Complaint!

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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. Creating Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives does not actually include those who remain opposed to and harmed by the neoliberal university. It might be that you’re at an event surrounded by peers, and maybe you signed a confidentiality agreement, or the institution that’s hosting the event is the institution in which the thing happened—there’s a restriction on what you can say about what went on.

Lorna Finlayson · Doors close, backs turn: Why complain

Counterinstitutional work in feminist hands is often housework, with all the drudgery and repetition that that word implies, painstaking work, administrative work, also care work, because if we need to transform institutions to survive them, we still need to survive the institutions we are trying to transform. If you like what you're reading online, why not take advantage of our subscription and get unlimited access to all of Times Higher Education's content? The chapter on Brick Walls is generally applicable… institutions, families – nuclear or extended, communities especially plural ones, etc. The impulse to doubt, diminish or deny isn’t limited to incorrigible misogynists or rape apologists. That something could be at once so synonymous with depravity and so common casts a statistical suspicion on neighbours, friends and family.Ahmed's goal throughout this book was to "spill the container" as willfulness provides a container for perversion. On Twitter, I saw scholars proclaiming the need to purge letter signatories from their citational practices, a statement that I find gestures to an individual response and practice rather than a structural one. These enduring habits of thought may explain why, contrary to popular myth, it is on the whole far from easy to pursue complaints of sexual misconduct.

Sara Ahmed - Wikipedia Sara Ahmed - Wikipedia

It would be naive to think that sexual misconduct is somehow immune from the possibility of vexatious complaint. It wasn’t that I didn’t experience the other side of academia—the narrowing of what counts as knowledge, the ways in which what appears to be an open and inclusive environment can actually be a hostile and difficult one for people who don’t fit. Later this year, I hope to do some informal launch events for the book focusing primarily on discussions with students and academics involved in activist projects at universities. She is the daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother, and she emigrated from England to Adelaide, Australia with her family in the early 1970s. Coincidence or not, I had been labelled “psychotic” by a senior academic for firmly establishing my boundaries and not allowing myself to be seduced by him into being another of his sexual conquests.It kind of changed when I wrote Queer Phenomenology, which in a way is, of all my works, the most located in a philosophical tradition. But the university was only ever partially and exceptionally the space of critical thought that many like to imagine it to have been. 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? But its insights are less often applied to what might be considered ‘quasi-carceral’ systems: disciplinary procedures that have some power to compel and to penalise but which stand outside criminal law. 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).

Sara Ahmed Complaint! Durham: Duke University Press, 2021

She has to keep making the same complaint to different people because they are not speaking to each other. Ahmed’s last sentence is a gesture to a similarly framed sentiment about citations: that they are ‘how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow’ (2017, 15-16). I think of their combined work as counterinstitutional, they teach us how universities work, for whom they work. Do you think that trying to change things at a university by complying with the procedures they’ve laid down is always likely to be a losing game?You’ve written that it enabled you to find a role that institutional life had inhibited, to act for others as a “feminist ear. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. The potent reminder that Ahmed offers is that we are not the ones with the problem, that a number of voices raised up in complaint can help identify that the problem lies elsewhere. If we have to give up so much of our language—and ourselves—to get people to the table, then it might be that the table keeps its place.

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

And now there I am,” and so, she came to see through it, a story she had been willing to go along with about a woman who had complained before. 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. The Office for Students will have powers to fine institutions for such breaches (as determined by a Conservative-appointed ‘Free Speech Champion’). The difference, some would argue, is that universities are capable of reform in a way that prisons and the police are not. She wasn’t sure whether to go through with the complaint because of what she was being told: that to complain would be to compromise her position, her career.Complaining as a speech act may have negative connotations, but Ahmed draws our attention to complaint as a form of feminist pedagogy. Sara Ahmed builds on a series of oral and written testimonies from students and employees who have complained to higher education universities about harassment and inequality. We weren’t sitting around talking about, I don’t know, affect theory—which is not to say it’s not interesting to sit around and talk about affect theory! Here, she asks readers to think about some inescapable questions: What happens when complaints are pushed under the rug? The most obvious is its exclusiveness: while Ahmed has an enthusiastic following, her mode of expression can be off-putting, even to those within academia.