Complaint! by Sara Ahmed

Abstract

Reviewed by: Complaint! by Sara Ahmed Julia K. Gruber (bio) Complaint! by Sara Ahmed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021, 359 pp., $29.95 paperback. In its satirical look at contemporary academia, the Netflix show The Chair (2021) takes on sensitive subjects, such as sexism, ageism, white elitism, free speech, and cancel culture. In the context of this review, it is interesting to note that the series is built around several complaints. Sandra Oh plays the newly appointed, first female, Asian American chair of an English department in crisis. In an NPR interview about the series, real-life academic Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen describes this hiring practice as the "glass cliff phenomenon": "Women of color are elevated to positions of power in really volatile moments when businesses know, they're in crisis. But that kind of scenario essentially sets them up to fall off the glass cliff."1 In episode one, the new chair accompanies a colleague to her new office, "a subterranean shithole in the athletics building." "What's the [End Page 350] point of a Title IX office if we are not going to use it?", Oh's character asks, to which her colleague responds: "Our first female chair, already a troublemaker." It is obvious that, even though she is pleasantly surprised by her chair's display of solidarity, the seasoned white woman professor instantly perceives the younger Asian-American woman's intent to file a complaint about the substandard office space as causing trouble. While Oh's character still seems to believe that filing a grievance with the university will remedy the situation, the older white professor has been working in academia long enough to know that "beating one's breast"—the original meaning of the verb "to complain," which is derived from Vulgar Latin "complanger"—will most likely lead to more problems. In her latest book, Sara Ahmed examines the phenomenology of complaint. As in all her writings, Ahmed repurposes language and situations in a way that invites her readers to reevaluate the environments they live and work in. In Complaint!, Ahmed exposes what it means to complain at academic institutions, explores how those who complain are perceived and punished for complaining, and lastly, praises those for whom complaining means fighting for justice and change despite the crushing ramifications of speaking up. Complaint! is based on the author's own experience with filing a complaint, which resulted in what she called in Living a Feminist Life (2017) "a feminist snap." In 2016, Ahmed's disappointment in her institution's handling of students' complaints about sexual harassment led her to leave academia as an employed academic: "It [writing this book] has helped me come to terms with what happened, to pick up the pieces of a shattered academic career […], to make and to understand the connections between what happened to me and what happened to others" (275). In four parts and eight chapters, Ahmed discusses the institutional mechanics of complaint, its immanence, what happens behind closed doors, and the importance of complaint collectives. Here, the author practices what she preaches: feminist solidarity. Thus, part IV consists of not only one, but two conclusions. Before Ahmed reaches her own conclusion, she provides space for women to write about a collective they formed to complain about sexual harassment and bullying at their institution. In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Ahmed intervened in one of the most common assumptions of social life, i.e., that we all need to be happy. In Complaint!, she writes: "[…] To complain is how you would stop yourself from being happy, to stop others from being happy, too, complaining is a killjoy genre" (1). Ahmed's aim is to counteract the history of unheard complaints "by giving complaint a hearing, by giving room to complaint, by listening to complaint, by becoming a feminist ear, to give complaints somewhere to go" (3). The book is based on forty interviews and eighteen written statements conducted and received between June 2017 and January 2019 and contains what Ahmed learned about complaining in academia: "Learned is one of the most used words in this book for a reason" (275, emphasis in original), she writes. [End Page 351] The subjects...