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

by Sarah Schulman

We have an enormous challenge now that the community of queer friends is facing profound transformation by queer pro-family ideology, an ideology that constructs the idea that people are bound together as a central legal and social structure of “protection” against outsiders, who are a “threat.” This is the very same construction that victimized many of us in fundamental ways in relationship to our own families. Lest we forget. The pro-family politic in the queer community has overwhelmed a lot of things that we once understood but no longer remember. Childcare is privatized instead of collectivized. Interestingly (and I leave it to historians to chart this one), lesbians in the feminist movement of the 1970s and ’80s, before the dawning of the pro-natalist mentality, were more overtly active for quality child care, which was considered to be one of a number of issues that were grouped together as “reproductive rights” (“Abortion rights, affordable and safe birth control, an end to Sterilization Abuse, Lesbian Rights and Quality Child Care”). But in our contemporary, queer pro-family ideology, there is no visible gay or lesbian movement for childcare rights. Our understandings about the consumerism of privatized living are forgotten. We’ve lost a lot of imaginative ground and also emotional complexity in how we talk about and understand relationships. Most importantly artificial ideas about perfect parents, ideal children, and storybook romance do great harm to many of us....