Okay, lot to unpack in here. I'm gonna take it one bit at a time. I understand you have a lot to say but I'm having trouble pinning down my own position on it for a few reasons.
She's a creep, she's like Johnny Depp, she's a stalker.
I don't know that you're someone who's followed me before, but I'm a defense attorney. I don't act on accusations. And there's very strong reasons for this: I've seen many many occasions when the nastiest accusations dissolve in the face of talking about what actually happened. Not to mention: I, along with huge other segments of the human race, have been called things that are untrue on the Internet.
No I wouldn't take a book like this seriously from Johnny Depp.
And in this book, she lays out a moral framework for why it is unethical to reject someone who propositions you, distance yourself from someone who harasses you, protect yourself from someone who retaliates against you, or report someone who abuses power to control you.
She IS talking about abuse. She IS minimizing abuse. She just calls it conflict, for the same reason that abusers describe their abusive relationships as "passionate" and their victims as "paranoid" or "hysterical." The same reason they get big fucking mad when you try to seek outside help or just run away. You don't need to do that, baby. We can work it out just the two of us.
This is interesting. I do think you're right that someone could use what she says to do the things you've laid out (maybe even she herself could do that), but also I don't think there's a paradigm in this world that's immune from abusers co-opting the language and ideas and using them to be manipulative and controlling.
And I think there are equally ways to read her paradigms to counter all of those points, because this book tends to at least nod towards complexity and nuance.
So here's what I'm thinking about. There is some very real stuff that she's talking about here that is genuinely oversimplified by calling it abuse. I've seen so many families do battle with protective orders in order to win custody cases and "win" divorces -- and it is getting excruciatingly common for people who appear to me to be the perpetrator of abuse to successfully obtain protective orders and press charges on their victims. I think cases like that are increasing every year, generally with men taking out charges on women. (Unlike Sarah Schulman, I find queer theory not particularly useful in my everyday job, where the overwhelming majority of intimate partner abuse charges are heterosexual.)
I think if you read the book with the underlying assumption that she is talking about abuse, that there isn't a real thing that she's trying to work through here, that you will have some obstacles with engaging with the content.
I think the most interesting part, also, is where she relates a training by Catherine Hodes regarding intimate partner violence. It seems to me like Catherine Hodes was speaking a language that Schulman herself didn't fully understand because Hodes was speaking to the actual caseworkers and people who engage with these relationships on an everyday basis, not to academics and writers. And Hodes is most fucking definitely onto something.
It's not useful to ask a client if they're "abused" because abused is in many ways not a useful term in that context. People who are not abused will identify themselves as abused and people who are abused will identify themselves as not abused. (This is so true and makes everything so hard)
It is more helpful to ask them what exactly happened during an event, how it began, the reactions both internally and externally
It is also helpful to ask them what they are afraid of and get into the reasons for that fear
Abusers and traumatized people both tend to blame their actions on factors external to them and lack understanding of their internal reactions
These are all true and true to my experience as well.
There's a whole section about how it's wrong and counterproductive - and maybe authoritarian? hm lots to digest - to communicate in writing instead of face-to-face.
That's an interesting argument that seems commonsensical given the demonic nature of iphones, but it takes on very different shading when you consider that she is a stalker working in a field where sexual harassment can trigger HR investigations.
She doesn't dislike emails because they're cold. She hates them because they're discoverable. She's trying to frame documentation as a trauma response. She's trying to pressure stalking and harassment victims to perform a level of intimacy they don't feel.
Okay, again, I don't really have any reason to think that there's a threatening motivation behind her dislike of email except your word. I'm open to hearing more.
I think two things are true about it for sure: Her dislike of email comes off excessive and kind of funny and Boomerish, and she's absolutely right that face-to-face conversations solve problems. I get that there's no paper trail (though I'm a big fan of the "Just confirming that we discussed a, b, and c, and decided on d" email follow-up), but, really, we all know we get stupid and misread emotions and fire off things we shouldn't have said through emails and text messages where going face-to-face brings out a more reasonable side.
(I myself did legitimate psychic damage to my brother once over a text conversation and kind of ended up shocked and a little fucked-up over the fact that I could be so mean and that I could wield language like I was a bard casting Vicious Mockery. I've been a lot more conscientious since.)
I don't appreciate the dichotomy of "you would disregard this book or you don't believe in lesbian abuse." Some of the most violent abuse I've ever seen was in lesbian relationships, and when I experienced that kind of psychological and emotional control, a woman was the one doing it.
Anyway, this brings me to my critique of what I'm seeing in the text, which is that in challenging the "pure victim" trope but only in certain situations, she's inadvertently reinforced it. She talks a big game about how as a community we need to ensure that being a "pure victim" is not necessary to ensure access to compassion and help, but when she engages with situations that she portrays as "reversing" the victim/abuser dynamic, she's calling for compassion because the Real Victim is So Mistreated.
You can see this in her treatment of Palestine (interesting because she is in fact Jewish), and her mentions of Black men murdered by police. Biggest example of this, though, I think, is her going into depth on the Canadian government's criminalization of HIV+ people infecting their partners with HIV.
Like, yes, obviously criminalizing this into aggravated rape and throwing particularly mostly black HIV+ people into prison for infecting their partners is a completely bonkers way to try and solve this problem; the carceral state cannot fix public health crises.
However, she spends an inordinate amount of time telling a story of One Time Her Friend Got Infected and He Didn't Call the Cops, and how some women were convicted of this and it's much less likely for women to transmit the virus/the virus was never genotyped/was never proven that what their partners had was what they had. Then she pays barely lip service to the fact that one of the people convicted of this infected EIGHT PEOPLE without disclosing their HIV+ status, two of whom DIED OF AIDS, which I think we can all agree is a BAD LOOK. (Again, if the government wants to prevent situations like that, maybe they should expand the testing, treatment, and prophylactic options instead of criminalizing and actively incentivizing people to not know their HIV status! AND YET.)
Just because of that, I think this book falls short of what it promises to be.
I think dismantling the Perfect Victim narrative is actually something we might want to do as a culture across the board. While I'm strongly of the opinion that in domestic violence the responsibility rests with the person who did the violence, victims regularly fail to report because of shame and the feeling that they did contribute to it. If they were relieved of the burden of being Perfect, there might be less shame to latch onto. And then they might have a shorter path to realizing that their only crime was to be a kind person targeted by a predator.
Besides, there are no Perfect Victims. There's always something Imperfect to latch on to.
Ultimately, I think Schulman does have some ideas here that are worth considering, but that she can't take her own blinders off enough to fully grapple with them. I do not offer an opinion about her being a stalker; I do think she has visibly bent some of the narratives in the book to try and support her points, and that's not great either.
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