Ties That Bind by Sarah Schulman

Author:Sarah Schulman [Schulman, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595584809
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRD PARTY INTERVENTION

The Human Obligation

What I find most moving about Kate’s analysis is the way she frames the cruelty of the lesbian partner against her lover as an act of projection. A lesbian who has had no rights and who has been traumatized by the system all her life suddenly has the euphoric emotional catharsis of being able, finally, to stick it to someone else. This reversal is so intoxicating that many will fight like dogs for that ecstatic feeling of domination. It’s an especially potent power when it is held over someone who knows their sexual truth, the very truths for which they have themselves been victimized. The fact that the originating cruelty was from other people whose privileges keep them out of reach seems not to matter. The glee of doing it to someone else, who has even less protection, prevails.

After all, some cruelty comes from privilege and some comes from trauma. Their motivations and solutions are entirely different. But their impact on the victim is the same. When privileged people scapegoat, they do it from repetition, arrogance, habit. The pleasure is the pleasure of entitlement, the inflated sense of one’s self as neutral, natural, and right. But when a perpetrator scapegoats from a place of trauma, it is almost always an act of projection. It was her father who sexually abused her, but it’s the lover who can truly reach her sexually who suddenly becomes Satan. It is her drunken parents who never could face and deal with a problem, but it is her lover making her open the credit card bills, whom she can in turn humiliate and cathartically dehumanize. And because the lover is herself unprotected, the lesbian can impulsively act out her pain on her partner without fear of consequence.

Kendell identifies this as a kind of re-victimization, where one devalued person “does not keep her promises” to another devalued person and does this “not understanding the ultimate harm” of her actions. She says, “It comes from a place that is so victimized that you don’t even understand when you’ve moved from being the victim to being the oppressor.” And she identifies the foundation of this cruel behavior as “a cadre of friends” who support the woman in her illegitimate action.

Being on the receiving end of intense homophobia from family, which is supposed to be the central support structure in a person’s life, is a severely traumatizing experience, which creates a resulting vulnerability that in turn makes the victim again susceptible to these kinds of projections from other oppressed people. Remember, people scapegoat the powerless because there is no consequence for doing so. If there was a consequence, they would stop. Having no family support because you are gay, being pathologized for being gay and then being blamed for the consequences of that pathologization, these twists create a target for the projection of others. These experiences make one extremely vulnerable to being blamed because the blamers know, instinctively, that no one will stand up and disrupt the process.

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