raft

Sarah Schulman is best known for her novels and plays, but also writes provocative non-fiction. I've just read the first chapter of her book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, and as usual, she has opened up another way of looking at things for me.
She talks about the power of shunning - and it's interesting to put it that way - "the power of shunning" underscores that the power goes to the one who shuns. You can say "the power of love" and "the power of being loved" and both ways power is endowed upon the receiver. In the case of shunning, the power is always on the side of the one who shuns and subtracted from their object.
This, I think, is one reason she puts a great emphasis on third parties taking responsibility for weighing in with the shunned and against the shunning. This goes somewhat against the American grain - why, shouldn't any person be able to stand up and adequately supply her own defense? Well, no. It's exhausting, it can wear you out and kill you, and even if successful, it only helps a few and not many. Schulman believes in the moral responsibility of the crowd, and how it manifests through the actions of individuals. (And I have been seeing more and more clearly that the great - maybe I should say successful - exhorters to individualism and selfishness in our age always seem to have institutional support.)
One particular aspect of shunning that she points out is within isolated and embattled groups, esp gay community and institutions. It can gain you favor with the powerful, to shun in common; it can create your own safer-feeling in-group; you may feel yourself elevated by pushing another down (crabs in a bucket).
I see another example of this going on. The organizers of Toronto's gay pride march have "have forbidden the activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) from marching in the parade under that name." As Sarah has pointed out (I paraphrase), hasn't the gay community experienced enough of cutting people off? More directly, isn't this a case of exerting power through shunning?
Now I read that the Madrid gay pride march organizers are forbidding an Israeli group from marching because the mayor of their home town, Tel Aviv, has not apologized for the raid on the flotilla to break the Gaza blockade.
Let the political terms cancel each other out, and you're left with the power of exclusion. So seductive. Esp, it seems, to those who have been at the mercy of others (much as we may wish that this would increase empathy, not decrease it). It may be part of what keeps the Palestinians and the Israelis at an impasse, both of them having been shunned alternately or simultaneously by their neighbors.

(Disclosure: Sarah and I are neighbors, acquaintances, and somewhere in the vicinity of friendship. I liked her books before I discovered she lived down the block.)