The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

by Sarah Schulman

understand their particular brand of cowardice. There is a destructive impulse inside many white gay men, where they become cruel or child-like or spineless out of a rage about not having the privileges that straight men of our race take for granted. They have grief about not being able to subjugate everyone else at will.

you do not have a functioning criminal class in the art world then you have academia, and while academia is a reflection of the art world, it is not the art world, it is academia and academia will never be the art world.

Feminism is still subversive. It's still scary. Feminism means humanity moving forward and addressing inequalities. And that women lead. Independent women who do not need men for their emotional, physical,

and economic well being are scary still. Even those of us who love men. I think that the fact that we strive to be independent is frightening because we challenge all the paradigms.

our literature was different from that dirty stuff, instead of part and parcel with it. But it is the homosexuality that got the books marginalized in the first place. Not their sentence structure.

Are we being duped by gentrified happiness, and can we find pleasure in something more complex, more multi-dimensional, and therefore more dynamic?

Gentrified happiness is often available to us in return for collusion with injustice. We go along with it, usually, because of the

privilege of dominance, which is the privilege not to notice how our way of living affects less powerful people.