Complaint!

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Constantly referencing herself and previous chapters, repeating and rephrasing -all in striking language but still, 100 pages less and it would be a 5/5. A lot of great insights into the process of complaint and also the subtleties of the world that turn innocuous things into complaints. For a while, I had been doing work on race and strangers—who gets seen as a body out of place within neighborhoods—but eventually I turned my attention to the university itself. 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.

Most of the charges here are broad and general, but anyone who has worked in higher education will recognize much of what Ahmed brings to light. 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. I became interested in “the table” in Husserl’s philosophy, which was only a passing reference for him. 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. Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining.The book isn’t an easy casual read, not necessarily because of the subject, but because of her repetitiveness that grates you to death. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain.

A complaint might be the start of something – so much happens after a complaint is lodged, because it has been lodged – but it is never the starting point’ (20). I could hear how these students were being talked about by others in the institution, I could hear how complainers were pathologized, accused of moaning about minor matters, and of being unwilling to let the institution recover from—that is, cover over—the problems they were trying to address. Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unreasonable’ (17) I have also heard, by professors interpreting my own complaints. Ahmed likens complaints to biographies that tell a particular life story, reminding us that data is as experiential as it is theoretical (18): ‘The term complaint biography helps us to think of the life of a complaint in relation to the life of a person or a group of people […] To think of a complaint biography is to recognize that a complaint, in being lodged somewhere, starts somewhere else. Ahmed is brilliant, but her repetitive writing style (which I believe was a thought-out choice) grated on me eventually, despite working for me initially.Universities will use the language of confidentiality—the need to protect the identities of those who make complaints—to justify that containment, and there is some truth to that. A lot of the really important work—in Black studies, in gender studies, in women’s studies—comes out of a battle with institutions for something. In tandem with On Being Included , her 2012 study of diversity initiatives, it mounts a compelling case against the long-term viability of institutional life as it’s currently configured. I would even argue more than average, but certainly in a unique way that very few other institutions mirror. follow the institutional life of a formal complaint: how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped.

I’m working on The Feminist Killjoy Handbook right now, in which I have a chapter about the feminist killjoy as a poet. Great book with deep insight into the failure of the complaints procedure within academia, on purpose, to work for those who make complaints, rather for the institution itself. Ahmed has such a way of turning theory into poetry in a way where every sentence resonates like hitting a drum. It’s not only that there’s a gap between statements about inclusivity and diversity and what actually happens.We use cookies on this site to understand how you use our content, and to give you the best browsing experience. She, like many others, has written that we can organise our worlds in other ways, that we can dismantle existing structures and build better alternative futures, noting wryly that a global pandemic shouldn’t have been the reason for this lesson to be learned (xi). 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. 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. You’ve written that it enabled you to find a role that institutional life had inhibited, to act for others as a “feminist ear.

I painted a lot of macabre, expressionist paintings, and I got into art school, but my father said it wouldn’t lead to a proper career, so I wasn’t allowed to go.To negate is to trigger an institution into protecting the status quo through risk-adverse processes that are experienced as violent and exhaustive. While the universities are rendered as safe spaces for many, the institutions abound with experiences of sexual assault, bullying, and many other forms of antagonisms. The book will appeal to socio-legal scholars interested in the phenomenology of organizations and institutions, especially academia.