Conflict is not abuse Overstating harm, community responsibility, and the duty of repair

Sarah Schulman, 1958-

Book - 2016

"[This work] is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, revealing how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the 'other' to avoid facing themselves"--Front flap.

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Subjects
Published
Vancouver : Arsenal Pulp Press [2016]
Language
English
Main Author
Sarah Schulman, 1958- (author)
Physical Description
299 pages ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-290).
ISBN
9781551526430
  • Introduction: A Reparative Manifesto
  • Methodology
  • Facing and Dealing with Conflict
  • Positive Change Can Happen
  • Part 1. The Conflicted Self and the Abusive State
  • Chapter 1. In Love: Conflict Is Not Abuse
  • The Dangerous Flirt
  • Email, Texts, and Negative Escalation
  • Reductive Modes of Illogic
  • Chapter 2. Abandoning the Personal: The State and the Production of Abuse
  • Understanding Is More Important than Determining the Victim
  • Authentic Relationships of Depth vs. Bonding by Bullying
  • When the Community Encourages Overreaction
  • False Accusations and the State
  • Chapter 3. The Police and the Politics of Overstating Harm
  • The Police as Arbiters of Relationships
  • "Violence," Violence, and the Harm of Misnaming Harm
  • Calling the Police on Singular Incidents of Violence
  • Calling the Police on Your Partner, When It's Your Father Who Should Have Gone to Jail
  • Chapter 4. HIV Criminalization in Canada: How the Richest Middle Class in the World Decided to Call the Police on HIV-Positive People in Order to Cover Up Their Racism, Guilt, and Anxiety about Sexuality and Their Supremacy-Based Investment in Punishment
  • Privileges and Problem-Solving in the Canadian and US Contexts
  • Think Twice Before Calling the Police
  • The Racial Roots of Canaditan HIV Criminalization
  • Viral Load and the State
  • Being "Abused" Instead of Responsible as State Policy
  • Criminalizing Human Experience
  • Women as Monsters
  • Crimes that Can't Occur
  • Claiming Abuse as an Excuse for Government Control
  • Claims of Abuse as Assertions of Normativity
  • In Conflict: Real Friends Don't Let Friends Call the Police
  • Part 2. The Impulse to Escalate
  • Chapter 5. On Escalation
  • Supremacy Ideology as a Refusal of Knowledge
  • Traumatized Behavior: When Knowledge Becomes Unbearable
  • Interrupting Escalation Before It Produces Tragedy
  • Control is at the Center of Supremacy and Traumatized Behavior
  • The Making of Monsters as Delusional Thinking
  • The Cultural Habit of Acknowledging Distorted Thinking
  • The Denial of Mental Illness
  • Chapter 6. Manic Flight Reaction: Trigger + Shunning
  • Trigger + Shunning #1: Manic Plight Reaction (Historical Psychoanalysis)
  • Trigger + Shunning #2: Borderline Episode (Psychiatry and Pop Psychology)
  • Trigger + Shunning #3: Fight, Flight, Freeze (Mindfulness, American Buddhism)
  • Trigger + Shunning #4: Detaching with an Axe (Al-Anon)
  • They All Agree: Delay and Accountable Community
  • Chapter 7. Queer Families, Compensatory Motherhood, and the Political Culture of Escalation
  • Good Families Don't Hurt Other People
  • Rethinking the Family Ethic as a Form of Harm Reduction
  • Queer Families and Supremacy Ideology
  • Compensatory Motherhood and the Need to Blame
  • Part 3. Supremacy/Trauma and the Justification of Injustice: The Israeli War on Gaza
  • Chapter 8. Watching Genocide Unfold in Real Time: Gaza through Facebook and Twitter, June 2 - July 23, 2014
  • The Strategy of False Accusation
  • When We Need to Be "Abused," the Truth Doesn't Matter
  • Conclusion: The Duty of Repair
  • What's So Impossible about Apologizing for Your Part?
  • Feeling Better vs. Getting Better
  • Acknowledgments
  • Works Cited
  • Citations by Page
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this incisive, refreshing work, Schulman (The Gentrification of the Mind), a novelist, documentarian, and social critic, documents how those with power and privilege increasingly tend to conflate any challenge to their authority or ways of thinking with being attacked. Exploring the overlap between the political and personal, Schulman poses thoughtful examples of how conflict and disagreement-especially when marginalized voices try to enter the commons-are met with false accusations of abuse and claims of victimization by those who may feel offended but are not harmed. Unafraid to tackle challenging subjects such as trigger warnings and safe spaces, Schulman also ruminates on what she sees as society's collective failure to prioritize the teaching of basic problem-solving and relationship skills, resulting in a culture of knee-jerk escalation that, when expressed through physical or emotional force (as in interpersonal abuse and military conflicts) obscures the structural roots of interpersonal and societal breakdown. Like classic works of the early women's and gay liberation movements, this thought-provoking title expertly analyzes power dynamics inherent to interactions as small-scale as spousal violence and as large-scale as the increasing criminalization of HIV-positive Canadians and the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza. A concluding call to address personal and social conflicts without state intervention via police and courts caps off a work that's likely to inspire much discussion. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.