Complaint!

Product Information

I]mmanence implies what we are in, as presence or even the present, but it can also imply what remains, immanence as what carries on from the past, what has not been transcended or what we are not over” (102). 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 . The sound of the book is not just the sound of institutional machinery – that clunk, clunk – but the sound of the effort of coming up, of what we bring when we bring something up; who, too we bring up. The physical effort, you can hear it: the wear and tear, the moans, the groans … We can hear it in our own voices, we can hear it in each other’s voices. We can hear it because we feel it: the sound of how hard we keep having to push. I think of that push as collective, a complaint collective (276).

There are many ways we can be shut out – from institutions, from categories of personhood, from ourselves, even. One woman of colour describes her department as a revolving door: women and minorities enter only to head right out again: whoosh, whoosh. Even complaints that assume at some point the form of a formal complaint begin long before the use of a procedure. References can be doors: how some are given a route through, how others are stopped from progressing. When the door is closed on her complaint, and also on her, she will not be there, bringing to the institution what she might have brought to it, the door is kept open for him. When the door is open for him, he can keep doing because what he has been doing where he has been doing it: behind closed doors.

Table of Contents

To complain is to admit the truth of violence. To complain is to let the ghosts in. To be haunted is to be hit by an inheritance” (Ahmed, 2021: 308) In this launch, we will reflect together on the role of complaint collectives. This launch will be a complaint collective. You are invited to become part of that collective, and to honour, remember and appreciate the work of those who complain for a more just world. 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. As a feminist of color,” Ahmed writes, “many of my experiences of being a feminist killjoy are of killing feminist joy, for instance, by pointing out racism in so much feminist politics or by identifying the whiteness of so many feminist spaces.” The accessibility of spaces – both feminist and decidedly non-feminist – is where the doors come in (and go out). Doors, both literal and metaphorical, are central to Complaint! because doors are instrumental in how universities (don’t) handle complaints: “Doors teach us about power: who is enabled by the institution, who is stopped from getting in or getting through.” Harassment does not just behind doors, it takes place around doors, those doors we sometimes call promotion. I am listening to an indigenous woman academic. She tries to make a complaint after a senior manager sabotages her tenure case as well as the tenure cases of other indigenous academics. When you are harassed and bullied, when doors are closed, nay, slammed, making it hard to get anywhere, it can be history you are up against; thrown up against

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!. In Complaint!, you write, using Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, that “complaints procedures could … be understood as ‘the master’s tools.’ ” At the same time, as you point out, making a formal complaint can be politicizing, since it shows the complainant how the institution systematically devalues her grievances. 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? Complaint! is narrower in focus than the broader crisis facing higher education institutions. Ahmed’s work is interested in deconstructing abstractions. Having previously turned her attention to the politics of ‘use’, the goal of Complaint! is to ‘offer a full and feminist account of the politics of complaint’. Reading this book now, however, I feel that Ahmed speaks to the broader increasing tendency towards institutional fatalism, which ‘tells you that institutions are what they are such that there is no point trying to change them’. She reminds us that fatalism is a choice and that to choose fatalism is to take a side. At their best, then, complaints function as refusals to do business as usual.Our battles are not the same battles. But there are many battles happening behind closed doors. Behind closed doors: that is where complaints are often found, so that is where you might find us too, those of us for whom the institution is not built; and what we bring with us, who we bring us, the worlds that would not be here if some of us were not here; the data we hold, our bodies, our memories; perhaps the more we have to spill, the tighter their hold. The more we have to spill. Many complaints end up in filing cabinets; filing as filing away. One student said of her complaint: “it just gets shoved in the box.” Another student describes: “I feel like my complaint has gone into the complaint graveyard.” When a complaint is filed away or binned or buried those who complain can end up feeling filed away or binned or buried. Sometimes to get the materials out, we get out. When I make the reasons for my resignation public, I shared information, not very much, but enough; that there had been these enquiries. I became a leak: drip; drip. These insights help to quell my fear that is it not always immediately apparent what is political about complaint. After all, as Ahmed identifies, complaints are often made by perpetrators just as readily as victims. We live in an age where language no longer feels sufficient. Like the language of social justice, the language of victimhood is endlessly co-opted, recombined and re-purposed by individuals adept at DARVO. As Ahmed notes, although race and gender scholars are deemed complainers, they are more likely to receive complaints against them. This issue is most pronounced when complaints emphasise hurt feelings rather than pointing at material power relations. I think of the case where a union was penalised for publishing a poster identifying employees who worked during a strike action as scabs, making it a more serious offence to call someone a scab than to be a scab. In the end, she decides to make a formal complaint because she “wanted to prevent other students from having to go through such practice.” A complaint can be understood as non-reproductive labour: the work you have to stop the reproduction of an inheritance. You have to stop the system from working, you have to throw a wrench in the works or to become, to borrow Sarah Franklin’s (2015) terms, a “wench in the works.” She goes to her course convenor who says, saying “I hear a lot of these complaints every year,” in an intonation that almost implied a yawn, as if to say: heard that before, been there, done that. She replies: “if you hear them every year why is it continuing?” To complain is often to find out about other complaints, earlier complaints. She then receives a warning, “be careful he is an important man.” A warning can be a statement about who is important. Importance is not just a judgement; it is a direction. She went ahead with a complaint. In making it she “sacrificed the references.” In reference to the prospect of doing a PhD she said, “the door is closed.” 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. 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.

When I was researching Complaint!, I became more aware of the limits of that strategy. 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. A lot of people talked to me about how when they tried to make complaints, it was often the diversity agenda that would be used against them—as if they weren’t doing this the right way, as if they weren’t being appealing enough, as if by even using certain words they were trying to make life difficult for other people, including other minoritized staff. 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. There is no question that sexual violence is common in universities, as it is outside them. A recent analysis in the Lancet, drawing on 104 studies from 16 countries, found that 17.4 per cent of women students in higher education – and 7.8 per cent of men – had experienced an ‘attempted or completed sexual act obtained by force, violence or coercion’. This excluded the still more common experience of sexual harassment. A survey conducted by the National Union of Students in 2010 found that 14 per cent of women students had suffered a serious physical or sexual assault and 68 per cent had experienced sexual harassment. Only a minority of those who experience abuse at universities make an official complaint. A 2017 investigation by the Guardian involving 120 universities found that fewer than two hundred formal complaints had been made by students against their teachers in a period of six years. W]hiteness can be just as occupying of issues or spaces when they are designated decolonial” (158). Complaints as tools to redress bullying and harassment can be turned into tools to bully and to harass. This will not be surprising to feminist audiences. We are familiar with how the tools introduced to redress power relations can be used by those who benefit from power relations. I noted earlier how formal complaints can bring with them other more affective and embodied senses of complaint. Formal complaints can end up separated or detached from those who have a complaint to make because of what they experience. This is why it is so important not to tell the story of complaint as a story of what happens to formal complaints; formal complaints can be redirected toward those who try to challenge abuses of power, those who desire or require a modification of an existing arrangement. The complainer becomes a complaint magnet, to become a complainer is to attract complaints, to receive them as well as make them, to receive them because you make them. If you use the word race for instance you might be heard as complaining but you also more likely to be complained about. The magnetism of the figure of the complainer has much to teach us about the direction of violence. Violence is redirected toward those who identify violence and that redirection can be achieved through the very techniques we introduce to challenge the direction of violence.

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.