Complainers' dictionary
BTG no. 22
As we read Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! and joined the inaugural Bluestocking reading group on November 27, we couldn’t help but see the reflection of our own personal and collective stories—our history of complaint. It is a history that was not always part of the retelling that centered on the protests that erupted in Ateneo de Manila University in October 2019, but it is a history that we nevertheless, or perhaps all the more, wanted to do justice to. Reading “Collective Conclusions” by Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, and Alice Corble, with Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia, and others, was uncanniest, and prompted us to think of how we could tell our story as graduate students of the ADMU Philosophy Department. We don’t know how to completely make sense of it yet, but what we know is that our history is that of finding the language to complain. So here, we begin to chart our history by listing the words we needed to learn as a complaint collective.
Open secret
When tracing the beginning of our complaint, we can think of many possible points, but perhaps we can locate it best by calling to memory that visceral feeling we had of wanting to speak up and do something. It was in late 2018 that we started holding meetings as graduate students. We would ask to reserve rooms for a “writing group.” There, we began to talk about what each of us knew, albeit disjointedly, to be an open secret: that our department has a continuing history of sexual harassment. We decided to collectively work on a letter to capture what we shared. The writing process felt cathartic because it was finally putting into words what we could not speak about or rather, what we could only talk about in secret. We spent a great deal of time thinking about whether to sign our names and to whom to send the letter because we feared being dismissed, or worse, that we’d face backlash from our department.
Proper channels
We understood that the department’s approach to the issue insisted on the use of proper channels. We knew that even speaking about the details of this issue among ourselves would be frowned upon and deemed “improper.” But by then we also already knew that the proper channels had failed, and we knew how they had failed our friends and students. We heard our seniors dismiss the accounts of students who were sharing their stories, and yes, their complaints, on social media. Yet, in our unique position as graduate students, and for many of us, graduate assistants of the department, we immediately understood why students and alumni would use social media as a recourse. They felt that there, they would have a better chance of being heard and—even in that risky and very public space—had a better chance of keeping themselves safe. We also knew that the use of this recourse pointed to significant barriers that survivors faced in navigating the official processes.
Enabling culture
We inevitably had to make sense of the culture in the department and what parts of it perpetuated the problem. The department fostered a culture that was “collegial,” yet collegiality was inevitably marred by the unaddressed issue of sexual violence. Learning the ropes of collegiality entailed being hyper-aware of one’s position and knowing which seniors could cross the line of what was safe and professional. To them, boundaries were always permeable, which meant that it was sometimes left to us, the juniors, to enforce these boundaries. Banter in the department was common but sometimes the jokes became uncomfortable and would make light of problematic behavior. Yet part of practicing collegiality was learning when to laugh, what we could say and what we couldn’t, and when the conversation invited us in or didn’t. We learned that speaking up about anything other than “good-natured” topics would be deemed uncollegial.
Misogyny and sexism
When the protests erupted in October 2019, we found an opening to release the letter that we were writing. Coming from the high of the October 15 protest, we returned to the department to condense our draft. It would be the first time we were able to talk about the issue openly in the department office. Not in hushed voices, no longer in the guise of a “writing group,” we finalized and posted our statement online before going home. It would turn out that many of the words we used to describe the problem in the department would be highly contested—apart from enabling culture, the words misogyny and sexism. The conversation surrounding these words was a conversation we could never forward in the department because of how it was outright dismissed. Later, we found space and comfort in a reading group we started in Time’s Up Ateneo in April 2020 about Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Through this reading group, we found more comrades, comrades with whom we could safely find our words and our bearings, and who resonated with our experiences of misogyny and sexism, both before and in the aftermath of the protests.
Stonewalling
Even during the lockdown, we continued in our efforts to open up the discussion about the department culture and the impact of sexual violence by corresponding with our seniors. By this time, we had a much better grasp of our position, we were confident with our words, and perhaps even optimistic about working together as graduate students and faculty of the department. While they invoked adjustments already made by the department and the passing of a new and better policy, we knew that these were not enough. Policy and adjustments would not automatically fix the harmful culture nor ensure better responses and safer spaces. But even after everything that happened and despite the urgency and the weight of our words, we did not get a response or an opening—it felt like they fully closed the door on us.
Retaliation
We would be remiss not to mention the glaringly obvious yet unacknowledged. Many of us are no longer in the department. Some of us left by choice, some not, others somewhere in between. But our leaving must be understood as a response to the choices made by the department to maintain an environment that was hostile to our speaking up, and their choice to retaliate. Our leaving responds to how, having been painted as complainers, we remain unheard. We did not want our staying to be made evidence of a complaint already heard and addressed—we see our leaving as the only possible way to continue voicing complaint, using the language we now have.
Danna Aduna and Reese Ungson
Time’s Up Ateneo
https://timesupateneo.org