Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
    Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
    Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
    Audiobook10 hours

    Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

    Written by Sarah Schulman

    Narrated by Sarah Schulman

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

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

    This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 10, 2018
    ISBN9781541480513
    Author

    Sarah Schulman

    Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction (including The Cosmopolitans, Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry), nonfiction (including Stagestruck, Conflict is Not Abuse, and The Gentrification of the Mind), and theater (Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and more), and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films (The Owls, Mommy Is Coming, and United in Anger, among others). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

    Related to Conflict Is Not Abuse

    Related audiobooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Burning House

      Jul 2, 2018

      The Burning House
      14 min read

    • Article

      Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism

      Dec 10, 2018

      Jackie Wang is “a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD candidate at Harvard University.” 1 I was first introduced to her writing in 2012 when some prairie prison

      5 min read

    • Article

      Andrea Long Chu: Females: A Concern

      Dec 15, 2019

      Verso, 2019 Based in New York City, Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic whose writings have been credited with launching a “second wave” in trans studies. Females: A Concern is her first book-length work, which provides readings of contemporary

      5 min read

    • Article

      The TikTok Lesbolution

      May 27, 2022

      The TikTok Lesbolution
      3 min read

    • Article

      Race and Equality

      Jul 16, 2020

      Race and Equality
      20 min read

    • Article

      It’s Only Human Nature

      Feb 23, 2023

      ‘‘PEOPLE LIKE COLDPLAY and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people, Jeremy.” Super Hans, the crack-addicted dispenser of violence and wisdom in the noughties sitcom Peep Show and the Tory cleric, Jonathan Swift, might not be obvious bedfellows. T

      3 min read

    • Article

      Turning Perpetrators Into Healers

      Dec 21, 2017

      Al Franken the serial groper. Al Franken the scapegoat. History proceeds clumsily. Innocent people -- or "innocently guilty" people, like the junior senator from Minnesota -- often get unfairly hung out to dry. Should he have to resign? As far as I c

      4 min read

    • Article

      Criminal Intent

      Jan 7, 2020

      Rachel Monroe is not letting herself off the hook. Her book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, may address women’s fascination with crime, but her first object of study is herself. “Over the years,” she writes, “I’ve

      3 min read

    • Article

      'When They Call You a Terrorist': Patrisse Khan-Cullors discusses what's next for Black Lives Matter

      Jan 31, 2018

      Consider this passage from "When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir" by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele: In the city of Los Angeles, almost 50 percent of all homicides go unsolved and gang injunctions did absolutely nothing

      3 min read

    • Article

      This Is Not a Sex Panic

      Jan 17, 2018

      This Is Not a Sex Panic
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Conflict Is Not Abuse

    3.5/5

    73 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Hauntingly resonant today 2023 November
      Also well-written and solid voice nice to listen to
    • 2/5
      I agree with the basic premise of this book, but I have two primary areas of concern that are pushing me to put it down and find any other author’s approach to it. First of all, I don’t believe this is a subject I need to be reading from the perspective of a white woman regardless of her sexual orientation or other marginalized status. Secondly, I found the first chapter so repulsive as a sexual assault survivor that I had to stop midway to pull myself out of a dissociative episode, and I would highly recommend any reader of similar background to skip it if they choose to read it. While I do think she makes good points in it about relying too heavily on one-sided (digital) communication, the author veers into a segment where she basically invalidates any rejection of a potential sexual partner. She doesn’t seem willing to address her own trauma of rejection as a queer woman, instead projecting the responsibility to coddle the feelings of the rejected on the rest of the world. It’s just so strange and offputting, and also right up the alley of the type of social justice writing that the man who attacked me would align himself with. Again, the premise/thesis is great, but I will definitely be seeking less self-centered voices to present it.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      There's some real insight here, but I think this book would have been better as a single focused essay. Instead the author has added a lot of anecdata which I'm not sure holds up to scrutiny, a thesis-less critique of the queer reclamation of family as a thing we get to have, and an extended piece on the 2014 Gaza war that is mostly other people's social media posts (and no evidence that permission was given for publication of those posts).
    • 5/5
      Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is not Abuse is the best book I have read this year, bar none. Even when I disagreed Sarah always made me think, question my own beliefs and tease out how my own patterns of managing conflict impacted others, especially in individual conflict and in the many political groups I have been a member.Basically Sarah says that conflict and abuse are conflated which can lead to a victimization mindset, ruin relationships and break up political and community groups. Sarah also notes that global conflicts have the same roots as interpersonal and group struggles. Projection and denial and differing values based in race, class, gender and personality are the sources of conflict and that to heal there must be an understanding of these sources and the dynamic it has created. I agree with Sarah about projection and denial in interpersonal and group dynamics but am not convinced that projection and denial is the most salient cause of global conflict. This is when Sarah's concepts become unhelpful generalizations. Yes, it plays a part but it is not sufficient. I also disagreed with Sarah that survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence are main disruptors of individual relationships and political groups. It is a double edge sword to place blame on the blameless and add to the pigeon holding of survivors. It's hurtful and maddening to survivors to be seen as a malignant force. This may be true that this dynamic can occur and it makes sense that survivors would have distortions of thinking and may act out but this is stereotypical and harmful. Sometimes because of abuse survivors have the ability to cut right through the drama and dynamic right in front of them and call it out. Seeing bullshit all their lives make them exquisitely perceptive and they know how to create boundaries and when and whom it makes sense to talk to. It is hard to know whether this is Sarah's projections, based in her own experience or not.I also believe that cut-offs are especially problematic and hard. It is really heartbreaking to have a friend walk away without warning and block communication. It had happened to me and is so painful. I have never walked away from somebody but I have fought with somebody and disengaged from them even when they wanted to try to mend the relationship. I can’t say there was really any reason except fear. It is hard for me to decide whether to try to engage again and if/when trying to do so is productive. In any case, Conflict is not Abuse, is a beautiful and profound book that will keep with asking questions and remaining woke to the issues and that is a wonderful gift.