Complaint!

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Complaint as feminist pedagogy: what you are told you need to do to progress further and faster in the system is what reproduces the system. This is another insightful book in Ahmed’s well-regarded series of considerations of what acting as a feminist in non-feminist institutions means. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." — Choice To Ahmed, practicing feminism is integral to the embodiment of living a feminist life. Ahmed's Killjoy Manifesto [18] feministkilljoy blog [14] elucidate the tenets of living and practicing life through a feminist philosophy- while also creating space for sharing how these embodiments create tension in life experiences under systems of patriarchy and oppression. [ citation needed] Affect and phenomenology [ edit ]

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

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. Lancaster was an incredibly white institution, and I’d already been aware of that, obviously, as one of the very few academics of color employed there. But I began to hear the justifications of that whiteness in faculty meetings. My ears were filling with the sounds of institutional machinery. I became director of women’s studies, and we were precarious—we were fighting to keep our autonomy, and I could begin to feel the withdrawal of the institution’s support. I could tell we weren’t going to have a future. So I was getting a little desperate. Ahmed, Sara (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press. p.212. ISBN 9780822363040. OCLC 946461715. The doorways in my white body are populated with these kinds of ghosts too: the colonising kind, the racist kind. Should I attune to them? Can I learn from them? From their “immanence”?

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The book will appeal to socio-legal scholars interested in the phenomenology of organizations and institutions, especially academia. . . . Though Ahmed’s own experience is not treated directly, her reflections on the subject reveal her personal stakes in prizing apart the complaint. According to her unique positionality, she is both a witness and party to the community of people who supply the knowledge and encouragement complainers rely on to see their complaint through. In Ahmed’s decision to treat the testimonies about complaints on their terms, she weaves an intrinsic activist sensibility through the book." — Monika Lemke, Canadian Journal of Law and Society 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).

Lorna Finlayson · Doors close, backs turn: Why complain

Simpson, Hannah (7 October 2016). "Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed (review)". College Literature. 43 (4): 749–752. doi: 10.1353/lit.2016.0043. ISSN 1542-4286. Koch-Rein, Anson (9 November 2015). "NWSA Conference 2015". Anson Koch-Rein, PhD. Archived from the original on 14 October 2016 . Retrieved 22 September 2016. Tate, Shirley Anne. 2017. “How Do You Feel? ‘Well-Being’ as a Deracinated Strategic Goal in UK Universities.” In Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia, edited by Deborah Gabriel and Shirley Anne Tate, 54–66. ioe Press. An absolutely brilliant endeavor. . . . The real nuance and sophistication of this book, written with such emotional and intellectual insight, the means by which Ahmed identifies strategies of institutional power in relation to power in relation to harassment and abuse is revelatory, thorny, painful, and very, very necessary." — Linda M. Morra, Getting Lit with Linda So many people seem to go into academia with the idea that it will be a kind of refuge for their wonder. I’m curious how hopeful you feel that scholars can continue to find intellectual nourishment there.Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186-219. 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 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

Complaint! - De Gruyter Complaint! - De Gruyter

From complaint we learn how the house is built. In my book What’s the Use? I use this image as an image of queer use, how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. 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. Diversity work is one of Ahmed's common topics. Included in many of her works, including Living a Feminist Life and On Being Included, it is a concept that makes tangible what it means to live a feminist life day to day in institutions. To Ahmed, diversity work is "[learning] about the techniques of power in the effort to transform institutional norms or in an effort to be in a world that does not accommodate our being." Diversity work is not any one thing. It is the act of trying to change an institution, and also simply the act of existing in one when it was not meant for you. She draws upon her experiences as a woman of color in academia and the works of others, including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Heidi Mirza. [20] Lesbian feminism of color [ edit ]W]hiteness can be just as occupying of issues or spaces when they are designated decolonial” (158). 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)

Sara Ahmed You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed

As a paralegal form that has gone underappreciated in academic literature, the sustained treatment of “the complaint” is an accomplishment of its own. Through Ahmed’s treatment, complaints are positioned as a unique focal point of the study of institutions, with distinctive methodological and conceptual implications. As Ahmed sees it, the formal pathway of complaints places the complainer in a position of direct observation of the organization’s mundane, routinized, and institutionalized form of power. The emphasis on the complainer’s experiences enables Ahmed to appreciate the affective dimensions of the formal and informal institutional mechanisms that work in tandem with one another as complaints are processed by the system. Ahmed does not take for granted the fact that “making a complaint is never completed by a single action” (p. 5). It is significant that the complaints process is lengthy and often “exhausting, especially given that what you complain about is already exhausting and the institutional environment that processes the complaint often requires considerable tactical facility to navigate it and weather its challenges” (p. 5). Power is experienced by the complainer, whose affinity with the complaint puts them in the path of more resistance. In the early years of your academic career—when you focused on postmodernism, postcolonialism, queer phenomenology, affect theory—you were, essentially, producing theory. But with On Being Included and Living a Feminist Life, your research and methods shifted. They began to resemble something like sociology. And those books weren’t purely descriptive or analytical—they also formed part of the real-life work you were doing to try to change the institution you inhabited. What occasioned that shift? One thing I am learning through complaint/ Complaint! is that this ‘innocent’ reproduction may not just be despite my (ancestors’) intentions – our supposed godliness, goodness – but also because of them. I thought of these ancestors when I thought of the well-meaning senior, white, female, feminist colleague (a figure that the Complaint! collective is very familiar with) advising me to “smile more” after my attempts to raise the coloniality of the curriculum at a staff meeting. And I thought of this advice, when I read Sara Ahmed’s account of a female student who – after escaping the office of a male staff member when he sexually assaulted her – was asked by senior management to sit down with him and have a cup of tea. The sound of an alarm bell announces a danger in the external world even if you hear the sound inside your own head. We don’t always take heed of what we hear. She starts questioning herself rather than his behaviour. She tells herself off; she gives herself a talking to. In questioning herself, she also exercises violent stereotypes of feminists as feminazis even though she identifies as a feminist. External judgements can be given voice as internal doubt. But she keeps noticing it, that the syllabus is occupied; how it is occupied: “he left any thinker who wasn’t a white man essentially until the end of the course.” He introduces a woman thinker as “not a very sophisticated thinker.” She comes to realise that her first impression that something was wrong was right: “and then I was like, no, no, no, no, things are wrong not just in terms of gender, things are desperately wrong with the way he is teaching full-stop.” When she realises, she was right to hear that something was wrong; those no’s come out. I think of all of those no’s, no, no, no, no, the sound of an increasing confidence in her own judgement.This observation makes space for the penultimate chapter of the concluding section. In Chapter Seven, other contributors wrote ‘Collective Conclusions’, detailing their first collaboration on a report on their department which documented the sexualisation and abuses of powers they witnessed or experienced during their studies (264). The role of Ahmed, Sara (1998). Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge University Press.