Complaint!

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To Ahmed, practicing feminism is integral to the embodiment of living a feminist life. Ahmed's Killjoy Manifesto [18] feministkilljoy blog [14] elucidate the tenets of living and practicing life through a feminist philosophy- while also creating space for sharing how these embodiments create tension in life experiences under systems of patriarchy and oppression. [ citation needed] Affect and phenomenology [ edit ] Published by Duke University Press in 2014. [38] Ahmed focuses on the idea of willfulness as resistance. She adds that willfulness involves persistence in having been brought down. Ahmed's goal throughout this book was to "spill the container" as willfulness provides a container for perversion. [39] Living a Feminist Life [ edit ]

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed | Goodreads

Being brought up in a middle-class environment, I was always told the university was where I would go. I was, originally, very interested in fine arts. I painted a lot of macabre, expressionist paintings, and I got into art school, but my father said it wouldn’t lead to a proper career, so I wasn’t allowed to go. I was also a philosophical child, so it then seemed obvious to choose the humanities. Ahmed, Sara, 1969-". Library of Congress . Retrieved 16 January 2015. data sheet (Ahmed, Sara; b. 08-30-69) 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? I was so compelled by your point, in On Being Included, that the term diversity “can be used as a description or affirmation of anything”—that it’s often seen “as a ‘good’ word precisely because it can be used in diverse ways.”Published in 2021 by Duke University Press. [46] According to the publisher: "examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens." [47] Co-edited books [ edit ] It was like: note this it. A complaint as something you are doing can acquire exteriority, becoming a thing in the world; scratching away; a little bird, all your energy going into an activity that matters so much to what you can do, who you can be, but barely seems to leave a trace; the more you try, the smaller it becomes, you become, smaller; smaller still. I think of those birds scratching away and, I think of diversity work, described to me by a practitioner as a “banging your head on the wall job.” When the wall keeps its place, it is you that ends up sore. And what happens to the wall? All you seem to have done is scratch the surface. Complaint as feminist pedagogy: the system is working by stopping those who are trying to stop the system from working. For awhile ago when i was reading your blog i saw a passage when you were talking about how one of your most uncomfortable moments within the academy have been when you are asking, who is invited, who are not invited and so on…i need the exact reference to that passage and have gone through most part of your blog but was unable to find it. can you help me with that_ To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account.

Complaint! A Book Launch and a Complaint Collective - Sara Ahmed Complaint! A Book Launch and a Complaint Collective - Sara Ahmed

Harrison, Guy (2021). On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster. U of Nebraska Press. p.111. ISBN 978-1-4962-2742-3. Ahmed's volume has become a foundational text in an emerging field in cultural studies known as affect— with a sound similar to that in the word acting—which seeks to investigate the way emotions impact individuals, institutions, and society at large.Complaint! offers catharsis, collectivity, and care. It is an archive of complaint, it is a radical call to action, and it is a feminist record. It is also beautifully written, deeply painful, and absolutely necessary at this very moment.” — Catherine Oliver, Gender, Place & Culture

Complaint!- Combined Academic Complaint!- Combined Academic

Emma Rees is professor of literature and gender studies at the University of Chester, where she is director of the Institute of Gender Studies. Kessler Lecture 2017 Sara Ahmed". YouTube. 2 July 2019. Archived from the original on 15 December 2021 . Retrieved 9 February 2021. Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar, writer and activist. She has held academic appointments at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently comple...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. This is another insightful book in Ahmed’s well-regarded series of considerations of what acting as a feminist in non-feminist institutions means. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." — Choice I hear you, Sara Ahmed; I am trying to hear these ghosts. To feel these ghosts, learn from them, push with them. Yet I also hear and feel the wearing, tearing, moaning, groaning, pushing of Jane “Grannie” Glasgow in 1842, giving birth to my great-great-grandfather. One of the wives of Irish Presbyterian missionaries based in Gujarat, we are told she had a “prolonged and difficult labour” after refusing to let an Indian midwife turn her breech baby, to touch her. In Complaint! , Ahmed collects oral and written testimony from dozens of people who have experienced sexual abuse, racist harassment, or bullying within universities, and have chosen either to go through the institutions’ formal grievance procedures or to challenge those procedures altogether. Though all her interlocutors work in academia, I felt throughout that I could be reading about any other scene from institutional life. The stories Ahmed tells will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to seek redress (or merely recognition) from an institution trained against them. Over and over, complaints are either discouraged before they’re made, or welcomed in the abstract but deemed not credible in practice. Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining. They are both diminished and demonized. On the one hand, their concerns are deemed inconsequential—they’re trying to make something out of nothing—and on the other, they’re presented as malicious and threatening, as if they have the power to singlehandedly take the whole institution down. Ahmed was based at the Institute for Women's Studies at Lancaster University from 1994 to 2004, and is one of its former directors. [8] She was appointed to the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2004, and was the inaugural director of its Centre for Feminist Research, which was set up 'to consolidate Goldsmiths' feminist histories and to help shape feminist futures at Goldsmiths.' [9] In spring 2009 Ahmed was the Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women's Studies at Rutgers University [10] and in Lent 2013 she was the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Professor in Gender Studies at Cambridge University, where she conducted research on "Willful Women: Feminism and a History of Will". [11] In 2015 she was the keynote speaker at the National Women's Studies Association annual conference. [12] In 2016 Ahmed resigned from her post at Goldsmiths in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff there. [13] She has indicated that she will continue her work as an independent scholar. [14] She blogs at feministkilljoys, a project she continues to update. [15] The blog is a companion to her book Living a Feminist Life (2017) that enables her to reach people; posts become chapters and the book becomes blogging material. The term "feminist killjoy" "became a communication device, a way of reaching people who recognized in her something of their own experience." [16] Theories [ edit ] Intersectionality [ edit ]

Sara Ahmed Complaint! Durham: Duke University Press, 2021

Tate, Shirley Anne. 2017. “How Do You Feel? ‘Well-Being’ as a Deracinated Strategic Goal in UK Universities.” In Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia, edited by Deborah Gabriel and Shirley Anne Tate, 54–66. ioe Press. Ahmed illuminates how institutions like the university are designed for precisely the people who can and continue to flourish while miming theoretical righteousness and perpetuating violent norms." W]hiteness can be just as occupying of issues or spaces when they are designated decolonial” (158). 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. Simpson, Hannah (7 October 2016). "Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed (review)". College Literature. 43 (4): 749–752. doi: 10.1353/lit.2016.0043. ISSN 1542-4286.

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It is worth adding that among the group was one man who took both his professional ethics and his commitment to feminism seriously. Reward’, Sara Ahmed tells us, comes from warder, “to guard” (100). In white institutions, she continues, everyone gets rewarded for whiteness, for watching what we (or others) say, for becoming agents of surveillance, reproducing the “institutional legacy”. While she writes of this poisoned promise as necessary for POC safety or survival, as laboured and precarious, for me as a white woman it feels seductively available – speedy, easy, pleasant. There’s that lube again, oiling white bodies, oiling colonial cogs. Weems, Lisa (2012). "The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (review)". PhiloSOPHIA. 2 (2): 229–233. ISSN 2155-0905. It is a mess, a tangle, if you get in, you can’t work out how to get out; you end up with so many dead ends, so many crossed wires. And despite all of that, all that work, nothing seems to shift.