Complaint!

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Closing a door can sometimes be a survival strategy; she closes the door to the institution by withdrawing herself, her commitments, from it. She still does her work; she still teaches her students. She uses the door to shut out what she can, who she can. She takes herself off the door; she depersonalises it. And she pulls down the blinds and she pulls on a mask, the mask of her people, connecting her fight to the battles that came before, because, quite frankly, for her, this is a war. Sara Ahmed always has her finger on the pulse of the times as she assists us to explore the deeper meanings and philosophical nuances of quotidian concepts and practices. Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, Complaint! is precisely the text we need at this moment as we seek to understand and transform the institutional structures promoting racism and heteropatriarchy.” — Angela Y. Davis An occupation that can look like ‘conviviality’ (Tate 2017, as cited on 159), politeness (162), diversity (162), collegiality (201), like not noticing (p. 201), like saying – even feeling – that there is nothing you can do (248). An occupation that can be disquietingly quiet. Indeed Sara Ahmed notes how words like “odd, bizarre, weird, strange and disorienting” (44) came up repeatedly in the Complaint!collective when people described the institutional violence they experienced. She understands this repetition through her own earlier concept of “non-performativity” – those institutional speech acts that do not do what they say, creating a “gap between appearance and experience” (41), a gap that can be excruciating (56), cruel (57). Complaint! is teaching me about (how complaint is teaching me about) whiteness, although I wonder if this is not just any kind of whiteness. The majority of testimonies assembled by Sara Ahmed were from UK universities; the others were mainly from ex-British colonies. Could it be that they document a particular kind of whiteness, an (exported) whiteness of the metropole, of settler colonialism? There is also the phenomenon known as lip service. As one of Ahmed’s interviewees says, a complaint may be met with nods and promises only for nothing to happen: ‘He seemed to take it on board; he was listening; he was nodding. Ten days later I still had not heard anything. A space of limbo opened up.’ The act of nodding, Ahmed writes, can be ‘non-performative’, her term for ‘institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name’. (The italics are Ahmed’s.) But as with strategic inefficiency, non-performative acts do perform a function, just not the one they suggest. Organisations often respond to criticism ‘by pointing to their own policies as if having a policy against something is evidence it does not exist’. And if showing off an existing policy won’t cut it, you can always announce a new one: ‘Creating a new policy to deal with a problem becomes another way of avoiding that problem.’

I’m working on The Feminist Killjoy Handbook right now, in which I have a chapter about the feminist killjoy as a poet. I use a very simple expression, “to let loose.” To let loose is to express yourself. It can even be about losing your temper. But it can also just mean to loosen one’s hold. Lauren Berlant taught me a lot about loosening a hold on things. They had an incredible way of creating room in the description of an attachment to something, which I think is really hard to do. And my aunt, Gulzar Bano, who is a feminist poet, taught me something, too. She wrote poems that were angry, on one level, but also very, very loving. When I think about both Gulzar and Lauren, I think about how the tightness or narrowness of words—of pronouns, say—can be experienced as giving you no room. You have to experiment with combination. There’s a connection between moving words around and opening lives up. Practically everyone I know who earns their living within an institutional setting has considered leaving it. Most don’t. The idea of escape becomes difficult to separate from the hardships it might bring—reduced access to funds, community, and so on. But it seems as though your resignation acted as one of those possibilities for being otherwise. You’ve written that it enabled you to find a role that institutional life had inhibited, to act for others as a “feminist ear.” Could say more about that, the communities or modes of communicating that opened themselves up to you once you made your exit?This is audacious but persuasive critique, which accrues its power by stealth. Complaint! is dense with insight, but admirably lucid." — Zora Simic, Australian Book Review In her powerful new book . . . 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. Here, she asks readers to think about some inescapable questions: What happens when complaints are pushed under the rug? How is complaint radical feminism? And, how can we learn about power from those who choose to fight against the powerful?" — Rebecca Schneid, Indy Week 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).

To use the Lordeian formulation, the effort to rebuild the master’s house so that it can accommodate those for whom it was not intended cannot be understood purely as a reformist project. It is, potentially, revolutionary. Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. It’s the sociability of complaint that leads it in a direction similar to a protest. You find your co-complainers, the people who get it, who have been there, your comrades. Some people cannot survive these institutions. Some people do not survive them. It is a fundamentally life-affirming task to build institutions that are not dependent on the diminishment of the life-capacities of others. Are there other people who have influenced you as you made that transition, loosening your attachment to the genre of academic writing? Even complaints that assume at some point the form of a formal complaint begin long before the use of a procedure. There is a genealogy of experience, a genealogy of consciousness in my body that is now at this stage traumatised beyond the capacity to go to the university. There’s a legacy, a genealogy and I haven’t really opened that door too widely as I have been so focused on my experience in the last 7 years. 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.

The front cover of this book from the patron saint of self-professed feminist killjoys, Sara Ahmed, features two doors by Rachel Whiteread. Those familiar with Whiteread’s work, though, will soon realise that they are and are not doors; they’re the casts or impressions of two doors. This presence-via-absence is a hallmark of the artist, whose playfulness around perspective and phenomenology is what fans of Ahmed’s writing will instantly recognise in Complaint!. By chance, a colleague in the management school, Elaine Swan, had gotten funding to do research on diversity in further education. 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. It was pragmatic, really, but then once I began the research, it changed everything. I ended up being involved with this group that was writing a race equality policy. Writing that policy was my first hard institutional lesson. We brought what I thought of as a critical language into it, but the university was able to use the policy—which was about articulating racism in the institution—as evidence of how good it was at race equality. What I learned from that was how easily we can end up being interpellated. It’s not only that there’s a gap between statements about inclusivity and diversity and what actually happens. It’s also that we end up working to create the appearance of what isn’t the case. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2016. “ Outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality.” Accessed 17 th Jan, 2022.