Solidarity Is the Core of Our Movements — It’s Also Messier Than We Often Admit

“We are all led to solidarity by a complicated array of emotional, political, material and coincidental experiences,” novelist, activist and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman told me recently as we discussed her new book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. “What really matters in the end is what we conclude from all these influences.”

Her reflections on the importance of solidarity are timely in this moment, as solidarity with Palestinians has become increasingly criminalized. Over the past year and a half, university administrations have used every means at their disposal to repress campus-based protests against the U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza. Instead of showing solidarity with their students, these administrations have collaborated with police to brutalize protesters, banned Palestinian and Jewish activist groups, and suspended and expelled pro-Palestinian students and professors with a relentless zeal. It’s now hard to imagine a different path, one where universities stood by their alleged values of free expression, and extolled the virtue of their students’ right to protest as a vital aspect of the learning process. Instead, the bipartisan consensus between the Democratic and Republican parties, the Israel lobby and Evangelical Christians has led to Orwellian new laws defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and now the Trump administration is using powers available since the Patriot Act to abduct foreign student activists, send them to private prisons and threaten them with deportation.

Schulman’s new book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, centers on the importance of the Palestinian solidarity movement, examining “solidarity as a practice, as a creative endeavor, as performance art, as new forms of relationships, as a series of strategies and responses.” She looks to the work of activists, artists, writers, critical thinkers and iconoclasts past and present to understand the relationships that allow for solidarity to take place.

Schulman resists the notion of solidarity as something pure, instead revealing intrinsic power dynamics. “As long as we think of solidarity as saintly, we will not be able to fulfill it,” she writes. If the “purpose of this book is to make solidarity doable,” her method is unconventional — expose the contradictions, the limitations, the fantasies — in order to show the ways that flawed individuals under duress can still take meaningful action to challenge tyranny.

When “resistance grows, but the killing does not stop,” Schulman writes, it’s time to become more strategic, methodical, innovative, collaborative and dedicated to justice regardless of the whims of corporate power, institutional oppression, or societal approval. This interview addresses the complications of solidarity and the hypocrisy of the culture industry, as well as institutional bias, abortion activism, trans suicide and Schulman’s own experience coming to terms with the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: I was struck by your response to the repression of Palestinian solidarity protests by university administrations, where you write that “the knowledge gained by these illuminating institutional betrayals lasts forever.” What does this knowledge allow?

Sarah Schulman: Hopefully a kind of alienation from the institutions of what I call “criteria” — the institutions that have been mythologized into a power that maintains hierarchy and exception from rights.

You write that “criteria” is a euphemism for bias. In this sense, would you say that this type of bias, which treats students and faculty as status objects to achieve for the university rather than collaborative partners, is part of the corporatization of the university that prevents meaningful solidarity with student protests?

Perhaps originally universities were places where the primary relationships were between teachers and students. But as they have grown into top-heavy hedge funds and what Lisa Duggan said about New York University — “a real estate company that offers classes” — faculty [are seen as] this annoying whining entity, with no participation in governance, that administration doesn’t know what to do with.

Since this book is framed by the call for solidarity with Palestine, I wonder if you could talk about what prevented you, like so many others, from facing the reality of the Israeli occupation until 2009, and what ultimately allowed you to come to terms with this and change your life to take action?

As I have said before, I am ashamed and embarrassed that it took me so long to face the reality of the Israel/Palestine relationship. What changed is what I document in my book Israel/Palestine and the Queer International — like most people absorbed in unconscious supremacy thinking, I needed a personal experience to let in what Palestinians had long been saying. I was invited to present at Tel Aviv University on familial homophobia, based on the book Ties That Bind that I had just published. My Jewish colleague told me that there was an academic boycott, which I had never heard of. I wrote to Judith Butler and Naomi Klein to ask for advice — Butler got back to me within hours and sent me material. Once I read it, I understood that I could not accept the invitation. This was the beginning.

You also write that your experience of growing up in a Jewish family that saw itself outside of Americanism, and your experience of familial homophobia and misogyny, helped you to connect the Israeli occupation with other systems of supremacy masquerading as reality. But many who grow up alienated from systems of power do not make these same connections.

I actually think that a lot of people understand that what is happening to Palestinians is wrong. Millions of people all over the world are in the streets protesting this brutality. But it remains a protest from below as the power elite side with and fund Israel. What has allowed each of these millions of people to figure out the truth? Some mixture of character and common sense.

You write about your experience helping women cross borders to get abortions in Europe in 1979, and you compare this to the United States now, after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. When you say that “abortion is a collective experience,” I think of this activism as well as your societal message, can you talk about that?

Well, I have come to understand how women were hung out to dry by the rhetoric of the confessional activist trope around abortion, established in France by Simone de Beauvoir and others. In that era it was shocking and brave for women to acknowledge that they had had an illegal abortion — it showed what a hidden part of women’s lives this was. However, there is a wide range of people whose lives are improved by every abortion — not just the woman — there is the man, her parents, her co-workers and community, and most importantly her other children. This shows us that abortion is actually a collective experience that benefits across the society.

When you got back from France, you met an activist named Wilmette Brown, a Black lesbian from New Jersey who worked with the English Collective of Prostitutes. You write that her organizing was like a strategic form of performance art, what did you learn from this?

Wilmette, a former Black Panther and out lesbian, was part of a movement that emerged in the U.S. in the early 1980s, Wages for Housework. Her goal was to get money for women. And in this chapter I share her ingenious method for helping sex workers — at that time called “prostitutes” — to raise their prices [by saying on TV that “prostitutes would be raising their prices for the Democratic Convention”]. It was a brilliant low-effort move and one I found very inspiring.

The section of the book on Jean Genet in Palestine is fascinating — Genet is well known as an author, and an avowed homosexual, thief and convict, but not as well-known as a Nazi fetishist, French colonial soldier, antisemite and advocate for the Black Panthers and Palestinian liberation. Your point here is not to condemn his contradictions, but to say that solidarity is still important even if conflicted, hypocritical, or dependent on supremacy. What are the limitations of this kind of solidarity, and what are the possibilities?

What I learned from working on that piece is that the demand for a pure, clean motive is counterproductive. We are all led to solidarity by a complicated array of emotional, political, material and coincidental experiences. What really matters in the end is what we conclude from all these influences and that we act and that our actions are — to some degree — effective, without having to be perfect.

Woven throughout this book is a critique of the culture industry. You write that the “US entertainment industry is one of the last places a person can find solidarity.” What would solidarity look like in this industry, and what would this change?

Good question. From my own experiences with commercial theater, publishing, film, television — the culture of money is quickly corrupting, even on tiny theatrical budgets or ridiculously large TV budgets. People in the industries are constantly working on projects that are stupid, repetitive, destructive and boring — despite the potential of the art forms themselves. And they get used to it. So, because in that world familiarity equals quality, most of them get distorted values from constant exposure to worthless projects, especially successful ones.

In not-for-profit publishing I do see a lot more solidarity than in, let’s say television, where actually being a visionary writer — “good means makes money,” one person explained to me — usually means you are doomed.

I know that I have, for decades, line-edited other people’s novels and nonfiction books — and sent them to the people and places that can help them advance to the best of my ability. It was very shocking to experience that when you send scripts to “friends” you have to follow up five times to hear back from them and then there is no specificity and no real concrete help. When nothing is at stake except a career, people are just more shallow, narcissistic and territorial.

Toward the end of the book, you include a conversation between you and trans author, historian and artist Morgan Page about responses to your eulogy for trans blogger Bryn Kelly, a close friend of both of you who killed herself in 2016. This conversation, which includes questions from the audience, changes the book because a different kind of emotion comes through. It feels like in some ways this actualizes the type of solidarity you invoke in the book — was this your intent?

I hope so.

You write that Kelly’s death was not a failure of community, since she had so much support, and yet this did not save her. What does this say about solidarity?

Kelly’s problems were structural — she suffered from poverty, addiction and the stigma of being HIV+, even though she was brilliant — and also a wonderful though multifaceted person. She just missed the trans revolution and commodification, and, had she lived, she would have accessed it, I am sure. Solidarity can’t fix social context, although it can mediate it, and it can transform it in the long term. I think that alcohol played a role in her death as well, and that is something that solidarity can be defeated by.

When, in the audience, someone asks about the difference between self-care and collective care, you say that you haven’t gotten to the self-care part yet. Is this a stance of resistance, or a statement about living through crisis?

I am old-school and some buzz words never worked for me.