a while after posting “this is not a eulogy” and my follow-up to it, and with “Conflict Is Not Abuse” out for a bit, it seems worth making visible an account of what i’ve seen & heard of the response to the post.

the what i’ve seen & heard of part is important: i’m not on facebook, so quite a bit of this is second-hand. i’m trying to be as comprehensive about what i’ve heard as i can, precisely because it’s not coming to me directly. partly because i think doing so is important to the argument on gossip that’s involved here. and also because it points to the differences between what circulates visibly (on social media in particular) and what circulates based on ties of trust and friendship, and may indicate a bit about what the different stakes are for different people in that circulation. (which goes back to the points that b. binaohan made in the piece i cited here. i’m not including here two responses that happened via tumblr, which are already visible: one is in the notes, and my reply is in the follow-up post; the other is reflected in an edit to the posts’s first footnote.

i should also preface this by saying that i’ve had exactly two interactions with schulman herself since posting the piece. one over email, at the beginning of september, after a friend wrote us offering to broker some kind of conversation between us: she said she’d be open to a moderated public conversation; i said i’d lean towards an exchange in writing. neither of us has followed up. and one in person, at the beginning of last october, while waiting for the house to open at a play: she gave me a copy of the book and offered her usual openness to one-on-one private conversation.

what follows is what’s been happening alongside that.

so: i posted the piece on this tumblr on august 16. after a few weeks, it had perhaps 8 notes - a few more than the 3-6 average i get on an original post; much lower than the 40ish i’ve gotten once or twice.

on august 30 i started to get calls from friends who’d been cold-called by schulman; that’s continued pretty steadily (and i don’t assume it’s stopped since the last one i know of). the calls i’ve heard about have mainly been to folks who’ve had far less contact with her than i have - some who’d never had a conversation with her before - but who’re seen as being influential players in one or another white queer arts/culture scene. mostly, the folks she’s called hadn’t read, or even been aware of, my piece at the time they were cold-called.

the framings used in the calls have varied, from ‘i’m told you know who this person is’ to 'can you explain this person’, but the content has been consistent: extended venting about the footnotes in which i air widely known dirty laundry; minimal engagement with the political critique of her work. there’s also been a fair amount of active misrepresentation of what i wrote: attribution of specific politically-charged phrases that i did not use, etcetera. the implication (from the choice of targets and the tone of the conversations) has been pretty clear: these folks are supposed to be reining me in, and are on notice that they’re associated with me. if my memory serves, nearly everyone who’s spoken to me has said that they suggested that shulman respond directly to me if she has arguments with what i wrote. she hasn’t.

around then i also started to hear about approaches made to folks (some of them friends of mine) who had linked to the post from facebook, or mentioned it elsewhere online, mainly by schulman, later also by other people. again, the message was very consistent: they were told that the piece was inaccurate, that it misquoted schulman, that she “would never” have written certain things, and that they should take down the link. some of this, especially from schulman’s proxies, also included active misrepresentations of what i wrote - the most entertainingly inept being the out-of-context quoting of the word “obnoxious” (which i used in the first line of the piece to characterize anonymous - and thus unaccountable - critiques) as my supposed rubric for the whole piece.

some of the more rigorous targets of this sort of thing made their posts private while they went over my footnotes; upon finding my citations accurate, they were rather pissed off at the line they’d been fed, and reposted. others kept their posts up throughout, or took them down and kept them down - the difference depending mostly, as far as i can tell, on how much of their paid employment depends on the goodwill of social circles in which schulman and her proxies hold influence.

now, in the past two months, i’ve shared a certain amount of social space with several of the more diligent folks who’ve acted as schulman’s proxies in this. none of them has said a single word to my face about any of it (unless i’m misremembering about one person’s (non)involvement in the online hassling of re-posters, which would give the traditional rule-proving exception).

by contrast, at various points i’ve been approached by friends and acquaintances (if you’re reading this and aren’t sure which applies, to me it’s the former /grin/) who’ve had disagreements with, questions about, or strong reactions to the piece. we’ve had long and interesting conversations about it, which haven’t necessarily led to agreement, but definitely to better understanding between us. and for me, to clearer articulations of things i wrote and things that were left between the lines of the piece. i’m incredibly grateful for those exchanges.

also in the realm of direct communication, i’ve been thanked by a number of folks for writing the piece, specifically because they felt they couldn’t have safely done so. that making this kind of political critique of a prominent figure would have led to retribution and cold-shouldering that would have cost them paid work and social access they need to survive as queer and trans cultural workers. to be clear about what i mean by “prominent”: we’re talking about 'world-famous in poland’, as we say in yidishland - but if you live and work in warsaw, that means a lot.

i’ve also been told about more personal online smear efforts directed at me. again being carried out by folks at zero to one degree of social distance from me, with no attempt to make any kind of personal contact. the most direct of these that i’ve heard about was by someone whose response to the rape of a friend/close acquaintance was to try to shut her up, going so far as to contact her partner to try to get him to silence her. [note: the previous sentence has been edited for stricter accuracy] which, i would say, illustrates very clearly both who has a stake in shulman’s arguments going uncriticized, and how directly her arguments lend themselves to encouraging online attacks of the kind they claim to deplore.

finally, in mid-october, i was told that someone had been posting links to the piece in schulman’s book tour facebook events. i’d be interested to hear what conversations have come out of that - especially among folks who’ve read the book, and can see how it stays with and how it moves away from the underpinnings that schulman laid out while writing it. feel free to drop me a line and let me know (in the comments, or in my asks - if i write any further follow-up, i won’t quote private notes without asking, of course). the copy schulman gave me is in my to-read pile (under a martha rosler collection, some jo clayton, beth elliot’s autobiography-a-clef, most of “The Warmth of Other Suns”, and a few other things). i may have more things to say after i read it; i may say them here.

the notes count on the post has hovered in the 40s for several months now. most hedgehog photos do better by several orders of magnitude. i don’t take notes as a reflection of readership numbers; on posts that air political critiques, especially outside of a politics of purity, i do take them as a sign of how comfortable folks feel making agreement visible.

all in all, i think it’s been an interesting set of responses, especially in light of schulman’s ideas. i wasn’t really expecting this kind of illustration of how they play out in practice, but there it is. a critique from slightly below (and reasonably close by), leads not to the person criticized “pick[ing] up the phone and talk[ing] to them about it”, but to a classic process of triangulation, aimed at discrediting and isolating the source of the critique. the political substance of the critique is ignored, and not even token responses to it are made. this is a pretty minor form of what sarah ahmed has talked about as “how you become a problem when you expose a problem”, but even so it highlights the basic thing missing from schulman’s account: power.

some of what schulman talks about in the writing my piece analyzed is real: the israeli government does use false claims of victimhood to justify ongoing attempted genocide, and propagates them through astroturf hasbara strategies; mob harassment online does exist, with rapists and sexual harassers deploying it to try to silence their victims, and pseudo-feminists using it to cut trans women and sex workers off from survival resources.

but what a formalistic and psychological account cannot do is distinguish between these tactics used in defense of entrenched power, and collective efforts from below to challenge structures of power and prestige and those who benefit from them (and to enact alternatives to existing institutional structures). to stretch a metaphor, the approach schulman argues for can’t distinguish between a power-drill hole that eases the passage of a screw strengthening the master’s house, and a termite hole inching towards its collapse: all it can see is a hole, and its impulse is to fill it, strengthening the structure.

and what losing that distinction - refusing a basic analysis of power - enables, at the most basic level, is the uncritical embrace of the pattern of response i’ve just described, by people claiming to defend the utility of open, acknowledged conflict. the mobilization of something that looks a lot like “group shunning”, “overreaction”, and “bonding by bullying as a shallow definition of loyalty”. a willingness to attack in spaces presumed to be unseen, and smile in public sight, assuming that the gap would never be seen or named.

a misunderstanding of the power of gossip, rumor, and whisper so complete that they can be simultaneously condemned as all-powerful and dismissed as insignificant. this post could not exist if either of those things were true.