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per cent of men – had experienced an ‘attempted or completed sexual act obtained by force, violence or coercion’. A survey conducted by the National Union of Students in 2010 found that 14 per cent of women students had suffered a serious physical or sexual assault and 68 per cent had experienced sexual harassment. With Sara Ahmed, Sirma Bilge, Heidi Mirza, Tiffany Page and Leila Whitley, chaired by Chandra Frank. She describes: “I was just frightened and I just allowed myself to go through it very privately and I hit all those doors along the way, and just came out very guarded by it. 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.

Sara Ahmed - Wikipedia Sara Ahmed - Wikipedia

She has to keep making the same complaint to different people because they are not speaking to each other. It is worth adding that among the group was one man who took both his professional ethics and his commitment to feminism seriously. A lot of the work of complaint is releasing the story of that violence into a wider world and seeing what happens to it. Perhaps we can think of complaint as trying to change how people reside somewhere, which requires an act of dwelling on the problems with or in that residence.She now lives in the outskirts of Cambridge with her partner, Sarah Franklin, who is an academic at the University of Cambridge. I am in my eighties and many of my feminist colleagues who fought that battle then, are now dead, but I know the rage that that that generation would feel if they knew that almost half a century later that Sara’s brave action is needed. 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. There have been cases in the US of Title IX protections (which prohibit sex-based discrimination in education) being misused to attack queer academics, for instance.

Sara Ahmed Complaint! Durham: Duke University Press, 2021

The author does not flinch at the difficult intersections where one underrepresented or traditionally marginalized group seems at odds with another; instead, she examines the effects of complaint in each area of these intersections, retaining her sharp focus on an analysis of power dynamics. She describes: “There is something else which is something to do with being a young female academic from a working-class background: part of me felt that I wasn’t entitled to make the complaint – that this is how hard it is for everybody, and this is how hard it should be. 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.Occasionally the calculus favours the swift – and usually discreet – removal of someone who has become a liability, though this is less often a removal than a relocation (the ‘pass the harasser’ phenomenon, whereby men accused of sexual harassment are allowed to ‘move on’, only for similar allegations to arise at another institution). follow the institutional life of a formal complaint: how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped. racism and sexism, bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, ableism, precarity, the aftermath of challenging whiteness and the power structures of the university (‘the canon’ is a topic that obviously comes up), the paradox of committees on diversity and equality, silence and bribery (see especially pages 99-100) and lack of support, as evidenced by unkind reference letters for jobs post-graduate life.

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

The stories Ahmed tells will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to seek redress (or merely recognition) from an institution trained against them. These interviews, not least because of the exhausting (and, in many cases, life-altering) nature of what was being complained about, become “testimonies”. In response, Ahmed acknowledges the potential for complaints ‘to be used for ends that are not knowable in advance’, then counters that this concern might itself be co-opted as a shield for abuse.Complaint is complementary to citation, in that ‘a complaint can open the door to those who came before’ (310). I am so grateful to Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble—with support from Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia, and others—for writing one of conclusions of Complaint!