From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference. This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals. Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels published by Arsenal include Rat Bohemia , Empathy , After Delores , and The Mere Future . She lives in New York.

In this book, the author, a playwright and social critic explores the family, the first place where all people, straight, gay, and bisexual, learn homophobia. For it is within the family that homophobia begins to control people's lives, whether as perpetrators or recipients. Written in the tradition of Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which reconceptualized rape and transformed it from a private problem into an internationally recognized cultural crisis that is now punishable in the International Criminal Court, this book uncovers the hidden crime of "familial homophobia" and moves it into the open for social and political scrutiny. The author illustrates how societal homophobia is rooted in the family but reaches into all levels of social interaction, including how gay people treat each other. She probes the complex issues involved and prescribes third party interventions on the part of both individuals and institutions of authority so that we can all live a better life together on truly equal terms. This work attempts to change our understanding of homophobia and redefine the political landscape not just for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people but for us all.