Byers, David S.

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
Graduate School of Social Work and Social
Research Faculty Research and Scholarship
Graduate School of Social Work and Social
Research
2019
A Queer Ethic of Conflict and the Challenge of
Friendship. Review of Conflict Is Not Abuse:
Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and
the Duty of Repair
David S. Byers
Bryn Mawr College, dbyers@brynmawr.edu
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Custom Citation
Byers, David S. 2019. "A Queer Ethic of Conflict and the Challenge of Friendship. Review of Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm,
Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair." GLQ 25.1: 205-208.
 1 
A Queer Ethic of Conflict and the Challenge of Friendship  
David S. Byers 
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair 
Sarah Schulman 
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016. 15 + 299. 
 
Conflicts, according to Sarah Schulman in her most recent book, are varied, sometimes 
mundane, and often consequential challenges to dominant understandings. Conflicts can range 
from simply showing up in interaction, for people whose social identities and sexualities are 
contested, to active resistance to state and intergroup violence, marginalization, and oppression. 
Schulman’s deceptively simple contention is that such conflicts are so uncomfortable for most 
people that we pervasively misunderstand or misrepresent them as potentially leading to serious 
psychological, social, and physical harm. Intentionally or not, we overstate the danger of 
necessary and inevitable conflict and frame it as abuse.  
The obfuscation of necessary conflict relates in part to a defense of consolidated power 
and control—when people with more power feel narcissistically injured when those with less 
power pose a challenge. Schulman offers various case studies of this threatening interaction 
across power differentials, including driving (or walking, or selling loose cigarettes) while black 
in the United States, having sex while HIV+ in Canada, and resisting the occupation of the West 
Bank and siege on Gaza as a Palestinian.  
In the last example, Schulman provides a careful analysis of social media posts about 
Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2014, pointing to the Israeli government’s anxious control of the 
narrative through shunning and dehumanizing Palestinian resistance. The analysis remains as 
 2 
prescient today as prosaic. As I first sat down to read Schulman’s book, sixteen-year-old Ahed 
Tamimi was arrested for allegedly slapping and kicking two Israeli soldiers patrolling her village 
in the occupied West Bank (see Goldman 2017). Arrests of children and adolescents in the West 
Bank are common, usually for throwing stones at the occupying army (see Addameer.org). 
Tamimi’s case has received unusual attention because her family filmed the incident and the 
Israeli Education Minister has since offered that she should be imprisoned for life as punishment. 
Schulman’s point about overstating harm to justify state control could hardly be more evident. 
Israeli social psychologist Niza Yanay (2013) offers a similar psychoanalytic reading of the 
Israeli military’s violent response to challenges to its supremacy.  Building on a Fanonian 
conceptualization of colonialist anxiety, Yanay critiques the dominant power’s disavowed yet 
frustrated yearning for the subjugated group’s validation. 
In Schulman’s analysis, these overestimations of harm can also play out at the 
interpersonal level, even when the person claiming abuse may have less or similar structural or 
institutional power as the person accused. She offers several provocative examples, including 
sexual interactions in professional settings characterized too quickly and simply as sexual 
harassment, student demands for “trigger warnings” in college coursework to avoid 
uncomfortable content, and conflations of violence and abuses of power in intimate relationships. 
In a particularly disturbing example, she recounts an incident between two female friends in a 
long-term, high-conflict relationship. One of them threw a heavy object at the other, causing a 
broken bone, and weeks later the woman who was injured called the police to have her former 
partner arrested. Schulman suggests that the conflict might have been better resolved by seeking 
remediation and parting ways. Instead, the injured friend sought recourse for her pain and anger 
with punitive and likely ineffective legal measures, effectively recentering the state.    
 3 
The tradition of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theorization about conflict and power 
across micro and macro levels of interaction—between individuals, between individuals and the 
state, and between states—inevitably leads to additional distortions. Schulman’s work, however, 
largely finds coherence because of her strategy of locating disparate problems within a personal 
frame of reference through an ethic of bystander accountability. In each example, from Gaza to 
an East Village apartment, Schulman insistently implicates herself—as a member of the 
community and a friend who plays a role.  
Many of us are drawn into the group enactments Schulman describes, overstating the 
harm of interpersonal interactions to justify punishments of uncomfortable differences through 
shunning and scapegoating. This justification undermines our ability to engage productively in 
conflict and address dangerous abuse when it occurs. The slippage happens actively between us, 
yet we can interrupt the circuit by acting as what Schulman terms “good friends”—relations that, 
regardless of other formal and informal ties, facilitate questioning and accountability.We 
otherwise tend to egg each other on in escalating claims of abuse through notions of 
exceptionalism, whether in shared response to past trauma or relying on assumptions about the 
group’s supremacy. Schulman’s premise that traumatized groups often behave like groups 
organized around supremacy is an old, yet still challenging one in psychoanalytic contexts. I 
have theorized that targeted and traumatized people often need “accountable recognition” of 
social pain from their peers (2016: 343)—believable counter-projections to expectations of 
violence and indifference that can allow traumatized people to reconstitute and reengage across 
differences. Schulman centers her analysis not on pain but instead on the difficult recognition of 
the conflict itself.  
 4 
Here, too, is where a friend can help. Whether we are family members, teachers, students, 
colleagues, social workers, postal workers, lovers, and others who can also be friends—
Schulman’s new book offers an often persuasive new (and old) strategy for queer ethical 
engagement: a model of friendship that assumes conflict and difference, where we depend on 
each other to ask questions and hold each other accountable.  
   
David S. Byers is assistant professor at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social 
Research at Bryn Mawr College.  
 
References  
Byers, David S. “Recognition of Social Pain among Peers: Rethinking the Role of Bystanders in  
Bullying and Cyberbullying.” Smith College Studies in Social Work 86, no. 4 (2016): 
335-354. 
Goldman, Lisa. “Nabi Saleh is where I lost my Zionism.” +972 December 24, 2017,  
https://972mag.com/nabi-saleh-is-where-i-lost-my-zionism/131818/ 
“Imprisonment of Children,” Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association,  
accessed December 26, 2017. http://www.addameer.org/the_prisoners/children 
Yanay, Niza. The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse. Fordham Univ Press,  
2013. 
 


A Queer Ethic of Conflict and the Challenge of Friendship. Review of Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

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