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SARA AHMED

— Writing gives me hope, as it is about connecting what we are doing to what came before, to who comes after. Reading is also for me a way of being ‘in connection’. When I am feeling despair, political or otherwise, I tend to write or read. I often read Audre Lorde – her prose or poetry is always close to hand. For me, reading and writing are profoundly optimistic gestures. But that does not mean they are that for everyone. We take up the struggle differently. I am always struck not only by how hard people fight for more just worlds, but how there is creativity in that fight. This means that what is creative is close to what is exhausting. I draw hope from writing as I draw hope from connection, community and from political struggle.

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SARA AHMED

— I don’t think I had a specific goal for this book. I just wanted to share what I had learnt from talking to diversity practitioners. I wanted to share their wisdom. We learn so much about institutions from those given the task of transforming them. But we also learn from the fact that they are who teach us! It is practitioners who know from first-hand experience the gap between what institutions say they do, or what they say they are committed to, and what they do. I didn’t want the time that practitioners gave me – the energy – to disappear or be funnelled into academic papers no one reads. On Being Included was a hard book to write – the most difficult book I have had to write – in part because I did not go much further than describe the exhaustion of doing the work and the exhaustion of what the work does not do. But I am glad I put it out there, and that it can be of use to those who are trying to transform institutions, who know all about those walls.

 

It was extremely hard to get a publisher for On Being Included – I wanted a UK/European publisher given the focus. So many publishers said there was no market for it. Duke University Press, my publisher, does not tend to speak of the value of books in terms of markets. This book has a very wide and growing readership. It is being read more now than when it came out a decade ago, probably because the material has if anything acquired more relevance. The genre of the ‘non-performative’ has proliferated since the book came out; I am thinking here of all those organisations making statements about how Black Lives Matter whilst remaining hostile environments for Black people.

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SARA AHMED

— The Promise of Happiness does offer a critique of positive psychology as a way of thinking about human subjectivity. The ‘hopeful performative’ is my term for a kind of ‘task’ given to subjects to think or talk themselves into more positive or happier states of being. I am quite sure that these tasks are gendered, falling more heavily upon women. Some are made responsible not only for trying to make themselves happier but for making others happier, too. I have been returning to some of this material in my chapter ‘The Feminist Killjoy as Cultural Critic’, in the forthcoming The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. I have been thinking of the hopeful performative as a kind of polishing (drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the academic Anne McClintock, on polishing as domestic labour). Polishing is about the creation of a shiny surface. You can create an appearance of happiness by removing what does not correspond to it. To polish is also to remove the polish, the labour, from the appearance. I had already described diversity as ‘institutional polishing’ in Living a Feminist Life. I think the happiness duty can also fall on people of colour. We have to remove so much from ourselves to provide organisations with shiny happy diversity. We can also think of imperial history as polished, how the violence of empire is removed by how it is remembered (that story of empire as a gift of modernity). What is polished has not gone away. This is why to see through happiness is to encounter what is real.

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SARA AHMED

— Before I answer your question, it is worth pointing out that the timeline of Complaint! is messy. I decided to research complaints whilst I was in the middle of a long complaint process that involved multiple enquiries. I was supporting students who had submitted a collective complaint about sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. I realised that despite the indications that the university was going to take their complaint seriously – they held the enquiries after all – there was so much they were not going to recognise or do. We realised there was not going to be any public acknowledgement that the enquiries had even happened, let alone a discussion of a problem with the institutional culture they revealed. That silence was a wall. I decided to do the research before I resigned because I realised that if we asked people about their experience of making complaints, we would learn so much about institutions. And then, when I resigned, a ‘complaint collective’ did indeed take form (although I did not use that term – it came from doing the research). Not all of this collectivity was public. So many people who I had never met got in touch with me to check in and ask if I was alright and to thank me for taking a stand. So many people shared with me their own stories of what happened when they complained. The conclusion of Complaint! has a discussion of resignation letters, how they can become part of the work of complaint in sometimes surprising ways.

 

There is so much work in the complaint and that work is mostly withdrawn or hidden. That work gets me to your question! Making a complaint can feel like becoming institutionalised: you have to fill in forms and follow procedures, paths laid out by the institution. And, then, your complaint often ends up in a file. It is you, a person or a group of people, who is doing that work, who is filling that file. The harder it is to get through, the more you have to do. And the more you have to do, the heavier the file. But it is not just the file that becomes heavier. We can experience complaint as weight. People told me where or how they felt the weight of complaint; in their necks, or backs or on skin. I think of one senior researcher who made a complaint about bullying. She was so  traumatised by the process that her periods stopped. That detail was in a document. That document was in a file. And that file was held by the institution. If the personal is institutional, the story of complaint can be one of alienation, of becoming alienated from one’s body and being. In other words, alienation can be how the institutional is made personal. What they file, we store, often in our bodies. This is why our bodies can tell us so much about institutions.

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SARA AHMED

— If my project began as a project on formal complaints, I realised very quickly that to keep that focus would be to narrow it too much, to miss too much. Thinking of complaint as diversity work was a way of showing how the work of complaint exceeds the form of complaint. In On Being Included and Living a Feminist Life, I understood diversity work in two senses: the work we do when we try to transform institutions and the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the norms of institutions. These two senses often meet in a body: those who do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution are often given the task of transforming these norms.

 

If you have to ask for an accessible room, you are not making a complaint in any formal sense. You are asking in fact for what is necessary to do your work, you are asking to receive something to which you are entitled. But you are still often heard as complaining, as being negative, and as getting in the way of others – those who are already accommodated. One disabled student told me how she was perceived as a ‘complete pain in the ass’ when she asked for reasonable accommodations, for what she needed to do her work. She said to counter that perception, you have to appear ‘grovelingly grateful’ or even to become a ‘cheerleader’ for the organisation. Trying to manage perception, not to appear as a complainer, to maximise the distance between yourself and that figure, is diversity work and the work of complaint. So, although she did end up having to make a formal complaint to get what she needed, the work of complaint began long before that. Complaint can be about the work some have to do to enter or to be in institutions that are not built for them, as well as the work we do to make institutions more accommodating.

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SARA AHMED

— I first used the term ‘institutional plumber’ in my book On Being Included. It was the term that came to mind as I was listening to diversity practitioners talk about their work. Diversity practitioners are typically employed by organisations to institutionalise their commitments to diversity. And yet, they often experience the organisation as blocking their efforts. If the institution has many pipes, literal and metaphoric, systems for passing materials around (including waste), diversity practitioners come to know these systems because of how much gets stuck in them. I was rather surprised by the extent to which my research on complaint returned me to this earlier work. I was surprised in part as a complainer or complainant seems to be in a structurally different position to that of a diversity practitioner who, in the UK at least, is typically an administrator. The points of similarity seem to be around an experience of ‘stuckness’. The complainer often ends up having to administer the complaint process; they have to do what they can to keep the complaint moving. And they learn about institutions from the difficulties they have getting a complaint through them.

 

Even if you get a complaint through the system, complaints are mostly made behind closed doors, which means people don’t tend to hear about them. So, if complaints get through, they often don’t get out. A complaint might be filed away. Or a complaint might end up in the ‘complaint graveyard’, to use an evocative image shared by one student. Perhaps filing cabinets can be graves. Or we might end up filing complaints away ourselves. I think of a woman professor who, after describing how a sexist and heterosexist comment at a meeting became a bonding moment between men, said, ‘you file it under “don’t go there”’. The file ‘don’t go there’ tells us where we have been. We might file away what it hardest to handle. If so, then a file becomes a handle. Sometimes, to get the complaint out, we need to snap or to fly off the handle. And because of how many complaints have been co tained (whether in cabinets, our bodies or both) to leak can be to let out more than a single complaint; it can be to let all of them out, all the complaints that have previously been filed or suppressed. Complaints can end up all over the place. We can, too. If we let something out, whether by writing a blog post like I did, or making a loud sound in a meeting, or writing a resignation letter that could land anywhere, or distributing leaflets that name harassers who have been protected by their colleagues, to reference some of the leaky actions described in my book, others can find us. This is what I mean by ‘a leak as a lead’. I also describe mess as a queer map; if a complaint can leave a trail as well as be a tale, a complaint can be how we know where to go to find each other.