Complaint!

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I was so compelled by that story of the students in the anonymous collective, how once they recognized that their formal complaints against a particular professor would go unaddressed, they decided to inscribe all the library copies of his books with an acknowledgement that the author had been accused of sexual abuse.

This was a fascinating and well-written book on the pedagogy of the oppressed in the high towers of academia; how studying queer or feminist theory does not guarantee institutions that are free of such notions; that exploitative department heads exist; that institutions are more offended by the thought of there being problems than those problems themselves; of the failures of bureauracy; of non performative actions; and of complaints that go round and round but can open doors once in a blue moon (? A lot of the really important work—in Black studies, in gender studies, in women’s studies—comes out of a battle with institutions for something.This book explores those ideas to a profound depth and if you think that sounds interesting id recommend this book to you. I could hear how these students were being talked about by others in the institution, I could hear how complainers were pathologized, accused of moaning about minor matters, and of being unwilling to let the institution recover from—that is, cover over—the problems they were trying to address.

by emphasising how ‘complaints are not heard or how we are not heard when we are heard as complaining’ (3). The real nuance and sophistication of this book, written with such emotional and intellectual insight, the means by which Ahmed identifies strategies of institutional power in relation to power in relation to harassment and abuse is revelatory, thorny, painful, and very, very necessary.Lancaster was an incredibly white institution, and I’d already been aware of that, obviously, as one of the very few academics of color employed there. She asked if I wanted to work on the project with her, and I said yes, primarily because it was a way of bringing money into the Institute. She, like many others, has written that we can organise our worlds in other ways, that we can dismantle existing structures and build better alternative futures, noting wryly that a global pandemic shouldn’t have been the reason for this lesson to be learned (xi). before resigning, but doing so allowed the work to find new life, traveling beyond the closed doors and brick walls of the university, into the wide-open field of public discourse.

Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. Sara Ahmed, again, names what has needed to be named for so long: " To complain is to learn about power, and you cannot go back to who you were before you made the complaint. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do.In Part One, ‘Institutional Mechanics’, Ahmed analyses the language, policies and procedures as well as other ‘nonperformatives’ (see also Judith Butler, 1993): institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name (30, 80), such as nodding (80). We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience. In her latest contribution to our knowledge, Sara Ahmed gifts us with a book about the phenomenology of complaint and the layered, entangled complexity of how power works institutionally. The mechanics of the institution not only tell us how institutions work by going through long procedural processes, but also how they reproduce these systems of whiteness, violence and silencing (99-100).

And, of course, Ahmed’s work was in constant circulation, which I find both encouraging as much as it raises suspicion. The structure is also a bit garbled, with near constant references to previous and upcoming points in the book that eroded any sense of chronology. And missing all that has given me so many other opportunities to share, to communicate, and to think with people outside of those institutional spaces. It can be incredibly painful to know what happened, to know what you went through, but still you can’t say it, you can’t get it out. Ahmed has such a way of turning theory into poetry in a way where every sentence resonates like hitting a drum.She often uses smart allegory like how figurative speech around doors or our fear of strangers pervades institutional logic.