser.”

“Anyone who refuses to hear the details is making a deliberate decision not to understand.”

“Calling the police may interrupt real violence, but it is not designed to address the causes of actual violence or actual Abuse, nor does it address the confusion between Conflict and Abuse. Instead, putting the police in charge of both domestic Abuse and domestic Conflict creates a punitive response as the primary, and sometimes only, response. How the social structure of gender, race, and class contribute to violence is obscured. How conditions that may be created in part by sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, immigration status, disability, and class oppression contribute to both Abuse and Conflict is under-explored. And how early trauma, addiction, and mental illness contribute to Conflict escalation instead of resolution is also obscured.”

“Once the responsibility to protect one’s self is removed, the negative can re-conceptualize their experience as that of being “criminally wronged,” even if they were never at risk for being infected, simply because their condom-using positive sex partner did not disclose.”

“Prior to the US Supreme Court decision in the spring of 2015, more US states had legalized gay marriage than had anti-discrimination protection for LGBT people or Medicaid funding for abortion. By that summer, same-sex marriage was upheld nationally while abortion, birth control, and voting rights for Black Americans continued to be impeded.”

“Today, with gay marriage and parenthood prevalent, and the advent of gay nuclear families and normalized queer childbirth, a kind of white reconciliation is taking place. Inside this movement, white gays who assemble into nuclear families are readmitted into their birth families and resume their positions in their race and class formations. This not only breaks up the mixed queer community of friends, but also withdraws resources and access from those friends. These white queer families realign with the state that held them in pervasive illegality less than a generation ago. And this, of course, produces an investment in unjust social structures that once rejected but now enhance white queer families.”

[Corvus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edit: returning to this review to shout out Dean Spade's new book which tackles this so much better.

Original: I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, which I believe it was intended to create.

I really appreciate many ways it challenged my thinking and the social structures I've been assimilated into both in radical and queer communities and out in the rest of the world. There are excellent critiques of how technological communication can often exacerbate conflict and stop any chance for resolution, how group dynamics cause bullying and awful behavior towards those placed in the out group, how shunning of aggressors/perpetrators/etc of violence doesn't necessarilly stop the violence, how people who have suffered trauma can often reproduce the actions of those upholding authority and supremacy, the reality that we choose harmful coping mechanisms as a result of a society that refuses to believe or care about us when we suffer conflict, how some communities make us feel that we must call any conflict "abuse" in order for people to give much needed help, and the importance of listening and being willing to be uncomfortable in order to resolve conflicts. She made me really think about the words I use and experiences I have had as both the shunned and the shunner. I will absolutely be thinking differently and more critically about these issues.

My biggest criticism is that I felt that Schulman centered her own experience in unhelpful ways at times. There was a lot of "this person wouldn't talk to me anymore and that's not fair," without much acknowledgement that if a friend won't talk to someone anymore, it is sometimes due to a long string of unresolved conflicts, not one disagreement that they suddenly shun someone for. Sometimes refusing contact means setting a boundary with someone who consistently brings toxicity into your life in ways that they either refuse to resolve or can't resolve. I prefer that, if someone repeatedly talks about their own experiences this way, they also share what they could have done better- which Schulman does not do. As a result, it sometimes comes off as that person refusing to implement the strategies they are claiming to support or dismissing the boundaries of others because they aren't getting what they want. Sometimes people just need to stop talking because they will continue to harm each other in irreconcilable ways. It made me think of experiences I have had where I repeatedly offer people chances and try to resolve things with them, only to have them harm me in the same, and often worse ways than they initially had. It seems to support when someone says "I need some space," and the other person calls them every day anyways demanding they talk or get back together with them. But, maybe that's me centering my OWN experience in an equally unhelpful way.

She also centers herself in terms of identity- her section on queer families multiple times (I am sure unintentionally) puts queer people and people of color into separate camps as if queer people of color don't exist. She neglects to address the reality of disability, location, class, etc creating communication barriers which often require technology in communication- How can we make technological communication better as well?

The sections on HIV criminalization and the genocide of Palestinians by Israeli military forces were informative and engaging catalogues of recent historical events that I would like to have read in detail in a separate book. They seemed to be drawn out for the purposes of this book. I would have like these sections to be shorter for this book and replaced with more praxis- more nuanced interpersonal situations in our communities rather than authoritarian regimes oppressing people that most people reading this book will agree are wrong.

I'll be thinking of this book a lot in days to come. And, I appreciate the read.

[Casey Jo · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at page 100. (Under book report rules of "a book is at least 100 pages", I say it counts for the reading challenge.)

I appreciated the opening chapter of this book. Great points, including:
p. 36: "The fact that something could go wrong does not mean we are in danger."
p.45: "People need interactive conversations, even short ones, in order to understand each other." (on why hashing things out through email is so open to disaster)
p.58: From Catherine Hodes, "Abuse is Power Over and Conflict is Power Struggle" (to distinguish one from the other)

And then it all falls apart once she starts applying it to her life. She goes on about personal grudges, and she continually names the important of recognizing white, cis, power, etc. privilege. Unless. of course, she's the one doing it.

p.92: She declares that only physical violence is violence. Which might sound OK until she then later uses that definition to declare that she's never been violent.
p. 93: She has a "no censorship" rule and there's been "no complaint." That is, no complaint that she's listed to, no complaint that people, in a power imbalance, felt they could approach her about. (What was that thing about abuse and power again?) But then, on page 95, she tells about a student who DID confront her and she demeaned their approach and argument and then suggested that her grilling them was comparable to having worked it out.
p. 100: She was at a writers retreat where there was a single Black woman, who was isolated and isolating, and who talked about race in ways that Schulman found "inappropriate." At a dance, Schulman noticed that the music was "alienating" (read: white people music) and took it upon herself to approach the woman and put her hand on her shoulder. And then she was surprised that the woman punched her. And she was proud of herself for giving the retreat the names of other Black writers to potentially put through that experience.

At the end of the day, no one owes you their time and attention, and if you've hurt them, they have the right not to want to heal the wound, especially when you've touched on old scars and recurring wounds. Regardless of your intent. Regardless of how "you would have taken it." Regardless.

Glad I started reading it. Even gladder that I stopped.