Our battles are not the same battles. But there are many battles happening behind closed doors. Behind closed doors: that is where complaints are often found, so that is where you might find us too, those of us for whom the institution is not built; and what we bring with us, who we bring us, the worlds that would not be here if some of us were not here; the data we hold, our bodies, our memories; perhaps the more we have to spill, the tighter their hold. The more we have to spill. Many complaints end up in filing cabinets; filing as filing away. One student said of her complaint: “it just gets shoved in the box.” Another student describes: “I feel like my complaint has gone into the complaint graveyard.” When a complaint is filed away or binned or buried those who complain can end up feeling filed away or binned or buried. Sometimes to get the materials out, we get out. When I make the reasons for my resignation public, I shared information, not very much, but enough; that there had been these enquiries. I became a leak: drip; drip. In the first chapter of the first section, Ahmed notes that some words already carry a complaint; ‘all you have to do is use a word like race and you will be heard as complaining’ (65). Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unreasonable’ (17) I have also heard, by professors interpreting my own complaints. In the next section, ‘The Immanence of Complaint’, we see how ‘institutional blinds’ are lifted when complaints make violence visible; yet, acts of violence are also justified by what Ahmed calls ‘theoretical justifications’ (133). These theoretical considerations are themselves violent (134; read, too, an example of a Title IX case at Harvard University, where theoretical assumptions are harmful). Or, when discourse is contested, professors will hurl ‘you can’t handle criticism’ (126), which I also hear quite often, a phrase that requires a lot of elaboration in situations involving power. To use the Lordeian formulation, the effort to rebuild the master’s house so that it can accommodate those for whom it was not intended cannot be understood purely as a reformist project. It is, potentially, revolutionary. Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. It’s the sociability of complaint that leads it in a direction similar to a protest. You find your co-complainers, the people who get it, who have been there, your comrades. Some people cannot survive these institutions. Some people do not survive them. It is a fundamentally life-affirming task to build institutions that are not dependent on the diminishment of the life-capacities of others. 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.

The front cover of this book from the patron saint of self-professed feminist killjoys, Sara Ahmed, features two doors by Rachel Whiteread. Those familiar with Whiteread’s work, though, will soon realise that they are and are not doors; they’re the casts or impressions of two doors. This presence-via-absence is a hallmark of the artist, whose playfulness around perspective and phenomenology is what fans of Ahmed’s writing will instantly recognise in Complaint!. 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. When I was researching Complaint!, I became more aware of the limits of that strategy. If we have to give up so much of our language—and ourselves—to get people to the table, then it might be that the table keeps its place. A lot of people talked to me about how when they tried to make complaints, it was often the diversity agenda that would be used against them—as if they weren’t doing this the right way, as if they weren’t being appealing enough, as if by even using certain words they were trying to make life difficult for other people, including other minoritized staff.In Complaint!, you write, using Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, that “complaints procedures could … be understood as ‘the master’s tools.’ ” At the same time, as you point out, making a formal complaint can be politicizing, since it shows the complainant how the institution systematically devalues her grievances. Do you think that trying to change things at a university by complying with the procedures they’ve laid down is always likely to be a losing game?

There’s often a kind of onomatopoeia at work in the language you use to describe the circuitous processes people have to go through to complain. In both Complaint! and On Being Included, you sometimes seem to mimic, stylistically, that sense of claustrophobia. Your sentences can feel like a closed loop, in which the same phrases keep iterating—but then they shift such that a new possibility is illuminated. In other words, they model a way out. I wonder if your prose style has shifted as your ideas have been taken up—through Feminist Killjoys and your recent books—by readers outside academia? Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. These insights help to quell my fear that is it not always immediately apparent what is political about complaint. After all, as Ahmed identifies, complaints are often made by perpetrators just as readily as victims. We live in an age where language no longer feels sufficient. Like the language of social justice, the language of victimhood is endlessly co-opted, recombined and re-purposed by individuals adept at DARVO. As Ahmed notes, although race and gender scholars are deemed complainers, they are more likely to receive complaints against them. This issue is most pronounced when complaints emphasise hurt feelings rather than pointing at material power relations. I think of the case where a union was penalised for publishing a poster identifying employees who worked during a strike action as scabs, making it a more serious offence to call someone a scab than to be a scab. But it’s the third section of the book that is most troubling, especially for those like myself who feel that they have no other option but to leave while departments and the university continue with their everyday approach to research as business. A scholar’s or a student’s departure does not end institutional violence. As many of Ahmed’s participants shared, once they lodge complaints against their supervisors, there can be instant ‘institutional death’ (223).This is an phenomenal work diving into institutional dynamics, specifically through the lens of how said institutions deal with complaints. As the author makes clear, they usually do their best to shove things under the rug with minimal disruption, especially if someone who is well-liked or a leader is involved. She also does not flinch away from calling out the violence inherent in many of these interactions. It is difficult not to compare one’s own experiences whilst reading Complaint!, especially when I and others have seen many complaints go through institutional processes that led to nowhere or are ‘buried’, as one participant shared (38). Ahmed likens complaints to biographies that tell a particular life story, reminding us that data is as experiential as it is theoretical (18): ‘The term complaint biography helps us to think of the life of a complaint in relation to the life of a person or a group of people […] To think of a complaint biography is to recognize that a complaint, in being lodged somewhere, starts somewhere else. A complaint might be the start of something – so much happens after a complaint is lodged, because it has been lodged – but it is never the starting point’ (20). It is difficult not to compare one’s own experiences whilst reading Complaint!, especially when I and others have seen many complaints go through institutional processes that led to nowhere or are ‘buried’, as one participant shared (38). Ahmed likens complaints to biographies that tell a particular life story, reminding us that data is as experiential as it is theoretical (18): ‘The term complaint biography helps us to think of the life of a complaint in relation to the life of a person or a group of people […] To think of a complaint biography is to recognize that a complaint, in being lodged somewhere, starts somewhere else. A complaint might be the start of something – so much happens after a complaint is lodged, because it has been lodged – but it is never the starting point’ (20). The first three sections of Complaint! follow the institutional life of a formal complaint: how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped. In Part One, ‘Institutional Mechanics’, Ahmed analyses the language, policies and procedures as well as other ‘nonperformatives’ (see also Judith Butler, 1993): institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name (30, 80), such as nodding (80). Complaints follow a particular procedural pathway, and they are filed and placed in a record, a record that is not only indicative of what happens to a person but also what happens in institutions (38) – or what can be considered the ‘phenomenology of the institution’ (41). The mechanics of the institution not only tell us how institutions work by going through long procedural processes, but also how they reproduce these systems of whiteness, violence and silencing (99-100).

One thing I am learning through complaint/ Complaint! is that this ‘innocent’ reproduction may not just be despite my (ancestors’) intentions – our supposed godliness, goodness – but also because of them. I thought of these ancestors when I thought of the well-meaning senior, white, female, feminist colleague (a figure that the Complaint! collective is very familiar with) advising me to “smile more” after my attempts to raise the coloniality of the curriculum at a staff meeting. And I thought of this advice, when I read Sara Ahmed’s account of a female student who – after escaping the office of a male staff member when he sexually assaulted her – was asked by senior management to sit down with him and have a cup of tea.

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Ahmed presents a careful and sophisticated analysis of power and its abuses in universities." — Baharak Yousefi, College & Research Libraries

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.

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An absolutely brilliant endeavor. . . . The real nuance and sophistication of this book, written with such emotional and intellectual insight, the means by which Ahmed identifies strategies of institutional power in relation to power in relation to harassment and abuse is revelatory, thorny, painful, and very, very necessary." — Linda M. Morra, Getting Lit with Linda Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186-219.