On "Complaint!" by Sara Ahmed
Primer and guide questions for Bluestocking session no. 1
Dear Ghettonians,
As a leadup to the first session of Bluestocking: The BTG Reading Group, scheduled on November 27, 2021, 5:00-7:00 pm PHT, here’s a primer and a set of guide questions for the book we will be discussing, Complaint! by Sara Ahmed (Duke University Press, 2021). The deadline for registration is on November 24, 2021.
Background
In May 2016, Professor Sara Ahmed announced her resignation from her post at the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she served as the director of the Centre for Feminist Research. “Let me just say that I have resigned in protest against the failure to address the problem of sexual harassment,” she wrote in her blog. In a subsequent and longer post, she elaborated on her discovery of and advocacy against the endemic sexual harassment of students by academic staff. Ahmed, together with feminist colleagues and students who had come to them to tell their stories, had worked on this advocacy for three years. Despite the formal inquiries made, however, these “have not led to a robust and meaningful investigation of the problem of sexual harassment as an institutional problem.” Students also protested the lack of transparency of the process. In an August 26, 2016 article, The Guardian reported that it
has been given the names of a number of men who were allegedly the subject of inquiries at Goldsmiths between 2013 and 2014 following complaints from students about harassment and sexual misconduct. Settlements were reached and some staff left the university, but much of the detail cannot be reported because parties involved signed a confidentiality clause.
In the Philippines, in an eerie parallelism, protests also rocked Ateneo de Manila University, in response to unresolved sexual harassment cases against academic staff dating as far back as 2016. According to advocates, the injustice stemmed from institutional failures at the procedural level. Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) were also perceived as silencing victims in order to protect the reputation of the institution and the accused.
Ahmed’s book has been spurred by her experience at Goldsmiths and her solidarity with the students’ complaint collective. She undertook her research for it after her resignation, incorporating in her study at least 40 interviews with students, academics, researchers, and administrators; 18 written statements; and her own experience of undergoing the formal complaint process (p. 28). In doing so, she provides an account of complaint both as feminist pedagogy and as testimony. She also points to how complaints can serve as a “phenomenology of the institution,” an investigation into what goes on behind closed doors and in the background (p. 62).
Synopsis
The book comprises four main parts with two chapters each, as follows:
Part I: Institutional Mechanics looks into how policies and procedures can become “non-performative institutional speech acts,” i.e. speech acts that don’t bring into effect what they name (p. 50). Here, she also surveys a range of managerial tactics employed to defeat complaints in the initial stage, including warnings, the act of nodding, blanking, strategic inefficiency, and NDAs.
Part II: The Immanence of Complaint examines the experiences that lead to making complaints, which include epistemic uncertainty, a heightened consciousness upon coming upon a realization of what is happening, the insidiousness of the grooming process, the dearth of allies as people become party to the harassment in order not to be harassed themselves, and finally, the violent and alienating phenomenon of institutional harassment. In this part, Ahmed also analyzes the gendered figure of the complainer and how it is used to stop complaints (and why the privileged “Karen” can complain while avoiding the label of complainer). Ahmed characterizes complaint as “non-reproductive labor,” i.e. the labor of trying to intervene in the reproduction of a problem (p. 204). This labor falls disproportionately on the shoulders of misfits in the institution.
Part III: If These Doors Could Talk uses doors as a metaphor for the ways that institutions wield power. (The book cover features art by Rachel Whiteread entitled Double-Doors.) In one of the most triggering chapters, Ahmed enumerates even more tactics of institutional violence, showing how harassment itself can be built into the system through what goes on “behind closed doors.” Meanwhile, in the next chapter about “holding the door,” she narrates how the prospect of promotion and progression through the ranks can fuel the reluctance to complain, whereby the door holders essentially play the role of gatekeepers.
Part IV: Conclusion focuses on the uses and dynamics of complaint collectives. A chapter is written by postgrad students from Goldsmiths involved in the formal complaint process. Meanwhile, the eighth and final chapter describes complaint collectives as forms of institutional wisdom, emphasizing the important role of complaint activists in working on new policies and procedures. Banding together, individuals can share the costs of complaint, and thereby initiate real change.
Sara Ahmed’s works
While Complaint! is Ahmed’s sustained analysis of the complaint process as a phenomenology of the institution, her semi-autobiographical 2017 book Living a Feminist Life is also closely associated with her experience at Goldsmiths. Her most recent publication aside from Complaint! is What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), which she characterizes as constituting a trilogy along with The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Willful Subjects (2014). These works trace the genealogies of the words “use,” “happiness,” and “will,” respectively, putting them in the service of feminist politics. Also of note in this prolific writer’s backlist are On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), which she draws from in the current book for its conceptual tools about the mechanics of institutions; The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014), her groundbreaking contribution to the feminist and queer politics of emotion; and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), which provides a queer model of the phenomenological concept of orientation and describes a positive politics of disorientation.
Guide questions for Complaint!
What is your own relationship to complaint? Do you find it easy or hard to do? Do you think gender is in any way related to your attitude about complaint?
Have you ever gone through a formal complaint process? Does your experience resonate with the narratives in the book?
What insights have you learned from the book, especially in relation to sexual assault and harassment cases in the context of the Philippines?
Comment on social media as a forum for the unfolding or disclosure of sexual assault and harassment cases.
When sexual misconduct, harassment, or assault cases are settled, NDAs are usually part of the settlement. Is this good or bad practice?
The complaint process starts with the progressive realization or sense of what is not right, which can often be stymied by gaslighting. How can feminist epistemology help shed light on this process?
Often, instances of sexual harassment are characterized as mere banter, hence obscuring the real violence that words can do. What is your typical reaction to such “banter”? How should we respond to it?
Ahmed analyzes the ways that “collegiality” and a sense of institutional culture and character can promote harassment. Do you agree or disagree?
What are the implications of Ahmed’s phenomenology of the institution on our traditional concepts of moral responsibility and individual accountability?
Ahmed writes, “The personal is institutional” (p. 59). What do you think she means by this?
In her analysis of the complaints process embedded in institutions, Ahmed cites Audre Lorde’s insight about how the master’s tools could never dismantle the master’s house. Do you think the odds are already stacked against complaints?
Assess Ahmed’s argument that real institutional change lies in the formation of complaint collectives.
Comment on the centrality of the door metaphor in the book.
Ahmed writes that a policy should not be treated as an end, but as a means (p. 85). Why?
How can the concepts discussed in the book be related to other concepts previously taken up in BTG webinars, such as the logic of misogyny (Kate Manne), affective injustice (Amaia Srinivasan), collective responsibility (Hannah Arendt and Iris Marion Young), epistemic paralysis (Kelly Louise Agra), testimonial injustice (Miranda Fricker), and trust and trustworthiness (Onora O’Neill)?
We at BTG keenly look forward to your participation in our inaugural reading group discussion! Let this be the start of a meaningful conversation about the pressing problem of sexual harassment in our campuses. Let us form our own complaint collective, in the spirit of Ahmed’s famous figure of the feminist killjoy!
Sincerely,
Dr. Noelle Leslie dela Cruz
Philosophy Department, De La Salle University
Bluestocking session no. 1 lead discussant