Complaint!

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Harrison, Guy (2021). On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster. U of Nebraska Press. p.111. ISBN 978-1-4962-2742-3. Ahmed's volume has become a foundational text in an emerging field in cultural studies known as affect— with a sound similar to that in the word acting—which seeks to investigate the way emotions impact individuals, institutions, and society at large. Sara Ahmed: "Once We Find Each Other, So Much Else Becomes Possible" | Literary Hub". lithub.com. 10 April 2017 . Retrieved 29 March 2018. Published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press. [26] Ahmed's main focus in this book revolves around the question "is or should feminism be modern or postmodern?" She reflects on what she feels postmodernism is doing to the world in different contexts. [27] Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality [ edit ] It is a mess, a tangle, if you get in, you can’t work out how to get out; you end up with so many dead ends, so many crossed wires. And despite all of that, all that work, nothing seems to shift. 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.’

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed Can’t Complain | Eda Gunaydin on Complaint! by Sara Ahmed

Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy,” Lecture presented by Sara Ahmed, May 31st, 2021, Permanent Ordinary Seminar, Bilbao. Ahmed was based at the Institute for Women's Studies at Lancaster University from 1994 to 2004, and is one of its former directors. [8] She was appointed to the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2004, and was the inaugural director of its Centre for Feminist Research, which was set up 'to consolidate Goldsmiths' feminist histories and to help shape feminist futures at Goldsmiths.' [9] In spring 2009 Ahmed was the Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women's Studies at Rutgers University [10] and in Lent 2013 she was the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Professor in Gender Studies at Cambridge University, where she conducted research on "Willful Women: Feminism and a History of Will". [11] In 2015 she was the keynote speaker at the National Women's Studies Association annual conference. [12] In 2016 Ahmed resigned from her post at Goldsmiths in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff there. [13] She has indicated that she will continue her work as an independent scholar. [14] She blogs at feministkilljoys, a project she continues to update. [15] The blog is a companion to her book Living a Feminist Life (2017) that enables her to reach people; posts become chapters and the book becomes blogging material. The term "feminist killjoy" "became a communication device, a way of reaching people who recognized in her something of their own experience." [16] Theories [ edit ] Intersectionality [ edit ] 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. And so, we learn: occupation and dispossession are achieved by the same materials. Another story, more materials. A Masters student begins her new programme with high hopes and expectations. And then “it started.”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? It might take a collective effort to get the letters out. A disabled student was not getting anywhere with her complaint about the failure of the university to make reasonable accommodations. And then a file suddenly appears: “a load of documents turned up on the student’s union fax machine and we don’t know where they came from, they were historical documents about students who had to leave.” The documents including a hand written letter to a human rights charity by a former student who had cancer, and who was trying to get the university to let her finish her degree part-time. She speculates that a secretary was doing “their own little bit of direct action,” releasing those documents as a way of giving support to her complaint that she was not supposed to give. It is not surprising that a secretary can become a saboteur; secretary derives from secrets, the secretary is a keeper of secrets, she knows that there are secret files, where they are, she knows how to release them. I thank about the student who wrote that letter. We can’t know, we won’t know what happened to her. But we can make her letter matter. If the student I spoke to hadn’t made her complaint, that letter would have stayed put; dusty, buried. We can meet in an action without meeting in person. 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, Sara (3 February 2017). "Out and About". Feminist Killjoys. wordpress.org . Retrieved 16 March 2017.

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Ahmed, Sara (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press. p.212. ISBN 9780822363040. OCLC 946461715. Complaint as feminist pedagogy: the system is working by stopping those who are trying to stop the system from working.

Ahmed, Sara, 1969-". Library of Congress . Retrieved 16 January 2015. data sheet (Ahmed, Sara; b. 08-30-69)

Duke University Press - Complaint!

And so, a lot of the instances of vandalism and sabotage are about what you have to do to get the story out. The institution has ways of handling these histories of violence to make them disappear, just like the family can contain the violence that’s happened inside it as a skeleton in the closet. A lot of the work of complaint is releasing the story of that violence into a wider world and seeing what happens to it. In Complaint! , Sara Ahmed follows the institutional life of complaints within the university, exploring how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped, thereby reproducing systems of whiteness, violence and silencing. Proposing complaint as a feminist pedagogy and a form of collective and social action, Ahmed’s work should provoke change to a resistant institution and culture, writes Anna Nguyen . 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. Ahmed often focuses on the subject of orientation and being orientated in space, especially in relationship to sexual orientation. In her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others, Ahmed states that orientation refers to the objects and others that we turn to face as well as the space that we inhabit, and how it is that we inhabit that space. Ahmed brings together queer phenomenology as a way of conveying that orientation is situated in the lived experience. [32] The Promise of Happiness [ edit ] Even complaints that assume at some point the form of a formal complaint begin long before the use of a procedure.The second strand is the escalating ‘war on woke’. The government is actively encouraging and facilitating litigation against universities under the aegis of ‘free speech’: anyone who feels their freedom has been infringed – by not being invited to give a talk, for example, or having students protest against their giving one – will soon be empowered to sue universities. The Office for Students will have powers to fine institutions for such breaches (as determined by a Conservative-appointed ‘Free Speech Champion’). The white paper proposing these changes claims that ‘conservative’ students may feel uncomfortable expressing their political views in class. In this context, it isn’t hard to foresee an increasing number of complaints against left-wing lecturers for failing to provide ‘balance’ (complementing the false panic about political ‘bias’ and ‘indoctrination’ in schools) or for ‘discriminating’ against right-wing students. This toxic brew of marketisation-plus-culture-war can be expected to exacerbate the pre-existing tendency, noticed only in passing by Ahmed, whereby those who teach in ways or on matters deemed ‘too political’ (gender and race, Palestine etc) are at risk of attracting complaint: ‘You are not only heard as complaining; you are likely to have complaints made about you.’ W]hiteness can be just as occupying of issues or spaces when they are designated decolonial” (158). Ahmed, Sara (2012). On being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822395324. OCLC 782909885.