Complaint!

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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). 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 ] Ahmed, Sara (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822363040. OCLC 994735865. At some point I was reminded of Bertha Wilson (former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada) who speaks of “the trap of an asexual abstraction in which human being is always declined in the masculine”.

Complaint!- Combined Academic Complaint!- Combined Academic

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.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? To use the Lordeian formulation, the effort to rebuild the master’s house so that it can accommodate those for whom it was not intended cannot be understood purely as a reformist project. It is, potentially, revolutionary. Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. It’s the sociability of complaint that leads it in a direction similar to a protest. You find your co-complainers, the people who get it, who have been there, your comrades. Some people cannot survive these institutions. Some people do not survive them. It is a fundamentally life-affirming task to build institutions that are not dependent on the diminishment of the life-capacities of others.

Project MUSE - Complaint!

So many turnings, so many complaints. Complaint activism is not simply about using formal complaints procedures to press against institutions although it is that. It is about finding different ways to express our complaints: on the walls, in the committees, the classrooms, the dissertations, on the streets. Complaints can be expressed all over the place; they can be sneaky as well as leaky. The work of getting complaints out is also non-reproductive labour, complaints are records, they teach us something, the truth even, the truth about violence, institutional violence, the violence directed towards who identify violence, who say no to violence. Ahmed received the Kessler Award for contributions to the field of LGBTQ studies from CLAGS, CUNY. [21] Ahmed gave a talk, "Queer Use," when accepting this award. [22] But it’s the third section of the book that is most troubling, especially for those like myself who feel that they have no other option but to leave while departments and the university continue with their everyday approach to research as business. A scholar’s or a student’s departure does not end institutional violence. As many of Ahmed’s participants shared, once they lodge complaints against their supervisors, there can be instant ‘institutional death’ (223). Complaint as feminist pedagogy: to make a complaint within an institution is to learn about how institutions work, what I call institutional mechanics. To tell the story of a complaint made within an institution can be to tell another story about an institution. The story of complaint often counters the institution’s story of itself. On paper, a complaint can be pictured as a flow-chart, with straight lines and pointy arrows, giving the would-be complainer a clear route through.It is worth adding that among the group was one man who took both his professional ethics and his commitment to feminism seriously. 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”? a b c d e Ahmed, Sara (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press. p.230. ISBN 9780822363040. OCLC 994735865.

Book Review: Complaint! by Sara Ahmed | Impact of Social Sciences

Kessler Lecture 2017 Sara Ahmed". YouTube. 2 July 2019. Archived from the original on 15 December 2021 . Retrieved 9 February 2021. An opportunity can be figured as a window. A window of opportunity is the time you have when you can do something, when something is possible. When that window closes, a possibility is no longer available. Windows, like doors, are passages; they can be opened and closed, although windows are not usually intended for the passage of persons. The word window comes from a combination of wind and eye and has been compared to the old Frisian word andern, literally meaning ‘breath-door’, a window as a hole that allows the passage of air as well as light and sound. Windows enable the circulation of fresh air; a breath-door is how a room breathes, as well as how we can breathe more easily when we are inside a room. Sara Ahmed was born in Britain in 1969 to a Pakistani father and an English mother. Soon after, the family moved to Australia, where Ahmed grew up before returning to the UK to complete her doctorate. She is the author of eleven works of nonfiction, the earliest of which are totems of feminist postmodernism, affect theory, and queer phenomenology. Her most celebrated contribution has been the figure of the Feminist Killjoy, who shares a name with Ahmed’s popular blog, which she began writing alongside her 2017 work, Living a Feminist Life . “When you expose a problem,” she writes in that book, “you pose a problem.” 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.” 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.’ Smile more, have a cup of tea. Be nice, quiet, virtuous (73), conciliatory (210). A White Woman. Sip sweetly from colonialism, from genocide. Trade submission for privilege, for career. Become ‘ professionally racist’ (Kinouani 2021, my emphasis).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. 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's blog, "feministkilljoys", was written at the same time as "Living a Feminist Life" (2017). [41] As the title suggests, Ahmed explores feminist theory, and what it means on our everyday lives. One way this manifests is in diversity work, something to which she dedicated a third of the book. She also spends much of the book exploring the feminist killjoy, the feminist in action who takes up the call in their everyday life. [42] In 2020, Duke University Press confirmed that Living a Feminist Life was their best-selling book of the previous decade. [43] What's the Use? On the Uses of Use [ 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.