The world is consumed by violent fights and hostile disagreements. Sarah Schulman sees a way out of them. mollyhfischer writes
Photo: Ryan Pfluger Sarah Schulman is a playwright, an author, and a queer activist. She is also a professor of creative writing, and once, a number of years ago, she learned that a male graduate student maintained a blog where he wrote about his crush on her. He wrote that he was in love with her; he wrote that he wanted to fuck her; he wrote about her appearance in a way that made her feel bad. She told her colleagues what was happening, and their response was unanimous: He was “stalking” her.
Schulman describes this episode in a book she wrote some years later, Conflict Is Not Abuse. The book’s central insight is that people experiencing the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding often overstate the harm that has been done to them — they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation. And overstating harm itself can cause harm, whether it leads to social shunning or physical violence.
Schulman’s analysis scrambles familiar ideological lines. She looks askance at trigger warnings; she also looks askance at Zionism. She considers the way accusations of sexual threat have been used against Black and queer people and then uses that understanding to extend empathy to those accused of sexual harassment. She tries to dissect the internal logic of police brutality and domestic abuse.
“A nonfiction book is the story of an idea,” Schulman told me — and the analysis found in Conflict Is Not Abuse, she writes, brings “fifty-seven years of living and thirty-five years of writing to a critical conclusion.” In this case, the idea’s story is perhaps also her own. While waiting tables, she managed to write and publish two books, but some of the neighborhood artists who were her regulars suggested it might be useful to get an M.F.A. She enrolled in a City College writing program taught by Grace Paley, and on the first day, she read aloud an excerpt from her current project — her third novel, which had a lesbian narrator. The other students assumed the narrator was a man. Paley asked Schulman to come to her office after class.
Schulman is devoted to preserving the memory of the ACT UP era and of the hard work that its accomplishments required. In June 2001, she and Hubbard began the ACT UP Oral History Project, for which they recorded interviews with more than 180 surviving members of the group. Hubbard and filmmaker James Wentzy filmed, and she asked questions. “She would be in this intense relationship with the other person — a little bit like therapy,” Hubbard said.
As queer people were increasingly invited to identify with mainstream power in the ’90s and aughts—as gay rights gained purchase, as Pride went corporate — new questions arose. The movement from outsider to insider, to identifying with power, presents a crucial turn in Conflict Is Not Abuse.
The Women’s Liberation Zap Action Brigade, which interrupted the April 1981 Senate hearings on a bill that sought to ban abortion. Perhaps Schulman’s most provocative move in Conflict Is Not Abuse is her insistence that overstatement of harm happens everywhere: People in power who face criticism can overstate harm, but people who have previously suffered — who have lived through real harm — can do it too. For those in positions of dominance, she told me, “opposition feels like an attack.
Schulman believes that those who read her book as denying their own experiences of abuse are misunderstanding her, but she also seems interested in the defensiveness the book provokes. She heard from one reader who was upset that Conflict Is Not Abuse “made her question whether the partner she had accused of being abusive really was abusive,” she told me. “She saw that as an assault, that it made her doubt herself.
But people take shortcuts for a reason. Even before you arrive at the obstacles to solving problems like state violence, where implementing her theories is hard to imagine, just upholding Schulman’s ideals within the personal sphere is a daunting task. “The social world she’s describing is so time consuming,” her friend Lana Dee Povitz told me. It demands constant self-scrutiny, ongoing dialogue, diligent fact-finding, and availability for intervention in the personal lives of one’s friends.
From left: With Larry Kramer at Le Petit Versailles on Schulman’s 50th birthday.With Jim Hubbard in 2003 before filming an interview for the ACT UP Oral History project. Photo: From left: With Larry Kramer at Le Petit Versailles on Schulman’s 50th birthday.With Jim Hubbard in 2003 before filming an interview for the ACT UP Or... more From left: With Larry Kramer at Le Petit Versailles on Schulman’s 50th birthday.
The last time Villarosa was over, it was Lydia Polgreen and Rankine. Schulman once hosted Villarosa’s mother after she and Linda debated whether queer people are inevitably let down by their families; Villarosa had insisted that her mother was one of her best friends. Sometime later, Schulman asked Villarosa whether she could invite “Mrs. V” to dinner. Mrs. V and Schulman had a lovely time and talked at length about the theater.
Schulman often teaches a Friday-night fiction class from 6:30 to ten. “So my students have worked all week, they’ve taken care of their kids, and they’re coming to write fiction on Friday night,” she said. With the pandemic, her students’ challenges are more apparent than ever. “Their children are home from school, their parents are unemployed, they don’t have good Wi-Fi, and also they don’t always want their families to hear what their class discussions are like,” she told me.
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