Complaint!

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Sara Ahmed: "Once We Find Each Other, So Much Else Becomes Possible" | Literary Hub". lithub.com. 10 April 2017 . Retrieved 29 March 2018. 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). When you throw your body into the system to try to stop it from working, you feel the impact of how things are working” (171) 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

Sara Ahmed You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed

Tate, Shirley Anne. 2017. “How Do You Feel? ‘Well-Being’ as a Deracinated Strategic Goal in UK Universities.” In Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia, edited by Deborah Gabriel and Shirley Anne Tate, 54–66. ioe Press. Weems, Lisa (2012). "The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (review)". PhiloSOPHIA. 2 (2): 229–233. ISSN 2155-0905.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.

Complaint!- Combined Academic Complaint!- Combined Academic

If you complain you end up confirming a judgment that has already been made, you are not from here, you do not belong here. A lesbian academic describes: “if you have a situation and you make a complaint, then you are the woman who complains, the lesbian who complains. And then of course you get witch-hunted, you get scapegoated, you become the troublesome uppity woman; you become the woman who does not fit; you become everything the bully accuses you off, because nobody is listening to you. And you don’t like to hear yourself talking like that but you end up being in that situation, again. You can hear them saying, ‘oh there you go.” We both laughed when she said this. The feminist killjoy comes up here; she comes up in what we can hear. We hear each other in the wear and the tear of the words we share; we hear what it is like to come up against the same thing over and over again. We imagine the eyes rolling as if to say: well, she would say that. It was from experiences like this that I developed my equation: rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy. 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. Ahmed begins Complaint! by emphasising how ‘complaints are not heard or how we are not heard when we are heard as complaining’ (3). Those who follow Ahmed’s work will be well aware that she traces the genealogy of words – verbs, nouns, as subjects or as objects – and how their meanings may change depending on their uses. Complaining as a speech act may have negative connotations, but Ahmed draws our attention to complaint as a form of feminist pedagogy.Ahmed does this by offering a ‘feminist ear’, a method she’s introduced in Living a Feminist Life (3): ‘to acquire a feminist ear is to become attuned to the sharpness of such words, how they point, to whom they point. To be heard as complaining is often attuned to sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, stories too’ (17). More specifically, Ahmed is observing complaints as testimony (13) and as ‘formal allegation’ (4) in the space of the university that, as I note in my own fragments and experiences, offers informal procedures that mimic legal language and formalities to avoid any real accountability.

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Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2016. “ Outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality.” Accessed 17 th Jan, 2022.I’m working on The Feminist Killjoy Handbook right now, in which I have a chapter about the feminist killjoy as a poet. I use a very simple expression, “to let loose.” To let loose is to express yourself. It can even be about losing your temper. But it can also just mean to loosen one’s hold. Lauren Berlant taught me a lot about loosening a hold on things. They had an incredible way of creating room in the description of an attachment to something, which I think is really hard to do. And my aunt, Gulzar Bano, who is a feminist poet, taught me something, too. She wrote poems that were angry, on one level, but also very, very loving. When I think about both Gulzar and Lauren, I think about how the tightness or narrowness of words—of pronouns, say—can be experienced as giving you no room. You have to experiment with combination. There’s a connection between moving words around and opening lives up. To Ahmed, practicing feminism is integral to the embodiment of living a feminist life. Ahmed's Killjoy Manifesto [18] feministkilljoy blog [14] elucidate the tenets of living and practicing life through a feminist philosophy- while also creating space for sharing how these embodiments create tension in life experiences under systems of patriarchy and oppression. [ citation needed] Affect and phenomenology [ edit ]

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed | Waterstones

Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186-219. In her powerful new book . . . Sara Ahmed builds on a series of oral and written testimonies from students and employees who have complained to higher education universities about harassment and inequality. Here, she asks readers to think about some inescapable questions: What happens when complaints are pushed under the rug? How is complaint radical feminism? And, how can we learn about power from those who choose to fight against the powerful?" — Rebecca Schneid, Indy Week Complaints as tools to redress bullying and harassment can be turned into tools to bully and to harass. This will not be surprising to feminist audiences. We are familiar with how the tools introduced to redress power relations can be used by those who benefit from power relations. I noted earlier how formal complaints can bring with them other more affective and embodied senses of complaint. Formal complaints can end up separated or detached from those who have a complaint to make because of what they experience. This is why it is so important not to tell the story of complaint as a story of what happens to formal complaints; formal complaints can be redirected toward those who try to challenge abuses of power, those who desire or require a modification of an existing arrangement. The complainer becomes a complaint magnet, to become a complainer is to attract complaints, to receive them as well as make them, to receive them because you make them. If you use the word race for instance you might be heard as complaining but you also more likely to be complained about. The magnetism of the figure of the complainer has much to teach us about the direction of violence. Violence is redirected toward those who identify violence and that redirection can be achieved through the very techniques we introduce to challenge the direction of violence. You can be kept out by what you find out when you get in. And yet consider how diversity is often figured as an open door, turned into a tagline; tag on, tag along; minorities welcome, come in, come in! Just because they welcome you, it does not mean they expect you to turn up. Remember the post-box that became a nest? There could be another sign on the post-box: “birds welcome.” To complain is to admit the truth of violence. To complain is to let the ghosts in. To be haunted is to be hit by an inheritance” (Ahmed, 2021: 308)Closing a door can sometimes be a survival strategy; she closes the door to the institution by withdrawing herself, her commitments, from it. She still does her work; she still teaches her students. She uses the door to shut out what she can, who she can. She takes herself off the door; she depersonalises it. And she pulls down the blinds and she pulls on a mask, the mask of her people, connecting her fight to the battles that came before, because, quite frankly, for her, this is a war. 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. There is a genealogy of experience, a genealogy of consciousness in my body that is now at this stage traumatised beyond the capacity to go to the university. There’s a legacy, a genealogy and I haven’t really opened that door too widely as I have been so focused on my experience in the last 7 years. Reward’, Sara Ahmed tells us, comes from warder, “to guard” (100). In white institutions, she continues, everyone gets rewarded for whiteness, for watching what we (or others) say, for becoming agents of surveillance, reproducing the “institutional legacy”. While she writes of this poisoned promise as necessary for POC safety or survival, as laboured and precarious, for me as a white woman it feels seductively available – speedy, easy, pleasant. There’s that lube again, oiling white bodies, oiling colonial cogs. Ahmed, Sara, 1969-". Library of Congress . Retrieved 16 January 2015. data sheet (Ahmed, Sara; b. 08-30-69)