Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman (review)

The problem highlighted in Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair is a lack of consensus, within the queer community especially, over what constitutes normative disagreement. We disagree on what counts as disagreement. As a rhetorician, my disciplinary vocabulary for describing these conditions is to say that the argument is not “in stasis.” Ancient rhetoricians prescribed a systematic comparison of competing claims as a way of helping interlocutors discern which claims in an argument are actually responsive to one another. Conflict Is Not Abuse argues that competing criteria for distinguishing conflict from abuse are not in stasis. But Schulman does not prescribe (or provide) a comparison of competing claims; instead, she advocates reframing some disagreements by viewing their parties as “conflicted,” rather than seeking to identify a perpetrator and victim of abuse.

In the introduction, Schulman argues that people who are injured or feel threatened may overstate the harm that they have suffered in order to justify their own overreactions. In other words, people who see themselves as victims of abuse may actually be or become abusers. Schulman claims that what she calls “Traumatized behavior and Supremacy ideology” are parallel habits of mind, ways of thinking that seek to control others and exclude “self-criticism or difference” (29). Schulman’s central claim is not just that conflict is different from abuse, but that instances of normative conflict are often misidentified as abuse. Claims of victimhood, writes Schulman, may be used to disguise or defend the perpetration of real abuse.

Schulman comments on conflicts that range from interpersonal to international. Part I examines personal conflicts and state intervention. Chapter 1 applies the claim that victimhood can be used to reject differences in romantic relationships. Developing her argument through personal examples, Schulman gives readers the difficult job of separating her own grievances from the structural analysis she aims to offer. Schulman claims (I think shockingly) that identifying oneself as being or having been abused is (at least at times) a strategy for making oneself appear “deserving of group acclaim” (48). Schulman configures disclosing an experience of abuse as (potentially) a way of blaming another party for conflict and thereby presenting oneself as blameless and pure.

Schulman argues that traumatized people may inappropriately appeal to authorities for redress in circumstances that should properly be resolved between the parties themselves. In her discussion in Chapter 3 of college students asking their schools to provide trigger warnings, Schulman charges students with “justifying the repression of information” (94). Schulman presents potential triggers as “information” that gets “mischaracterized as harm” (92). Here Schulman gets some key facts wrong, claiming that professors at two schools “were mandated to issue ‘trigger warnings’” (93). This claim is either a mistake or misrepresentation that supports Schulman’s refiguring of (some) student trauma survivors as the real abusers.

Part II considers how conflicts escalate. For example, Chapter 6 analyzes being triggered as a form of overreaction that leads to shunning, which Schulman calls “an active form of harassment” (167). This claim implies that trauma survivors have a responsibility to dialogue with people they view as abusers: “Otherwise no reconciliation is imaginable” (167). Schulman’s stark contention should raise the question of whether (and when) reconciliation is truly desirable. Chapter 7 applies Schulman’s arguments to the psychodynamics of male supremacy in lesbian families, arguing that marriage and family structures themselves can (re)stage one’s personal trauma as supremacy.

Part III consists of only one chapter, an account of Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza. Fifty of this chapter’s sixty pages reproduce conversations Schulman read or was party to on social media. The experiment in reprinting digitally born texts is interesting, but it eliminates dates, times, and site-specific usernames, and Schulman does not comment on how the different reading chronologies of Facebook and Twitter influenced her selection of what to include...