Sara Ahmed

The term, to me, shows how sexual harassment within institutions goes beyond individuals to how an organisation gives permission to certain forms of conduct, despite the existence of policies against such conduct. I think of disability scholar Kay Inckle’s work on ‘unreasonable accommodations’, where she shows how institutions justify inaccessibility, despite inclusion policies. She describes being told by an equality officer she ‘could just go down on her bottom’, when she, a wheelchair user, was given a room only accessible by stairs. There is hostility not just in these explicit statements but in the wider structure that demands some people keep complaining just to be allowed into the room.

In the book I use a term from my previous work, ‘killjoy truth’ – what you learn about an institution when you come up against it. A lot of the work of complaint allows you to see for whom the institution works, how policies and procedures obscure problems, and how when you point that out you become the problem.

SA

The book looks at the ways institutions remove complaints – by removing the complainers, by making complaining exhausting, by complaints disappearing into an administrative system – and how institutions disguise this practice of removal. For example, an institution can appear to be committed to ‘diversity’ but those who embody diversity are required to be positive about the institution, to end up on committees or to become a spokesperson, to smile for a brochure.

The idea of ‘non-performativity’ came to me at a conference full of black and brown feminists, I think just after the Race Relations (Amendment) Act in 2000. We were talking about the proliferation of documents that were being generated about race equality, statements of commitment and state action plans. As one practitioner I once interviewed said: ‘You end up doing the document and not doing the doing.’

The term wasn’t initially intended as an intervention into any debates on performativity. Almost all of my work emerges from trying to understand practical problems, like an institution that is not accommodating those who it claims to accommodate. When you come up against those walls, that’s when you generate concepts. As I went on, I began to use Judith Butler’s work to build out my own concept, to think of non-performative speech acts as being those that do not bring into effect what they name.

One woman I speak to in the book made an informal complaint about sexual harassment about a senior person in her department. She found out afterwards that [the line manager] didn’t pass it on, because to pass on the complaint was to become implicated – they too would become a complainer. Complaints are understood as contagious, which impacts what people do or do not say. This can mean complaints get stuck in certain individuals, certain bodies, who must then carry that weight alone, or snap in one way or another.

Institutions manage complaints by atomisation. When you keep people who complain apart, the problems become smaller and you don’t get the building of a more structural critique. It makes it about individuals. If there’s racism, it’s about a racist individual; if there’s harassment, it’s not the institution that’s at stake – it’s the person who is a harasser.

I think here of Viola, who told me that when she complained in her workplace, she realised that it was supposed to be kept quiet. But speaking to her union, she learnt that other people had made similar complaints in the past. Viola understood herself as having been atomised, and this is how she acquired a consciousness of the institution and how it was working. Going through a complaint process can be so politicising, because you begin to see how the system works and for whom it works.

SA

When you make a complaint that threatens an institution’s self identity as progressive, or threatens key valuable individuals, the institution will come down on you. You need more people to withstand that force, firstly, and also to bear witness to it. One woman I spoke to said that ‘it’s crazy-making’ – the hostility is so extreme, but behind closed doors, so your reaction is used as evidence that you are the problem.

I’ve never initiated a formal complaint in my career, but I’ve supported a group of students trying to address historic and ongoing sexual harassment in a department. They had to form a collective, because they needed to share experiences and resources and to look out for each other. These kinds of collectives came up time and time again during my research.

A complaint might begin with a ‘no’ – no to this conduct, no to this institution, no to this form of violence, no to what’s going on in the world right now – but if you have to formalise that complaint to the institution, it can feel like being directed away from the complaint itself.

A complaint collective can think about this process in more expansive terms, outside of formal procedure. Maybe through direct action, or through not looking at one particular problem but putting an institution as a whole on trial. It can also stop the institution from being the only thing you’re addressing; you address each other instead.

SA

Wherever I’ve gone to speak about this research, people have continuously shared their stories with me – I wanted this book to put these stories in dialogue with each other, with less focus on the type of institution.

I write about the YouTuber Abigail Thorn’s video about complaining to the NHS and the seemingly endless process she was dragged through as a trans woman trying to access hormones she needed. Similarly, I begin the book with the complaint collective Grenfell Action Group and the devastating consequences of their complaints about fire safety being ignored or treated as malicious. In these forms of administrative violence, complaint activism becomes a lens to look at the violence of contemporary capitalism – the stigmatising of complainers is about people whose lives are not seen as valuable.

The book also includes the examples of CARD (Campaign Against Racial Discrimination), who in 1966 generated hundreds of complaints about racism in order to expose the limits of the race relations legislation, which didn’t at the time include housing and employment. I think this is a really good example of the use of complaint to document the extent of a social problem, to make it harder to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

When activists try to address historic abuse, they often find evidence of past complaints that have been buried. And so complaint activism has also been about trying to bring forward and contest that past, to reveal what has been buried and what continues because it hasn’t been dealt with. This might involve present-day questions about whose lives matter, whose losses do we grieve, but it also involves analysing how history is obscured.

SA

Undertaking this kind of empirical research – something I wasn’t trained in, as my background is in philosophy and literature – has been really important to my own political and intellectual formation. I had an opportunity to do an empirical project in collaboration with a social scientist, because I had been involved in writing a racial equality policy. I was watching how the institution was claiming to have done race equality because we had written this policy and I was beginning to see how non performativity was working.

I then began to think beyond how texts construct meaning, asking questions like I did in Strange Encounters and to some extent in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. I started to ask people why or how they use certain words, or where texts and documents go, where they get cited, or don’t, how they get taken up. That shift, which really happened in the early 2000s, has had a huge impact on my work.

An idea which began to come into my analysis in Queer Phenomenology is thinking about what doesn’t come into view, what becomes the background – beginning to notice what doesn’t get noticed, beginning to think how so much of institutional life never has people’s attention because it becomes taken for granted. When I began supporting students who were complaining, I decided that I would do empirical research on this quite early on.

I also see it as a continuation of the work in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: looking at the one who’s willing to name the problem, who then becomes the problem. The negativity of complaint really comes out in the work of the killjoy – how the ‘no’ that is directed at you, you redirect back to the institution, you repurpose it. Some of the arguments about mourning and melancholia that are in my book on emotions, and also in The Promise of Happiness, are here too. That’s in part wanting to critique the way in which good feeling or positivity is seen as forward thinking and free, whilst bad feeling is seen as stuck in the past, something to ‘get over’.

SA

There are all sorts of ways in which the complainer becomes pathologised. Some see the complainer as too negative, as compromising the capacity of others to get on in the institution and do feminist work in a more positive way. There are also those who judge complaint as a problematic form of political action. Even before I did the research, I noticed this image of the complainer as a carceral feminist, that a complaint process is akin to calling the police. Obviously, since then, we’ve got the figure of ‘Karen’, which I think recognises how people’s complaints get amplified because of their proximity to power. So the critiques of complaints and complainers are not all problematic – it has always been really contested and contradictory.

Even right now, I think about those who are saying ‘no’ to institutional violence, such as those protesting for a free Palestine and naming the genocide in Gaza, and how complaints are being used against those people. This tells you a lot about how what I call the complaint apparatus works, and whose complaints are able to go further. This is why one of the things I try to do in the book is to differentiate between formal complaints that enter into that apparatus and go through the institutions that you’re trying to complain about, and the complaints that begin elsewhere, that begin with us saying ‘no’, however that ‘no’ gets expressed.

SA

In the beginning of the chapter on complaints as activism, there’s an important caveat that the complaint activism I’m describing, or the deliberate incitement of complaint to generate community, can be used in ways that are hostile to minority groups of different kinds. My personal view is that a lot of these uses of complaint by gender critical feminists, such as employment tribunals and other legal mechanisms, have in part been successful because they protect and promote deeply conservative ideas about sex and gender.

And this ideology has been successful in recruiting feminists despite promoting deeply anti feminist rhetoric about policing the boundaries of who counts and who can be seen as a woman. But these ideas, which position trans people, and trans women especially, as dangerous or deluded, circulate because this form of transmisogyny and transphobia is already so normalised – it’s hegemonic.

Thinking about that self presentation of gender critical feminists as a minority group fighting against ‘the trans lobby’, I’m reminded of the way people talked about the ‘race equality lobby’ – all these imaginary powerful people imposing their views, creating a cultural climate where you can’t talk about anything without being accused of being a bigot. This inflation of the power of those who are fighting for survival, that’s how power works. Hegemony often identifies those who are struggling for space as taking power away from others, or having power that they don’t have.

I try to speak out about it as much as I can, as a lesbian feminist, in alliance with trans women and trans feminists especially. But it’s very draining, trying to constantly challenge something that is just antithetical to a vision of liberation from the coercive nature of sex and gender. So the really important part, for me, is to be in community with other people who share these critiques, to share our resources and our aspirations and to continue to say ‘no’ to these attacks.