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

by Sarah Schulman

Methodology I ground my perspective in the queer: I use queer examples, I cite queer authors, I am rooted in queer points of view, I address and investigate concerns and trends in queer discourse. I come directly from a specifically lesbian historical analysis of power, rooted generationally in Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, in which sexual, racial, material, emotional, colonial, and gender dynamics were seen as continuous and interrelated. Audre, in particular, in her classic Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which she called a “Biomythography,” addressed the question of genre directly by simply inventing her own. So I continue the tradition of creative writers using non-fiction to address their observations, feelings, contexts, histories, visions, memories, and dreams. It is a category of the literature of ideas that stands apart from academia, and yet is useful to it and frequently incorporated into classroom reading, serving as a subject of academic analysis and inquiry while not being a product of it.