Complaint!

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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. I still remember the sense of wonder—that it was possible to stay a student, to stay in a place of learning, to be surrounded by learning. I was so compelled by your point, in On Being Included, that the term diversity “can be used as a description or affirmation of anything”—that it’s often seen “as a ‘good’ word precisely because it can be used in diverse ways. 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 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. Her resignation was an act of protest against the institution’s culture of sexual harassment and thus, as Ahmed wrote on her blog, a “feminist issue. At the same time, the most inventive academic work comes from those who occupy precarious positions.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 don’t know that universities can be places where you can go to have breathing space, given the kinds of pressures academics are under, and given the extent to which these institutions rely on precarious staff.

but then I realize I don't actually want to share it with anyone who doesn't want to be changed by it. I was somewhere else, in my little cottage in the middle of Cambridgeshire, and being out meant all the stories could come out with me. It wasn’t that I didn’t experience the other side of academia—the narrowing of what counts as knowledge, the ways in which what appears to be an open and inclusive environment can actually be a hostile and difficult one for people who don’t fit. The stories Ahmed tells will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to seek redress (or merely recognition) from an institution trained against them. Complaining as a speech act may have negative connotations, but Ahmed draws our attention to complaint as a form of feminist pedagogy.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.

There’s one line in Audre Lorde’s “Power,” a very difficult and painful poem, about power lying loose and limp as an unconnected wire. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed had already begun an institutional ethnography on the language of diversity and how diversity and its initiatives are institutionalised performative acts. Or, when discourse is contested, professors will hurl ‘you can’t handle criticism’ (126), which I also hear quite often, a phrase that requires a lot of elaboration in situations involving power.If I wanted to stay in the department, he suggested, I would have to find a way to ‘submit’ in the least humiliating way for myself. I find the stories compelling and think the author gains from the focus, but I know for a fact that higher ed is replete with untouchable tyrants. Some months have passed since Harvard’s letter scandal, one that captivated our attention because of recurring predatorial behaviours, professorial networks that sustain power and the role of ‘star scholars’. Formal complaints can sound just like the master’s tools—bureaucratic, dry, tedious—but they’re also where you actually come to hear and learn about institutional mechanics, how institutions reproduce themselves. This succeeds where many other takes on bullying and harassment are too generic and fail to capture what power means if you are in these situations.

These theoretical considerations are themselves violent (134; read, too, an example of a Title IX case at Harvard University, where theoretical assumptions are harmful). Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining. 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. A lot of great insights into the process of complaint and also the subtleties of the world that turn innocuous things into complaints. That does not really detract from the overall usefulness of the work and is more of a desire to see this analysis replicated in other industries.

Ahmed has such a way of turning theory into poetry in a way where every sentence resonates like hitting a drum. I understand this decision, but this made it much more confusing to track the same complaint across multiple chapters, which is often necessary. Ahmed’s intellectually expansive book achieves two things: it exposes the meaning, experiences, and perceptions of complaint and provides testimony to the courage of those who complain, who fight, who believe justice should not just appear to be done; it must be done. 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).