Complaint!

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In the first chapter of the first section, Ahmed notes that some words already carry a complaint; ‘all you have to do is use a word like race and you will be heard as complaining’ (65). Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unreasonable’ (17) I have also heard, by professors interpreting my own complaints. In the next section, ‘The Immanence of Complaint’, we see how ‘institutional blinds’ are lifted when complaints make violence visible; yet, acts of violence are also justified by what Ahmed calls ‘theoretical justifications’ (133). These theoretical considerations are themselves violent (134; read, too, an example of a Title IX case at Harvard University, where theoretical assumptions are harmful). Or, when discourse is contested, professors will hurl ‘you can’t handle criticism’ (126), which I also hear quite often, a phrase that requires a lot of elaboration in situations involving power. You can be kept out by what you find out when you get in. And yet consider how diversity is often figured as an open door, turned into a tagline; tag on, tag along; minorities welcome, come in, come in! Just because they welcome you, it does not mean they expect you to turn up. Remember the post-box that became a nest? There could be another sign on the post-box: “birds welcome.” This “nonreproductive labour” can feel like nothing is happening, but at the very least is “a way of not doing nothing” (165, her italics) and thus, for a white woman, could perhaps be approached as a kind of dis-inheritance – passed on not with lube so much as Sara Ahmed’s “wary hope”, “close to the ground, even below the ground, slow, low, below; a hope born from what is worn” (289) – both drawing on and nurturing a “transgenerational intimacy” offered by the very act of complaining. Indeed for Sara Ahmed, Complaint!/complaint is ultimately about this kind of “slow inheritance” – the wary, collective, queer (“coming out all over the place”, 291), unknown yet inevitable impact of our efforts to stop institutional violence. Even complaints that assume at some point the form of a formal complaint begin long before the use of a procedure. An opportunity can be figured as a window. A window of opportunity is the time you have when you can do something, when something is possible. When that window closes, a possibility is no longer available. Windows, like doors, are passages; they can be opened and closed, although windows are not usually intended for the passage of persons. The word window comes from a combination of wind and eye and has been compared to the old Frisian word andern, literally meaning ‘breath-door’, a window as a hole that allows the passage of air as well as light and sound. Windows enable the circulation of fresh air; a breath-door is how a room breathes, as well as how we can breathe more easily when we are inside a room.

You have to think about the impact of doing this. Because having yet another complaint, it means that you give more credibility to the one who comes after you. When you talk about haunting you are talking about the size of the graveyard. And I think this is important. Because when you have one tombstone, one lonely little ghost, it doesn’t actually have any effect; you can have a nice cute little cemetery outside your window, but when you start having a massive one, common graveyards and so on, it becomes something else; it becomes much harder to manage.

Ahmed does this by offering a ‘feminist ear’, a method she’s introduced in Living a Feminist Life (3): ‘to acquire a feminist ear is to become attuned to the sharpness of such words, how they point, to whom they point. To be heard as complaining is often attuned to sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, stories too’ (17). More specifically, Ahmed is observing complaints as testimony (13) and as ‘formal allegation’ (4) in the space of the university that, as I note in my own fragments and experiences, offers informal procedures that mimic legal language and formalities to avoid any real accountability. 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. Complaint! offers catharsis, collectivity, and care. It is an archive of complaint, it is a radical call to action, and it is a feminist record. It is also beautifully written, deeply painful, and absolutely necessary at this very moment.” — Catherine Oliver, Gender, Place & Culture

There’s often a kind of onomatopoeia at work in the language you use to describe the circuitous processes people have to go through to complain. In both Complaint! and On Being Included, you sometimes seem to mimic, stylistically, that sense of claustrophobia. Your sentences can feel like a closed loop, in which the same phrases keep iterating—but then they shift such that a new possibility is illuminated. In other words, they model a way out. I wonder if your prose style has shifted as your ideas have been taken up—through Feminist Killjoys and your recent books—by readers outside academia? The sound of an alarm bell announces a danger in the external world even if you hear the sound inside your own head. We don’t always take heed of what we hear. She starts questioning herself rather than his behaviour. She tells herself off; she gives herself a talking to. In questioning herself, she also exercises violent stereotypes of feminists as feminazis even though she identifies as a feminist. External judgements can be given voice as internal doubt. But she keeps noticing it, that the syllabus is occupied; how it is occupied: “he left any thinker who wasn’t a white man essentially until the end of the course.” He introduces a woman thinker as “not a very sophisticated thinker.” She comes to realise that her first impression that something was wrong was right: “and then I was like, no, no, no, no, things are wrong not just in terms of gender, things are desperately wrong with the way he is teaching full-stop.” When she realises, she was right to hear that something was wrong; those no’s come out. I think of all of those no’s, no, no, no, no, the sound of an increasing confidence in her own judgement. It may be that the calculus is about to shift in favour of more punitive outcomes. But it’s unlikely to do so in a way that is good news for women or feminists – or anyone else, for that matter, who has reason to complain. Government policy on higher education has two mutually reinforcing strands. The first is the ongoing effort to encourage students to assert their ‘consumer rights’ against universities and academics deemed to be failing to provide ‘value for money’. This has been facilitated by the creation of the Office for Students (chaired by a Tory peer). Concern for the interests of students is a thin cover for the advancement of a marketising agenda: the subjection of higher education – like the health sector and so much else – to the competitive logic of the market, with the failure of some individuals and institutions (‘market exit’) an essential part of the process.

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An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. 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).

Are there other people who have influenced you as you made that transition, loosening your attachment to the genre of academic writing?Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! is an antidote to apathy. The book focuses on the tangle of testimonies Ahmed gleaned over a twenty-month period from ‘forty students, academics, researchers and administrators who had been involved in some way in a formal complaint process’. Using these interviews, Ahmed offers readers a slow and careful ‘phenomenology of the institution’: an account of how and why the same place, the same moment, the same door, can feel impossibly narrow, closed off or oppressive to one person, but to another feel like nothing at all. I am fascinated, as is Ahmed, by this gap, which causes some of us inside the university to wave, while others drown. Sara Ahmed was born in Britain in 1969 to a Pakistani father and an English mother. Soon after, the family moved to Australia, where Ahmed grew up before returning to the UK to complete her doctorate. She is the author of eleven works of nonfiction, the earliest of which are totems of feminist postmodernism, affect theory, and queer phenomenology. Her most celebrated contribution has been the figure of the Feminist Killjoy, who shares a name with Ahmed’s popular blog, which she began writing alongside her 2017 work, Living a Feminist Life . “When you expose a problem,” she writes in that book, “you pose a problem.” Being a Feminist Killjoy is a matter of identification; it is also, as Ahmed describes on the blog, what she does and how she thinks, “my philosophy and my politics.” In Complaint! , Ahmed collects oral and written testimony from dozens of people who have experienced sexual abuse, racist harassment, or bullying within universities, and have chosen either to go through the institutions’ formal grievance procedures or to challenge those procedures altogether. Though all her interlocutors work in academia, I felt throughout that I could be reading about any other scene from institutional life. The stories Ahmed tells will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to seek redress (or merely recognition) from an institution trained against them. Over and over, complaints are either discouraged before they’re made, or welcomed in the abstract but deemed not credible in practice. Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining. They are both diminished and demonized. On the one hand, their concerns are deemed inconsequential—they’re trying to make something out of nothing—and on the other, they’re presented as malicious and threatening, as if they have the power to singlehandedly take the whole institution down. I have had so many dreams of bleeding lately. Seeing my blood, my ancestors all over my white, female body. If I felt near dead when starting Complaint!, I felt near the dead after finishing it. As Sara Ahmed points out, graveyards are actually rather lively, full of not-so-lonely little ghosts, of those who have come before, complained before. Indeed, she considers Complaint! an “unburial”: