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Sarah Schulman Quotes

Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, historian and lesbian rights activist. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at College of Staten Island and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.

✵ 28. July 1958
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Sarah Schulman: 6 quotes0 likes

Famous Sarah Schulman Quotes

“I am not here to entertain straight people.”

Sarah Schulman

“There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”

Sarah Schulman

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 51

“Gentrification replaces most people's experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality.”

Sarah Schulman

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 161

“At the 2008 Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to books ignored by straight book awards) not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation's story?”

Sarah Schulman

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 151

“Gentrification is a process that hides the apparatus of domination from the dominant themselves. Spiritually, gentrification is the removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity—the familiar interaction of different kinds of people creating ideas together. Urbanity is what makes cities great, because the daily affirmation that people from other experiences are real makes innovative solutions and experiments possible. In this way, cities historically have provided acceptance, opportunity, and a place to create ideas contributing to freedom. Gentrification in the seventies, eighties, and nineties replaced urbanity with suburban values, … so that the suburban conditioning of racial and class stratification, homogeneity of consumption, mass-produced aesthetics, and familial privatization got resituated into big building, attached residences, and apartments. This undermines urbanity and recreates cities as centers of obedience instead of instigators of positive change.”

Sarah Schulman

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 27

“There is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable.”

Sarah Schulman

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

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