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Consider the exclamation mark Medieval in origin, this blink of ink has a gift for controversy A single point can signal a moment of joy or incredulity Use two or more, though, and risk being dismissed as shrill or shouty, especially if you are a woman   Feminist thinker and independent scholar Sara Ahmed has written 11 books, but her latest, Complaint! (2021), is the only one to employ an exclamation in its title Yet to immerse oneself in her body of work – which includes several public lectures, seminars and workshops – is to feel an intensification of everyday experience Her works are all attuned to affect, wilful subjects, and the phenomenology of trying to make yourself heard while living in a marked body: as an ‘unhappy queer’,’ a ‘melancholic migrant’, a woman and/or person of colour As Ahmed wrote in What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), ‘Sometimes, I feel like I am an exclamation point, as if in being I am shrieking’   In that book, a roving work of phenomenology, she examines ‘use as technique’ by closely examining a constellation of things, including an empty tube of toothpaste, a postbox, an arm and Jeremy Bentham’s desiccated body She shows how utilitarianism was historically used to shape the subjectivities of those deemed least desirable and most disposable – the poor, the incarcerated, the orphaned and the unhoused   What’s the Use? is the final book in a trilogy that began with The Promise of Happiness (2010), which looks at the regulatory uses of happiness, followed by Willful Subjects (2014), which valorises ‘wilfulness’ – a disposition towards disobedience, or to be ‘what gets in the way of what is on the way’ – as a way for feminists and minority groups to assert agency In its own way, each of her books tracks, with forensic care and attention, the peristalsis of power: what feeds it, what impedes it, what lubricates its sinuous passage through the halls of institutions and everyday life Bodies, for Ahmed, are a locus of feminist investigation Having an ‘out of skin’ experience – being at odds with the