Sara Ahmed: Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy

Thursday, 17 May 2018 5-minute read

Last week, I attended a lecture by Sara Ahmed at the University of Leeds titled ‘Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy’. This was organised by Quilting Points, an interdisciplinary reading group on critical theory in Leeds whose programme this academic year focussed on Ahmed’s work. Ahmed’s lecture drew from her current work on complaints against sexual harassment and bullying in universities and how employers and management respond. She examined the ways in which complaints create an alternate record of the university space, one which records acts of violence in the ways in which a space is used in order to prevent those events from recurring.

Ahmed began by considering the patterns of use of university spaces, drawing from Howard Risatti’s account of the distinction between an object’s use and its intended function. An object’s use brings with it a set of instructions that enforce certain social relations and imposes material restrictions on its properties. Drawing from work in disability studies, Ahmed argued that an object’s use is not just about what it is for but also who it is for: certain patterns in the way a university space is used (like recurring sexual harassment, lack of disability access, etc) can make the space feel occupied, and make communities feel excluded. In light of this, Ahmed described any kind of diversity work as ‘banging [one’s] head against a wall’.

She subsequently examined the various institutional mechanics of dealing with complaints, and how these procedures may result in solutions that never achieve anything substantial. Management bodies may appear to address the problem, organising committees and meetings to look into the matter, but ‘creating evidence of doing something is not the same as doing something’. Or, alternatively, bodies can render the complaint itself a non-starter by making it prohibitively difficult to lodge one, as the circumstances that lead to a complaint can make the making of it prohibitively difficult. She added, ‘You don’t have to prevent someone from doing something, just make it harder’, giving examples of complaints that were invalidated because they fell afoul of unreasonable time frames. Or managements could rely on exhaustion to make a complaint or complainer go away, or alternatively have a short-term as a pressure valve to avoid having to address a wider structural problem. She later added in the Q&A that institutions can appear to listen to complaints while still being complicit in the problem.

Further to these institutional-mechanical roadblocks to making complaints, there were further challenges in the ways in which employers and members of staff used university spaces, something which became apparent in the biographies of complaints that Ahmed then presented. The responses to complaints attempted to minimise the experience of the people who were harassed, making it appear as if it was the complaint that brought the problem into existence rather than being an actual concern. Employers and supervisors are further able to hold future references or connections ransom to prevent individuals from making complaints. These biographical examples of complaints through the various complaint processes drove home that the material politics of use and complaint that Ahmed discussed were not merely abstract, but were lived experiences of students and scholars who not just had to tolerate sexual harassment, but were then told that their harassers were important men, and that making a complaint would alienate them and threaten their careers.

In light of all of this, Ahmed argued that a complaint is a form of feminist memory that is contrary to the intended use of a university space and its official narrative of its reputation. To make a complaint is to be part of a counter-institutional project that becomes a space for solidarity and empathy. But these forms of complaint through the official channels of universities’ procedures would be inadequate in fully transforming the ways in which spaces are used as, quoting Audre Lorde, Ahmed added ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.

What I found particularly difficult about Ahmed’s account of complaint was how best to respond to complaints without dividing constituencies. A remark she made towards the end of the lecture was especially puzzling, about how students’ complaints about the strikes as part of the University and Colleges Union industrial action this year or the concerns raised by members of staff about the impact on student learning were minimised as them ‘acting like consumers’ and ‘being complicit in a neoliberal institution’, undermining the solidarity between students and staff. This is a difficult conundrum, one for which I do not yet have a clear answer. Moreover, opposing something does not necessarily mean one is not complicit. Central to Ahmed’s talk was a provocation for everyone to challenge how the university appears diverse, and to recognise the labour and risk of complaint that is otherwise unrecognised and to listen, and connect with others to support them and share in this labour.

Acknowledgements: My sincerest thanks to Quilting Points for putting on such a fantastic series of events, and to the directors Hayley Toth for making sure I was able to get to the event and Emma Parker for putting up with all the interruptions in our conversation since September last year. And to Sara Ahmed for the fantastic talk, but also for the picture of Poppy (because the best part about academia is people’s pets). And also Erika Hawkins for showing me around the campus, and for the lovely company.