Complaint Sara Ahmed Quotes

To learn from those who try to intervene in the reproduction of something is to learn about reproduction. To stop a system from being reproduced, you have to stop it from working. You have to throw a wrench in the works or to become, to borrow Sarah Franklin’s (2015) terms, “wenches in the works.” When you throw your body into the system to try to stop it from working, you feel the impact of how things are working. We learn how those who try to stop a culture from being reproduced are stopped. But in learning this, we also learn that reproduction is not inevitable, nor is it smooth, despite the failure to stop something from working.

Sexual harassment is material. It is a network that stops information from getting out. It is a set of alliances that come alive to stop something; that enable a complaint to be held up or to become confidential, so that it never comes out into the public domain. And notice here: so many complex things are going on at the same time. It is not activity that is coordinated by one person or even necessarily a group of people who are meeting in secret, although secret meetings probably do happen. All of these activities, however complex, sustain a direction; they have a point. Direction does not require something to originate from a single point: in fact a direction is achieved through consistency between points that do not seem to meet. Things combine to achieve something that is solid and tangible; bonds become binds. If one element does not hold, or become binding, another element holds or binds. The process is rather like the cement used to make walls: something is set into a holding pattern. The setting is what hardens. Perhaps when people notice the complexity, or even the inefficiency and disorganization, they don’t notice the cement. When you say there is a pattern, you are heard as paranoid, as if you are imagining that all this complexity derives from a single point.

those chips have come up again. The more nots you are, the more committees you are on. The more nots you are, the more chips they find. If we keep chipping away at the old block, no wonder they keep finding those chips on our shoulders. She added, “They treated the submission as an act of arrogance on my part.” It is as if she puts a complaint forward as a way of putting herself forward; the complaint is treated as self-promotional. So, it is not only that in making a complaint, you come to stand out. A complaint is treated as how you are promoting yourself.

The technologies we have available to challenge abuses of power—from complaints procedures to antidiscrimination policies to equality polices to the very languages of

Complaints about hostile environments might be necessary in order not to reproduce hostile environments. But complaints about hostile environments are often made in hostile environments.

centering of whiteness, white tears, the racism of denying racism, hurt feelings, white supremacy performed as hurt feelings.30 She is told off, called out for calling them out, for complaining in the wrong way.

harm and oppression—can be used to deflect attention from abuses of power. Those who abuse power given to them by virtue of their position can use the technologies intended to challenge abuses of power to abuse power. A bully with a complaint procedure is a bully with another weapon. Power is also the ability to influence how we are received. When some people matter more, their feelings matter more (“his distress was worth so much more than mine”). We are back to the significance of immanence. You don’t need to complain about not being taken more seriously if you are taken more seriously. But if those who are taken more seriously complain, then their complaints are taken more seriously.

An old syllabus, an old word, an old policy: these habits hold despite the modifications. The modifications made in response to previous complaints can end up reproducing the structure the complaints were about.

complaining often means drawing attention to yourself at the very time you draw attention to structures.

A structure can enable promotion. And if you challenge those structures, you are the one who becomes self-promotional.

Jennifer Doyle (2015, 33) observes that “the filing of a complaint often leads to the filing of more complaints—counter-complaints and complaints about the complaints process.” The immanence of complaints—complaints are made in situations that complaints are about—could be well described as a crash site: to complain is to collide into other complaints. Another way of saying this: some complaints get uptake; others do not.

When a complaint about a hostile environment collides with another complaint, that collision reproduces the hostile environment. To identify an environment as hostile is to be identified as hostile, as causing damage. You can become a “malicious complainer,” even though the complaint that is taken forward is not your complaint but the complaint made about you. And so we learn: it becomes more damaging to call a person, department, or institution transphobic than to be transphobic. We also learn: not all complaints are nonreproductive labor. In fact, complaints are more likely to get uptake when they are made against those who are trying to intervene in the reproduction of a problem. Reproduction is also about immanence: what is reproduced tends to be what we are

A classroom can be a post box. In writing that letter, she is trying to stop the same things from being posted: white supremacy as occupying of space. But the letter ends up being what is posted. A complaint about the letters in the box becomes another letter in the box. This is why to hear complaint is to learn about occupation. What usually happens keeps happening because those who try to stop it from happening, who complain about the hostility of an environment, are stopped. To post that letter, to make that complaint, can mean to end up being displaced. PART III IF THESE DOORS COULD TALK?

A complaint can be a point you reach when you can’t take it, when you are “just done with this,” the violence

A complaint can be how you live with yourself because a complaint is an attempt to address what is wrong, not to cope with something, not to let it happen, not to let it keep happening. You refuse to adjust to what is unjust. A complaint can be a way of not doing nothing. I think the double negative is often the terrain of complaint

A complaint can come out of a sense that unless you complain, the same thing will keep happening. In other words, a complaint can be what you have to make to stop the same thing from happening.

White supremacy can be enacted in the response to a complaint about white supremacy; you can be dispossessed from a complaint about dispossession.

If a body can express a complaint, a body can be a complaint testimony.

So much of the inventiveness of student activism comes from an intimate knowledge of how institutions work to protect themselves, comes out of an experience of being obstructed, whether by procedures or by people.

The person who puts the complaint forward ends up being the conduit; they have to hold all the information in order that it can be circulated; they have to keep things moving. We sense a difficulty here given that many of the experiences that lead to complaint can make it hard to hold yourself together, let alone an unwieldy process.

What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” She tells us what it means by showing us what it does. When a feminist house is built using the tools of “racist patriarchy,” the same house is being built, a house in which only some are allowed in, or only some are given room. Lorde stresses that those who are resourced by the master’s house will find those who try to dismantle that house “threatening” (112). An attempt to open up a space to others can be threatening to those who occupy that space.

A complaint becomes part of you, part of who you become, that problem child, you can’t shed it; you can’t shed her, having done it, made it, that complaint, “you cannot go back.” Perhaps it is a promise: having become a complainer, you cannot unbecome a complainer. Promises don’t always feel promising. That a complaint can take over your life, become your life, even become you, can be what makes complaint so exhausting.27 When making a complaint changes your sense of self, it changes your sense of the world.

To become a complainer can also mean becoming the object of other people’s complaints.7 Members of her department submitted an informal complaint to Human Resources identifying her as a bully. It should not surprise us that a “pushy minority” can morph into a bully. Bullying often works to create a narrative about a person as behind whatever is deemed problematic. She was a new head of department; she was trying to make changes to the culture of that department.

When violence gets in, a complaint comes out.

Whiteness can be reproduced in the spaces where it is supposedly being questioned. You even have to do the work of questioning the terms of their terms (“if you want to decolonize, we’ll do it on our terms”). If you don’t use their terms, or if you question their terms, what happens then? You might be dropped; you might be stopped. But the questions you raise are turned into questions about you.

You complain because you do not belong here. And your complaint becomes evidence you do not belong here. When the judgment that you do not belong here has already been made, you have to work hard not to provide evidence to support that judgment. She

Having evidence of being wronged does not stop you from being judged as in the wrong.

A complaint becomes a recording device; you have to record what you do not want to reproduce. This is what I mean by complaint as nonreproductive labor: all the work you have to do in order not to reproduce an inheritance.

Marilyn Frye (1983, 88) describes anger as akin to a speech act: “It cannot ‘come off’ if it doesn’t

get uptake.” Some complaints get uptake, which is to say, they come off, they survive a collision.

But rather than respond to her, the Indigenous student who called it out, the white professor prints out her letter and reads it out to the class, the same class she was complaining about. He does so without her permission. I think of that complaint, that letter, being read out by him. I think of what he is expressing in doing that. She is complaining about what is taken from her; white supremacy as the theft of space. And then her complaint is taken from her, turned into another way he expresses himself.