Complaint!

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a b Ahmed, Sara (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press. p.5. ISBN 9780822363040. OCLC 946461715. Thank you for writing this book. The easy style, the humor, the manner in which you cite (first name last name) make it a joy to read. You have rhyme too… speculate, accumulate, citational, relational… How wonderful! 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.” 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. 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.

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed | Goodreads

Previous Visiting Professors — University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies". www.gender.cam.ac.uk. 17 October 2014. 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 Published in 2012 by Duke University Press. [36] In On Being Included, Ahmed "offers an account of the diversity world". She explores institutional racism and whiteness, and the difficulties diversity workers face in trying to overcome them in their institutions. [37] Willful Subjects [ edit ]Are there other people who have influenced you as you made that transition, loosening your attachment to the genre of academic writing?

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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?

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Ahmed] presents a strong argument that power in higher education tends to protect itself, that diversity initiatives are often nothing more than window dressing, and that those who file complaints about a hostile work environment often face accusations of disloyalty or troublemaking. . . . 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. Sharp criticism of an overlooked systemic problem in higher education." Such paradoxes are central to how Ahmed articulates her feminism. It’s feminism that isn’t out to win friends but should certainly influence people. It’s angry because anger is required. And it’s collective and inclusive. Published by Duke University Press in 2014. [38] Ahmed focuses on the idea of willfulness as resistance. She adds that willfulness involves persistence in having been brought down. Ahmed's goal throughout this book was to "spill the container" as willfulness provides a container for perversion. [39] Living a Feminist Life [ edit ] 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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My name is Sara Ahmed, and this is my research blog. I am a feminist killjoy. It is what I do. It is how I think. It is my philosophy and my politics. There’s a lot I miss about being part of the university. We created solidarity in the Center for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, and I really miss that. That space had a sense of urgency. We weren’t sitting around talking about, I don’t know, affect theory—which is not to say it’s not interesting to sit around and talk about affect theory! But it was a different set of conversations that together felt like an emergency. We were trying to change the conditions of our own material possibilities. I miss my course on race, which I’d taught every year since I became an academic in 1994. I miss the students. But wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you’re missing something. You just have to decide what you’re willing to miss. And missing all that has given me so many other opportunities to share, to communicate, and to think with people outside of those institutional spaces. So I’m willing to miss it. 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!.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. Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! takes complaints as its subject, specifically the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made in the context of academic institutions and what actually happens. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed applies a feminist phenomenological perspective to the complaint. She uses her “feminist ear … as an institutional tactic” (p. 6) to become sensitized to what is required in seeing a complaint through. In so doing, Ahmed recognizes that the complainer’s process of working a complaint through the system is a labour of its own, and often one which is thankless, fruitless, and requires resilience in the face of institutionalized power. There is a politics to complaints. For Ahmed, complaints are a unique communicative form, which locates the problem in the one who speaks out and turns the institution into what the complainer is up against. Certainly, as complainers experience it, being at the helm of complaints is to experience the inscrutable inner workings of the institution. As Ahmed reasons, because of the institution’s demands on the complainer, the process of complaining often becomes part of the crisis or trauma they experience. 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 ] 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.

Duke University Press - Complaint!

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. This is audacious but persuasive critique, which accrues its power by stealth. Complaint! is dense with insight, but admirably lucid."W]hiteness can be just as occupying of issues or spaces when they are designated decolonial” (158). 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.