Complaint!

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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 ]

Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy | feministkilljoys Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy | feministkilljoys

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 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Malmö University, Sweden. [23] She gave a lecture, "Feminists at Work: Diversity, Complaint, Institutions" as honorary doctor. [24] Works [ edit ] 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 ] In the first chapter of the first section, Ahmed notes that some words already carry a complaint; ‘all you have to do is use a word like race and you will be heard as complaining’ (65). Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unreasonable’ (17) I have also heard, by professors interpreting my own complaints. In the next section, ‘The Immanence of Complaint’, we see how ‘institutional blinds’ are lifted when complaints make violence visible; yet, acts of violence are also justified by what Ahmed calls ‘theoretical justifications’ (133). These theoretical considerations are themselves violent (134; read, too, an example of a Title IX case at Harvard University, where theoretical assumptions are harmful). 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. 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.An occupation that can look like ‘conviviality’ (Tate 2017, as cited on 159), politeness (162), diversity (162), collegiality (201), like not noticing (p. 201), like saying – even feeling – that there is nothing you can do (248). An occupation that can be disquietingly quiet. Indeed Sara Ahmed notes how words like “odd, bizarre, weird, strange and disorienting” (44) came up repeatedly in the Complaint!collective when people described the institutional violence they experienced. She understands this repetition through her own earlier concept of “non-performativity” – those institutional speech acts that do not do what they say, creating a “gap between appearance and experience” (41), a gap that can be excruciating (56), cruel (57). It might take a collective effort to get the letters out. A disabled student was not getting anywhere with her complaint about the failure of the university to make reasonable accommodations. And then a file suddenly appears: “a load of documents turned up on the student’s union fax machine and we don’t know where they came from, they were historical documents about students who had to leave.” The documents including a hand written letter to a human rights charity by a former student who had cancer, and who was trying to get the university to let her finish her degree part-time. She speculates that a secretary was doing “their own little bit of direct action,” releasing those documents as a way of giving support to her complaint that she was not supposed to give. It is not surprising that a secretary can become a saboteur; secretary derives from secrets, the secretary is a keeper of secrets, she knows that there are secret files, where they are, she knows how to release them. I thank about the student who wrote that letter. We can’t know, we won’t know what happened to her. But we can make her letter matter. If the student I spoke to hadn’t made her complaint, that letter would have stayed put; dusty, buried. We can meet in an action without meeting in person. Published in 2019 by Duke University Press. [44] Ahmed gives the historical idea on the association of use with life and strength in the 19th century and how utilitarianism helped shape individuals through useful ends. She also explores how use comes with restricted spaces. Ahmed then explores the ideas for queer use. [45] Complaint! [ edit ] 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 Sara Ahmed (30 August 1969) [1] is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory. [2] [3] [4] Life [ edit ]

Duke University Press - Complaint!

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? This is audacious but persuasive critique, which accrues its power by stealth. Complaint! is dense with insight, but admirably lucid." — Zora Simic, Australian Book Review Previous Visiting Professors — University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies". www.gender.cam.ac.uk. 17 October 2014. I think what she wanted to do was to maintain her position as the director, and I was supposed to be some pleb; you know what I mean, she had to be the boss, and I had to be the servant type of thing, that was how her particular version of white supremacy worked, so not just belittling my academic credentials and academic capabilities but also belittling me in front of the students; belittling me in front of administrators.Emma Rees is professor of literature and gender studies at the University of Chester, where she is director of the Institute of Gender Studies.