Sarah Schulman describes herself, and her work, as unorthodox. "I mean, this has been one of the problems my whole life. I don't write books that take an already established position in an argument," said Schulman. "All of my books initiate a new frame. This is true of my book on familial homophobia, of my book on gentrification, of my book about the Palestinian Queer movement. If you don't read it, you can't know what it's about, because it's not an idea you've heard before. But the thing is, people imagine that they know what it's saying, because they think it's some kind of preexisting idea they already object to. So then they start taking it down without even knowing what it is."
On a well-rounded queer bookshelf, Schulman's name would appear multiple times. While she writes plays and fiction, her nonfiction is often hard to categorize. Works like Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences sound like queer theory, but a term Schulman once used to describe her previous nonfiction work, The Gentrification of the Mind, seems the most all-encompassing. Her latest book, Conflict Is Not Abuse, is in that tradition. While it includes interviews and case studies, Schulman calls the book "community-based nonfiction that's outside of the academic realm," and compares its function to the essays of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.
The thesis of Conflict Is Not Abuse is that people in a conflict often mistake their heightened emotions—either inadvertently or willfully—as a more sinister threat. "Right now, there's a confusion where some of us feel that if we're frustrated and angry and upset, and we don't know how to solve the problem, that means we're being abused. There's a confusion between internal anxiety and external danger. Things like racism function in the same way. The white police officer kills the Black man because he feels an internal anxiety that comes from racism, and it makes him believe that that Black man is dangerous to him, even though he's not," Schulman said.
This misrepresentation's benefit is obvious to Schulman. "We're in a moment geopolitically as well as personally, where if a person or a nation or a group acknowledges that they have participated in causing pain or escalating conflict, then it becomes their fault," she explained. "And so everyone on every level is playing the game where they present themselves as a pure and innocent victim, which some people actually are. But in cases when they're not, people present themselves that way, so that they can be eligible for compassion."
The examples she cites in the book range from domestic partner violence to state-sponsored violence like the 2014 Israeli-Palestine clash. She notes that perpetrators often use pre-existing oppressive systems to their own advantage: the abusive partner, for instance, files the restraining order. This has become more common in the queer community as institutions like marriage help the assimilation process.
"When I was younger, gay people would never call the police, because they were considered threatening," Schulman said. "Now, certain kinds of gay people are invited to call the police. We have a division in a group that was once united by being unilaterally in illegality. We now see that white gay people who are citizens, if they're not trans or sex workers, if they're HIV negative, especially if they're in family structures, are increasingly invited into the power structure. So we have a new abject object, a new queer, who is undocumented or trans or poor. And this person becomes the object of that apparatus. American history shows that the structure doesn't change. It just rearranges who's on the bottom and who's on the top."
Schulman said she finds the solution to misuse of the community's newfound power in group accountability. "Unfortunately, now we define group loyalty by who helps us escalate. But I'm saying that that's not loyalty," Schulman explained. "Loyalty is the person who says, "how can I help you calm down? How can I help the two of you talk to each other? What is the order of events? How do you think you contributed to this? That's love. That's what a true friend does. We have to get away from this nationalist model of friendship."
Queer assimilation appears to be occurring on an artistic level as well. For years, Schulman railed against a lack of primary lesbian content in mainstream art, an issue that crippled her career as a playwright. She can pinpoint why critics and the public alike have lauded recent works like Fun Home and Transparent.
"Historically, things that reinforce the dominant culture's view of themselves are the queer works that get promoted," Schulman said. "And that's also true for works by other minorities. Most of the queer-themed works that are getting mainstreamed and institutional recognition have to do with family."
Radical queer culture has left its mark: Schulman cites Black Lives Matter and Palestinian solidarity as radical movements that welcome queer people and are informed by queer analysis. But when it comes to LGBTQ activism, Schulman sees a split in priorities.
"The LGBT track has become more of a white reconciliation movement, focused on certain kinds of legal reforms that are about assimilating white gay people into a white power structure," she said. "The reason there was a separate gay movement in the first place was because nobody else would have us."
Forgetting the past in the rush towards assimilation can have powerful consequences beyond creating dysfunctional conflict. Schulman was part of ACT UP in the '80s, and a central theme of much of her work is friendship.
"This is a community that functions on friendship," Schulman writes about the queer movement. "The reason we were able to respond so appropriately to the AIDS crisis was because we were a community based group and not divided into privatized family units."
Schulman's personal desires for the queer agenda include preserving those strong friendships that make movements like ACT UP possible, redefining motherhood for queer women, and combating racism and poverty. And she doesn't feel her role has shifted from activist to critic.
"Hopefully everything as deepened," Schulman said. But the arenas I'm involved in are the same."
Sarah Schulman will appear at Women and Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark St, at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 23, to discuss Conflict is Not Abuse.
