Abstract
Readers familiar with Sara Ahmed's work will find her incisive analysis calling out in Complaint! Prepare to read something more like poetry than academic prose and you will appreciate her lyrical, reflexive rhythm. She writes, “You can become a complainer because of where you locate the problem. To become a complainer is to become the location of a problem” (3). Ahmed presents iterations of such phrases that twist and turn around the topic with in-depth analysis and reflection on institutional machinations of grievance and power. She presents a multi-faceted examination of complaint as a means for understanding a deeper reality: “…if you ask those who complain about their experiences of complaint, you will learn so much about institutions and about power” (7). While focused on examples from higher education, the book is relevant for institutions in many fields enacting similar dynamics.
Complaint! is divided into four parts: structure, experience, power, and recommendations based on Ahmed's lived experience and in-depth research.
Part I, Institutional mechanics of complaint explores policies, procedures, and what actually happens in institutions. I found this fascinating for its resonance with my own experience of formal and informal grievance processes. I expect it will resonate with your experience as member or leader of an institution.
Part II, The Immanence of Complaint explains this layered reality. “To make a complaint, you have to go back over something because it is not over” (101) a reflexive process Ahmed describes as backward temporality comparing this to queer temporality. Immanence is to dwell on something of the past while living in complaint now, bringing it forward in expression, pressing for transformation.
Part III, If These Doors Could Talk uses doors as metaphors for the opening and closing of institutions and institutional leadership to complainants. Ahmed examines who has power to open or close doors, how they provide or withdraw access, for whom such doors are designed or designated, and ultimately offers advice on how to navigate institutional doors.
Part IV, Conclusions addresses the longevity of complaint and their institutional and personal presence; if they are heard, lead to change, or dismissed. Ahmed asserts the collective, public nature of this action—and resonant long-lasting consequences—whether or not they lead to satisfactory results for the complainant or the institution.
Ahmed immerses the reader into the murky processes of grievance to problematize the contradictions of complaint while addressing agency too. “Describing complainers as institutional mechanics is a way to show that those who make complaints come to know about how institutions are working” (28). It is not enough to raise a voice in complaint, she contends. Instead, we must understand the mechanisms of complaint and work on them as a mechanic works on an engine. She describes these structures as more ambiguous machinations than simply policy mechanisms, reflecting my own experiences of an institution making claims about “unwritten policies” regarding unmarried partners traveling together with a religiously affiliated institution. More than a book on grievance, it throws open the doors of punitive procedures to show how they swing back on the very people seeking redress for injustice and inequity. She walks us through back doors and peers into institutional closets to explore the operations of power in higher education.
Ahmed describes complaint as messy in the way that intersectionality is messy. “If intersectionality is a point about structures, complaints are often an experience of those same structures” (24). Complaints may begin as focused resistance to a particular injustice, but they uncover the interlaced power dynamics of advantage and burden associated with identity categories in institutional life that make visible hidden normative assumptions.
Furthering Ahmed's arguments about “institutional nonperformativity” found in On Being Included (2012), the strength of this work is in its critique of contradictions: between policy and practice, image and reality, institutional values and outcomes. Given the metaphor of doors, it is possible to read into it an admonition of exit, of don’t let the door hit you on the way out! Instead, Ahmed insists on the persistent if indistinct efficacy of complaint, offering in the final paragraph of the book, “Impact is a slow inheritance” (310).
The strength of the book is in its validation of those who have complained, who have been politicized by complaint, and who have received complaints; all know its lasting legacy. The weakness is perhaps in me as reader and reviewer, wanting desperately for a powerful list of recommendations, instead leaving the book with significant insights about the operations of institutional power, but little hope for structural change. Strategic approaches to effective complaints—including a repeated warning to mind the gap between policy, procedure, and what actually happens—encourage and caution us to apply these insights to the fraught doors of institutional life.
