Complaint!

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It was like: note this it. A complaint as something you are doing can acquire exteriority, becoming a thing in the world; scratching away; a little bird, all your energy going into an activity that matters so much to what you can do, who you can be, but barely seems to leave a trace; the more you try, the smaller it becomes, you become, smaller; smaller still. I think of those birds scratching away and, I think of diversity work, described to me by a practitioner as a “banging your head on the wall job.” When the wall keeps its place, it is you that ends up sore. And what happens to the wall? All you seem to have done is scratch the surface. I think what she wanted to do was to maintain her position as the director, and I was supposed to be some pleb; you know what I mean, she had to be the boss, and I had to be the servant type of thing, that was how her particular version of white supremacy worked, so not just belittling my academic credentials and academic capabilities but also belittling me in front of the students; belittling me in front of administrators. Ahmed, Sara (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822363040. OCLC 994735865. Ahmed presents a careful and sophisticated analysis of power and its abuses in universities." — Baharak Yousefi, College & Research Libraries

Complaint! - Sara Ahmed - Google Books Complaint! - Sara Ahmed - Google Books

Complaints as tools to redress bullying and harassment can be turned into tools to bully and to harass. This will not be surprising to feminist audiences. We are familiar with how the tools introduced to redress power relations can be used by those who benefit from power relations. I noted earlier how formal complaints can bring with them other more affective and embodied senses of complaint. Formal complaints can end up separated or detached from those who have a complaint to make because of what they experience. This is why it is so important not to tell the story of complaint as a story of what happens to formal complaints; formal complaints can be redirected toward those who try to challenge abuses of power, those who desire or require a modification of an existing arrangement. The complainer becomes a complaint magnet, to become a complainer is to attract complaints, to receive them as well as make them, to receive them because you make them. If you use the word race for instance you might be heard as complaining but you also more likely to be complained about. The magnetism of the figure of the complainer has much to teach us about the direction of violence. Violence is redirected toward those who identify violence and that redirection can be achieved through the very techniques we introduce to challenge the direction of violence. I hear you, Sara Ahmed; I am trying to hear these ghosts. To feel these ghosts, learn from them, push with them. Yet I also hear and feel the wearing, tearing, moaning, groaning, pushing of Jane “Grannie” Glasgow in 1842, giving birth to my great-great-grandfather. One of the wives of Irish Presbyterian missionaries based in Gujarat, we are told she had a “prolonged and difficult labour” after refusing to let an Indian midwife turn her breech baby, to touch her. As a paralegal form that has gone underappreciated in academic literature, the sustained treatment of “the complaint” is an accomplishment of its own. Through Ahmed’s treatment, complaints are positioned as a unique focal point of the study of institutions, with distinctive methodological and conceptual implications. As Ahmed sees it, the formal pathway of complaints places the complainer in a position of direct observation of the organization’s mundane, routinized, and institutionalized form of power. The emphasis on the complainer’s experiences enables Ahmed to appreciate the affective dimensions of the formal and informal institutional mechanisms that work in tandem with one another as complaints are processed by the system. Ahmed does not take for granted the fact that “making a complaint is never completed by a single action” (p. 5). It is significant that the complaints process is lengthy and often “exhausting, especially given that what you complain about is already exhausting and the institutional environment that processes the complaint often requires considerable tactical facility to navigate it and weather its challenges” (p. 5). Power is experienced by the complainer, whose affinity with the complaint puts them in the path of more resistance.There was a lot of media coverage of your departure from academia, but I’m curious to know more about your early relationship to it. What promise did the university hold for you as a young person? Reward’, Sara Ahmed tells us, comes from warder, “to guard” (100). In white institutions, she continues, everyone gets rewarded for whiteness, for watching what we (or others) say, for becoming agents of surveillance, reproducing the “institutional legacy”. While she writes of this poisoned promise as necessary for POC safety or survival, as laboured and precarious, for me as a white woman it feels seductively available – speedy, easy, pleasant. There’s that lube again, oiling white bodies, oiling colonial cogs. A complaint can be the effort to be accommodated. An academic describes how she has to keep pointing out that rooms are inaccessible because they keep booking rooms that are inaccessible: “I worry about drawing attention to myself. But this is what happens when you hire a person in a wheelchair. There have been major access issues at the university.” She spoke of “the drain, the exhaustion, the sense of why should I have to be the one who speaks out.” You have to speak out because others do not; and because you speak out others can justify their own silence; they hear you, so it becomes about you, “major access issues” become your issues. Ahmed begins Complaint! by emphasising how ‘complaints are not heard or how we are not heard when we are heard as complaining’ (3). Those who follow Ahmed’s work will be well aware that she traces the genealogy of words – verbs, nouns, as subjects or as objects – and how their meanings may change depending on their uses. Complaining as a speech act may have negative connotations, but Ahmed draws our attention to complaint as a form of feminist pedagogy. One thing I am learning through complaint/ Complaint! is that this ‘innocent’ reproduction may not just be despite my (ancestors’) intentions – our supposed godliness, goodness – but also because of them. I thought of these ancestors when I thought of the well-meaning senior, white, female, feminist colleague (a figure that the Complaint! collective is very familiar with) advising me to “smile more” after my attempts to raise the coloniality of the curriculum at a staff meeting. And I thought of this advice, when I read Sara Ahmed’s account of a female student who – after escaping the office of a male staff member when he sexually assaulted her – was asked by senior management to sit down with him and have a cup of tea.

Complaint! - De Gruyter Complaint! - De Gruyter

is … close to the what of complaint. A complaint has much to teach us about where, about where we are dwelling. To dwell can mean to live in a particular place or in a particular way. To dwell can also mean to linger on something or to delay. Given that complaints are understood as negative, to complain is to dwell on something negative. Perhaps we can think of complaint as trying to change how people reside somewhere, which requires an act of dwelling on the problems with or in that residence. From this, we learn: trying to change a dwelling is given the quality of being negative or even destructive, to complain as a negative dwelling. Feminist Killjoy' Sara Ahmed to be appointed new honorary doctor at Malmö University | Malmö University".

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Ahmed's blog, "feministkilljoys", was written at the same time as "Living a Feminist Life" (2017). [41] As the title suggests, Ahmed explores feminist theory, and what it means on our everyday lives. One way this manifests is in diversity work, something to which she dedicated a third of the book. She also spends much of the book exploring the feminist killjoy, the feminist in action who takes up the call in their everyday life. [42] In 2020, Duke University Press confirmed that Living a Feminist Life was their best-selling book of the previous decade. [43] What's the Use? On the Uses of Use [ edit ] The university responded in the mode of damage limitation, treating information as a mess. There is hope here: they cannot mop up all of our mess. A leak can be a lead. By becoming a leak, I became easier to find; people came to me with their complaints. That we find each other through complaint is a finding. Posting that letter was how I became part of a collective, a complaint collective; we are assembled before you.

Complaint! A Book Launch and a Complaint Collective - Sara Ahmed Complaint! A Book Launch and a Complaint Collective - Sara Ahmed

The first three sections of Complaint! follow the institutional life of a formal complaint: how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped. 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). Complaints follow a particular procedural pathway, and they are filed and placed in a record, a record that is not only indicative of what happens to a person but also what happens in institutions (38) – or what can be considered the ‘phenomenology of the institution’ (41). 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). Talk about the prevalence of sexual violence provokes a degree of scepticism: it can’t be that common – or else ‘it’ is not the real thing (not ‘rape-rape’, in Whoopi Goldberg’s phrase). The impulse to doubt, diminish or deny isn’t limited to incorrigible misogynists or rape apologists. High levels of public fear about paedophilia and ‘stranger danger’ notwithstanding, most people find it difficult to believe that sexual abuse is as widespread as the evidence suggests (the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse estimates its incidence in the UK at around 15 per cent for girls and 5 per cent for boys). That something could be at once so synonymous with depravity and so common casts a statistical suspicion on neighbours, friends and family. Yet there is even more to this explicitly feminist pedagogy. Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! collective welcomes the reader in, reminding us that “we are not alone” (278). That doorways are populated, haunted. Even if we feel like a “lonely little ghost” (308). Even if Complaint! was “hard to read” (277). Complaint as feminist pedagogy: what you are told you need to do to progress further and faster in the system is what reproduces the system.

About feministkilljoys

Feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, affect theory If complaint collectives are formed to keep a complaint going, complaint collectives can keep us going” (Sara Ahmed)