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The Police and the Politics of Overstating Harm

From: Conflict Is Not Abuse

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This chapter examines the expression of overstating harm in which the police are called or the state is invoked in matters where Conflict is misrepresented as Abuse. In trying to understand how the police became the arbiters of our relationships, the author looks at the historic evolution from the creation of the Feminist Anti-Violence movement in the 1960s to contemporary state control of the domestic realm. How resistance politics became part of the state apparatus of control, often using the same words. How differences in race and class impact contemporary legal and social approaches to intimate partner abuse, and how the individual’s inability to problem-solve serves the interests of the state.

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Contributors

Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman is the author of eighteen books: the novels The Cosmopolitans, The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness To a Lost Imagination, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, and the plays Mercy and Carson McCullers. She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of the movies The Owls and Mommy is Coming, and co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Award for "Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies" from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.