Business

INTRODUCTION

HEARING COMPLAINT

To be heard as complaining is not to be heard. To hear someone as com- plaining is an effective way of dismissing someone. You do not have to listen to the content of what she is saying if she is just complaining or always complaining. Consider how many self- help books teach you how not to complain or how to stop complaining. Titles are telling: No Complaints: How to Stop Sabotaging Your Own Joy; A Complaint Free World: How to Stop Complaining and Start Enjoying the Life You Always Wanted; Stop Complaining: Adjust Your Mind- Set and Live a Happier Life. Instructions to stop complaining are messages about complaint. The message received: to complain is not only to be negative; it is to be stuck on being negative. To complain is how you would stop yourself from being happy, to stop others from being happy too, complaint as a killjoy genre.

Who is heard as complaining? A hearing can be a judgment. A hearing can be a history. We can turn to the archives of Black feminism to hear how that judgment has a history. In one instance, Lorene Cary (1991), a working- class African American woman, is writing about her mother: “I always saw it coming. Some white department-store manager would look at my mother and see no more than a modestly dressed young black woman making a tiresome complaint. He’d use that tone of voice they used when they had impor tant work elsewhere. Uh-oh. Then he’d dismiss her with his eyes. I’d feel her body stiffen next to me and I’d know that he’d set her off ” (58). Cary “always saw it coming.” She has come to know her mother’s reactions; she can feel them as they happen. Earlier she describes how

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2

Introduction

her mother had “studied” the “rich white people” she’d worked for, as her mother’s mother had done before, and how Cary “studied” her mother (57). To study her mother is to learn what sets her off, the “rich white people,” store man ag ers, employers, who dismiss her as a “modestly dressed young black woman making a tiresome complaint.” Cary can hear and see it herself: the “tone of voice they used,” how he would “dismiss her with his eyes.” She can also hear her mother hear it, see her mother see it. Cary shows how Black feminist knowledge can be passed down as intimacy with bodily reactions.

To be heard as making a tiresome complaint is to be heard as being tire- some, as distracting somebody from doing “impor tant work elsewhere.” In that moment, it is history we hear, a history of how Black women are heard as just complaining, history as going on, history as going on about it. This story is not just about how her mother as a Black woman is heard as making “a tiresome complaint.” It is a story of how her mother reacts, how her body stiffens; how she is set off. Her mother refuses the message: this is not impor tant, you are not impor tant, what is impor tant is else- where. Those deemed tiresome complainers have something to teach us about complaint, to teach us about the politics of how some are received, to teach us what it takes to refuse a message about who is impor tant, what is impor tant.

What it takes, who it takes. I found Cary’s memoir because it was ref- erenced in Patricia Hill Collins’s ([1990] 2000) classic text Black Feminist Thought. Collins draws upon Cary’s description to show how emergent Black women went about “surviving the everyday disrespect and outright assaults that accompany controlling images” (96). Citation too can be hearing. We depend upon what others can hear. Collins could hear what Cary’s mother could hear because of what Cary could hear her mother hear. Collins uses that hearing to show what Black women know about “controlling images” in the strategies they develop to survive them.

A complaint: how you show what you know. Later in the text, Collins evokes the figure of the complainer. With reference to the prob lem of color blindness, how racism is often reproduced by not being seen, she observes, “Black women who make claims of discrimination and who demand that policies and procedures may not be as fair as they seem can more easily be dismissed as complainers who want special, unearned favors” (279). Racism as such can be dismissed as a complaint.

There is history to that dismissal. A history can be made up of many instances. In another instance, Amrit Wilson ([1976] 2000) discusses a report written by Hamida Kazi in the feminist magazine Spare Rib in

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3

Hearing Complaint

1976.1 The story is about an Asian woman who is assaulted by her hus- band. Wilson offers a subtle account of how such stories are framed by the media and delivered to a wider public. She writes, “When such stories are reported they are used to show how Asians are ‘uncivilised,’ and that they should be setting their community in order instead of complaining about racism” (188). This is a rather light use of the word complaining; it might not seem worth singling it out. Uses can be light when words are heavy. Complaining, complaint, complainer: we can be weighed down by words as well as judgments. We learn from a single sentence that to speak about racism is to be heard not only as complaining but as complaining about the wrong thing, to make racism a complaint as how some avoid addressing prob lems in their own community. Racism becomes that tire- some complaint, how some tire themselves out or tire others out, stop- ping themselves from doing what they should be doing (“setting their community in order”).

The judgment of complaint can also be an order: to stop complain- ing as a demand to set things right. Wilson shows that a story used for racist purposes (evidence of Asians being “uncivilized”) can be the same story used to dismiss racism as complaint. Racism is often enacted by the dismissal of racism as complaint. Stories about vio lence against Asian women are instrumentalized to demand allegiance to a national proj ect. Allegiance would be enacted by being willing to locate the prob lem of vio lence in your community rather than in the nation; the latter vio lence we often summarize as racism. You can become a complainer because of where you locate the prob lem. To become a complainer is to become the location of a prob lem. Wilson, by hearing how Asian women activists are “answering back,” to reference the title of her piece, teaches us how some are willing to become complainers, to locate a prob lem, to become the location of a prob lem.

A FEMINIST EAR

It was impor tant to me to open this book with how complaints are not heard or how we are not heard when we are heard as complaining. My aim in the book is to counter this history by giving complaint a hearing, by giving room to complaint, by listening to complaint. A history can become routine; a history can be how those who complain are dismissed, rendered incredible. I think of my method in this proj ect as being about hearing, lending my ear or becoming a feminist ear. I first introduced the idea of a feminist ear in my book Living a Feminist Life (2017). I was

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4

Introduction

describing a scene from the feminist film A Question of Silence (directed by Marleen Gorris, 1982). In the scene, a secretary is seated at a table. She makes a suggestion. The men at the table say nothing. It is as if she has not said anything. A man at the table then makes the same suggestion. They rush to congratulate him on his good idea.

She sits there silently. A question of silence: she can hear how she was not heard; she knows how and why she is passed over. She is just a secre- tary; she is the only woman seated at a table of men: she is not supposed to have ideas of her own; she is supposed to write down their ideas.2 To hear with a feminist ear is to hear who is not heard, how we are not heard. If we are taught to tune out some people, then a feminist ear is an achievement. We become attuned to those who are tuned out, and we can be those, which means becoming attuned to ourselves can also be an achievement. We learn from who is not heard about who is deemed impor tant or who is doing “impor tant work,” to return to the sharpness of Cary’s Black fem- inist insights. We learn how only some ideas are heard if they are deemed to come from the right people; right can be white. What would you say or do if you were the one being passed over? What would you say or do if your ideas were heard as originating with another person? Would you complain? Would you say something, express something? The question of complaint is intimately bound up with the question of hearing, of how we express ourselves given what or who is passed over.

To hear complaint is to become attuned to the diff er ent forms of its expression. We can pause here and consider the diff er ent meanings of complaint. A complaint can be an expression of grief, pain, or dissatisfac- tion, something that is a cause of a protest or outcry, a bodily ailment, or a formal allegation.3 In researching complaint, I began with the latter sense of complaint. But as I will show throughout this book, the latter sense of complaint as formal allegation brings up other, more affective and embodied senses. It was a feminist ear that led me here; it was what I could hear in complaint or from complaint that led me to the proj ect. I was inspired to do this proj ect after taking part in a series of inquiries into sexual harassment and sexual misconduct that had been prompted by a collective complaint lodged by students. Another way of saying this: the proj ect was inspired by students. If my task in this book is to hear complaints, to listen to them, to work through them and with them, the book is a continuation of a task I began with students.

Where we hear complaint matters; when we hear complaint matters. I still remember the day I first heard from the students who had put for- ward a collective complaint. The students had requested a meeting. I was

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Hearing Complaint

asked to attend as a feminist academic from a diff er ent department. The students had requested this meeting because an inquiry into sexual ha- rassment that had taken place over the summer of that year did not find sufficient evidence, or evidence that took the right form, to take their complaint further. The students I met that day had already formed a col- lective to write a complaint. I learned from them how and why they had formed that collective. You too will have an opportunity to learn from and about their collective in chapter 7 of this book. I also learned there had been a number of earlier inquiries prompted by earlier complaints. I have since found out how common this is: when you are involved in a complaint, you come to hear about earlier complaints. You come to hear about what you did not know about.

I attended the meeting with the students with another academic. Be- fore the meeting, I wrote to her to say that it had been “stressed” to me that “the institutional will is such that any formal letters of complaint will have immediate consequences.” If I passed on this stress before the meet- ing, the students taught me to question it. By insisting that the students individually make formal written complaints, the university was asking them to give up their anonymity, to make themselves even more vulner- able than they had already made themselves. The following day I wrote to the colleague with whom I attended the meeting that if the position was that we needed formal written complaints by individuals to reopen the inquiry, then “strategically” we might need to try to “get that evidence.” But we also agreed that we needed to push for a change of position. We realized our task ought not to be to persuade the students to make formal written complaints but to persuade the university to hear the complaints that had already been made.

We wrote a report giving a full account of what the students had shared with us. We quoted a legal expert who had confirmed that formal written statements should not be necessary to establish “the balance of probabil- ity” that harassment has happened, which was all that was needed, by law, to establish. We concluded the report by stating that those who have been harassed “should not be made responsible for redressing it.” Listening to the students, we had realized just how much work, time, and energy they had already given to identifying and documenting the prob lem. As I will explore throughout this book, making a complaint is never completed by a single action: it often requires you do more and more work. It is exhaust- ing, especially given that what you complain about is already exhausting.

The report we wrote up after the meeting led to further communi- cations between academics and administrators, to the reopening of the

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6

Introduction

inquiry, and then to further inquiries. We can identify a prob lem in this sequence of events. For the students’ complaint to be heard, or for the complaint to be heard with a stronger commitment to action, it had to be written up by academics. Complaints, it seems, go further the extent to which those positioned higher up in an organ ization express them or give support to them. The path of a complaint, where a complaint goes, how far it goes, teaches us something about how institutions work, what I call in part I of this book institutional mechanics. It should not be the case that support from those who are more established is necessary for a complaint to be heard. But when this is the case, that support can be vital to stop a complaint pro cess from being stalled.

To work on a complaint is often to work out how a complaint is stalled. It was given how the pro cess had stalled that we agreed on a compromise: students could make complaints anonymously. When the requirements for the form of complaint were loosened, more students came forward to testify in the inquiries. There was nothing automatic about this pro- cess; complaints did not rush out like water from a tap that had been unblocked. It still took a conscious and collective effort by students to make complaints that would be, in their terms, “legible to the university.”4 It is not only that a complaint is not completed by a single action; you often have to keep making the same complaints in diff er ent ways before they will be heard or in order for them to be heard. Many of the students who testified in these inquiries shared their stories with me. Those stories remain their stories. I do not share their stories in this book. But I have written Complaint! with their stories in mind. I hear their stories along- side those I have collected for this book. To become a feminist ear is to hear complaints together.

A feminist ear can be understood as an institutional tactic. To hear complaints, you have to dismantle the barriers that stop us from hearing complaints, and by barriers, I am referring to institutional barriers, the walls, the doors that render so much of what is said, what is done, invis- ible and inaudible. If you have to dismantle barriers to hear complaints, hearing complaints can make you more aware of those barriers. In other words, hearing complaints can also be how you learn how complaints are not heard.

It takes work to hear complaints because it takes work for others to reach you. Becoming a feminist ear meant not only hearing the students’ complaints; it meant sharing the work. It meant becoming part of their collective. Their collective became ours. I think of that ours as the promise of feminism, ours not as a possession but as an invitation, an opening,

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Hearing Complaint

a combining of forces. We worked together to confront the institution more directly about its role in enabling and reproducing a culture of ha- rassment. The harder it is to get through, the more you have to do. The more we tried to confront the prob lem of sexual harassment as an insti- tutional prob lem, the more we refused to accept weak statements about what the university was committed to doing, the more we questioned how they were changing policies without communicating with anyone why we needed to change policies (chapter  1), the more re sis tance we encountered.

Complaint: a path of more re sis tance. The institution becomes what you come up against. At times it felt like we were getting somewhere. At other times the wall came down and we realized that however far they were going to go, they were not going to go far enough. We could not even get public acknowl edgment from the administration that there had been any inquiries. It was as if they had never happened. To hear complaint can be to hear that silence: what is not being said, what is not being done, what is not being dealt with. It was during one of those times, walls com- ing down, the sound of silence can be walls coming down, that I de cided I wanted to conduct research on other people’s experience of complaint. My own experience of working with students on these inquiries led me to this proj ect. So much of what you do, the labor, the strug gle, happens behind closed doors: no one knows about it; no one has to know about it. My desire to do this research came from a sense of frustration, the feeling of doing so much not to get very far. Frustration can be a feminist rec ord. My desire to do this research also came from my own conviction that if you ask those who complain about their experiences of complaint, you will learn so much about institutions and about power: complaint as feminist pedagogy.5 Yes, frustration can be a feminist rec ord. Another way of putting this: Watch out, we have the data.

The knowledge we acquire from being in a situation can sometimes require we leave a situation. What I learned about institutions from sup- porting a complaint led me to leave; at the time it did not feel like a choice but like what I had to do. I think back to that room where I first heard from the students. When you are involved in a complaint, you are still at work; you are still doing your work. I would keep entering that room, the same room in which we had that meeting. It was my department’s meeting room, a much- used room. We would have other meetings in that room, academic meetings, papers shuffling, papers and persons being re - arranged. It was the same room, but it might as well have been a diff er ent room; perhaps it was a diff er ent room. It was filled with memories, occupied by a

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8

Introduction

history that felt as tangible as the walls. What you hear in the room comes to fill that room. I could not just turn up at the same old meetings, doing the same old things.

COLLECTING COMPLAINTS

I de cided to undertake this research on complaint before I resigned, but I did not begin the research until over a year after.6 That I resigned changed the nature of the research as well as how I could do it. I shared that I re- signed in a post on my blog on May 30, 2016. My resignation was widely reported in the national media less than two weeks later. While I found the exposure difficult, I was moved and inspired by how many people got in touch with me to express their solidarity, rage, and care. I received messages from many diff er ent people telling me what happened to them when they had complained. I heard from others who had left their posts and professions as a result of a complaint. One story coming out can lead to more stories coming out. I realized something from what came out: by resigning from my post, I had made myself more accessible as a feminist ear. Having become a feminist ear within my own institution, I could turn my ear outward, toward others working in other institutions. I think it was because I resigned in protest about the failure of the institution to hear complaints that people entrusted me with their stories of complaint. It remains my responsibility to earn that trust.

Given that my own resignation put me in a better position to collect other people’s stories of complaint, I am not just telling the story; I am part of the story. In Living a Feminist Life (2017), I described my resig- nation as a snap, a feminist snap. “Snap” can be what you say when you make the same connection. A snap can also be the sound of something breaking. So often a complaint is understood as snapping a bond, break- ing ties, connections, to a university, to a department, to a proj ect, to a colleague. One of the reasons some people do not hear about a complaint or are not willing to hear about a complaint is because of how it would threaten a bond they have to a university, a department, a proj ect, or a colleague. Snap: when a break becomes a connection.

Also snap: how we hear what each other can hear. A feminist ear can thus be a research method as well as an institutional tactic. I could write this book because of how many people shared with me their experiences of making complaints. I could write this book because of who I came to hear. My task is to hear about complaints from those who have made them. The data comes primarily from communications with academics

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9

Hearing Complaint

and students who have made or considered making formal complaints at universities (or comparable educational institutes) about unequal or unjust working conditions or abuses of power such as harassment and bullying.7 This book is a collection of their complaints. Of course, there are other complaints, other kinds of complaints, and thus other stories to tell about complaint. In order to hear the complaints that I collect here, I cannot hear all complaints.

How did I come to collect these stories? Most people who participated in this research got in touch with me through my website or blog.8 Not every one who got in touch with me went on to tell me their story. Some- times getting in touch can be telling enough. People gave diff er ent reasons for getting in touch. Some said they wanted to help or to help out. One student emailed, “I write because I went through a years- long complaints procedure that I would like to share with you if you are still in this phase of your proj ect and/or if it might be helpful in your work.” Another wrote, “Thank you so much for doing this study. In order to help out, I want to share my own experience in submitting a formal complaint to my university’s reporting office after being sexually harassed by another student.” Some people got in touch with me because they felt I would or could hear them. One student wrote, “And so do bear with me as I write this to you. I know you’ll get it. You’ll get me, and what’s happened and where one might go from here.” Another student wrote, “I am writing because I need a feminist ear. Perhaps you can use this complaint in your work.” To become a feminist ear is to indicate you are willing to receive complaints. An academic wrote, “I want the story to go somewhere (apart from round and round in my head) which is why I am contacting you.” It can be hard when our stories of complaint go round and round in our heads. It can feel like a lot of movement without getting very far. Telling someone the story of complaint can be how the story goes somewhere. To become a feminist ear is to give complaints somewhere to go.

The proj ect gathered momentum as I began to share stories of com- plaint in posts, lectures, and seminars. The more you share, the more you hear. I think some people offered to tell me their stories of complaint because they could connect their own experiences with the stories I had already shared. To share a story of complaint can be to make a connec- tion. To share a story of complaint can be to add to a collection. A post- graduate researcher wrote to me, “I am happy to share my experience for your study if you are still collecting narratives.” To collect can mean to go to a place and to bring something or somebody back. To collect can also mean to bring something together from diff er ent places or periods

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10

Introduction

of time. To receive complaints, to hear them, is thus also to collect them; to go there is to go back; to bring something back is to bring us together.

That most of the people whose experiences I share in this book got in touch with me has shaped the tone and texture of this work. Those who contacted me often had to pay a high price for the complaints they made; in fact, this is why some people contacted me. One former pro- fessor wrote, “I took an off- the- record grievance pay- out (not massive) and a much- reduced pension to get out of academia two years ago after an unremitting fifteen years of sexist (and disablist) bullying. I would be willing to participate in your study if you can guarantee complete confi- dentiality. I had to sign a gagging clause when I got my grievance pay- out, which—as I’m sure you are aware—is how universities typically try to cover up the sexism that is rampant within them.” She needed me to keep her complaint confidential because of what the institution had covered up through the use of a gag clause, or an nda (nondisclosure agreement). To cover up a complaint is to cover over what the complaint was about, in this instance, sexist and ableist bullying, the “sexism that is rampant” within universities.

You are more likely to share a story of complaint if you have been stopped from sharing that story. Another academic wrote, “I would be happy to talk about my experience of being pushed into an nda.” Many people who contacted me did so because of what they were pushed into or how they were pushed out. In other words, much of the data in this book came out of complaints that led people into direct confrontations with institutions (and by “institutions” I would include the people em- ployed by institutions, peers and colleagues as well as administrators and man ag ers). We do not need to assume that complaints about unequal working conditions or abuses of power necessarily lead to such confron- tations to learn from those that do.

There is so much to confront in these stories. I conducted interviews with forty students, academics, researchers, and administrators who had been involved in some way in a formal complaint pro cess, including those who did not take their complaints forward, who started the pro cess only to withdraw from it.9 The interviews for the proj ect were conducted over a twenty- month period between June 2017 and January 2019. I spoke to many more people than I had originally planned. I could have spoken to many more people than I did. It was hard not to keep speaking to those who asked to speak to me, but I knew I needed to stop if I was to have any chance of doing justice to the material I had collected.10 In addi- tion to interviews, I received eigh teen written statements. I have over the

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22

Introduction

IN CONVERSATION

I have told you the story of the book. I have told you about the stories in the book. It is also impor tant for me to share how I understand this book as participating in a wider sharing of stories. The #MeToo move- ment, at least the one inspired by the Twitter hashtag, began after I had already started the research on complaint. As a po liti cal campaign the Me Too movement began much earlier, in 2006, or ga nized by the Black feminist activist Tarana Burke as a “space for supporting and amplifying the voices of survivors of sexual abuse, assault and exploitation.”30 Many of those I spoke to after #MeToo went viral referred to it: sometimes as a source of inspiration for their own decision to speak to me; sometimes as what heightened their sense of vulnerability, as a reminder of the trauma and pain of complaint; sometimes as a way of reflecting on the status of their own complaint as a story. One se nior researcher asked of her own testimony, “It is just another story. Another #MeToo?” It makes sense that #MeToo would become not only a reference point but a question, a question of what telling the story of a complaint can do.

This book in being on complaint is also on the university. By saying this book is on the university, I mean something more than that the university is my research field or site.31 I also mean the book is about working on the university. I write this book out of a commitment to the proj ect of rebuild- ing universities because I believe that universities, as places we can go to learn, not the only places but places that matter, universities as holders of many histories of learning, should be as open and accessible to as many as pos si ble. In working on the university, I am deeply indebted to the work of Black feminists and feminists of color who have offered impor tant critiques of how power operates within universities, including M. Jacqui Alexander, Sirma Bilge, Philomena Essed, Rosalind Hampton, Sunshine Kamaloni, Heidi Mirza, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Kay Sian, Malinda Smith, Shirley Anne Tate, and Gloria Wekker. Their combined work has created what I think of as counterinstitutional knowledge of how uni- versities work, for whom they work.32 Many of these scholars have also provided strong critiques of how universities make use of the rhe toric of diversity as a way of managing differences and antagonism. This book is indebted to these critiques in part because complaints procedures func- tion rather like diversity: when offered as solutions to prob lems, they are prob lems given new forms. So many complaints about prob lems within institutions are resolved in ways that reproduce the prob lems. So many complaints end up being complaints about how complaints are handled.

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23

Hearing Complaint

So many complaints made within institutions end up being complaints about institutions.

Counterinstitutional work in Black feminist and feminist of color hands is also often house work, with all the drudgery and repetition that word entails; painstaking work, administrative work, care work, and yes, diversity work.33 Institutions become what we work on because of how they do not accommodate us. My own experiences of doing this work as a woman of color academic have thus been an impor tant resource in researching and writing about complaint. I noted earlier that this book came out of my experience of working with students at my former uni- versity (as well as on it; there is no question, we were on it). I think of this work as in conversation with the work of those former students, two of whom are now academics, Tiffany Page and Leila Whitley, as well as the many other student activists I have met since beginning this research who are trying to find new ways to address old prob lems of sexual harassment and sexual vio lence at universities. As Anne McClintock (2017) describes, “Furious with administrators for protecting their institutional reputations instead of their students’ rights, survivors bypassed obstructionist deans, in ven ted new strategies of collaboration, taught themselves Title IX, and with unpre ce dented clout brought over two hundred universities under federal investigation.”34 So much of the inventiveness of student activism comes from an intimate knowledge of how institutions work to protect themselves, comes out of an experience of being obstructed, whether by procedures or by people.

I have many debts to students. I am deeply indebted to the work of Black students and students of color who have pushed universities to ad- dress their complicity with slavery and colonialism by challenging the ongoing use of campus security and police, by asking questions like “Why is my curriculum white?” or “Why is my professor not Black?,” by call- ing for the removal of statues of slave traders or the renaming of build- ings named after eugenicists.35 Some of the students complaining against sexual vio lence are the same students campaigning against the glorifica- tion of slavery and empire. I am inspired by a new generation of Black feminists and feminists of color in the UK and beyond; I think especially of the work of Lola Olufemi, Odelia Younge, Waithera Sebatindira, and Suhaiymah Manzoor- Khan.36 A feminist ear needs to be intergenera- tional: we need to become each other’s ears. We have so much to learn from each other.

We have many strug gles at universities because universities are occu- pied by many histories. If to complain within the institution is to strug gle

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24

Introduction

against it, then complaint shows, to use Angela Y. Davis’s (2016, 19) terms, “the intersectionality of strug gles.”37 By taking complaints as the shared thread, this research also brings the objects of complaint into view. I noted earlier how complaints can bring a world into focus; you come to see more. Making the act of complaining my focus thus brings what complaints are about into focus. Complaint provides a lens, a way of see- ing, noticing, attending to a prob lem in the effort to redress that prob lem.

We could describe the lens provided by complaint as an intersectional lens. Some of the words used to describe the complaint experience, I think especially of the word messy, are the same words used to describe intersectionality. We can return to my earlier description of complaint as a crash scene. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 139) describes intersectional- ity as like a collision of traffic coming from many diff er ent directions: “Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens at an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them.”38 You cannot always tell who or what determines the crash; for Black women, it could be race or sex discrimination or race and sex discrimination. If intersectionality is a point about structures, complaints are often an experience of those same structures; we tend to notice what stops us from proceeding, from going somewhere, from being somewhere.

Power is not simply what complaints are about; power shapes what happens when you complain.39 Complaint offers a way of attending to inequalities and power relationships from the point of view of those who try to challenge them. Although the focus of my study is on how people make use of complaint to challenge power, that is not all I will have to say about power. This book will show the complexities, contradictions, and complications of power through the lens of complaint. We will learn, for instance, how the same complaints procedures used as tools to re- dress bullying and harassment can be used as tools to bully and to harass. That this happens will not be surprising to feminist readers. We are fa- miliar with how the tools introduced to redress power relations can be used by those who benefit from power relations. The issue is not just that complaints procedures can be used by those with more power, but that complaints are more likely to be received well when they are made by those with more power. Even complications have complications. It can be tricky to work out who has “more power” in this or that instance in part as many who have complaints made against them tend to pass themselves

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25

Hearing Complaint

off as victims of a disciplinary apparatus. When this passing is successful, there is a reversal of power.

If power is tricky, complaints are sticky. Those who make complaints and those who are heard as complaining are themselves more likely to be complained about, becoming what I call in chapter 4 complaint magnets. So much can stick to you because you complain or when you complain. In the pages that follow, you will read about many sticky situations. I will share stories of those who have made complaints about sexual harass- ment, racial harassment, bullying, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism. You will hear how complaints can be affected by the structural position of the complainer (and by affected, I am refer- ring not only to where complaints go but whether and how complaints are made), by institutional precarity, poverty, mental and physical health, age, citizenship status, and so on. These phenomena all have distinct aca- demic lit er a tures. I will not be engaging substantially with these lit er a- tures within the main body of this book, although I use notes as point- ers so you can find relevant sources. I think of myself in this book as thinking with those I have communicated with. The complainers are my guides; they are my feminist phi los o phers, my critical theorists, and also my collective.

The words I have collected not only do the work; they are the work. In the first part of the book, I explore how making complaints teaches us about how institutions work, or institutional mechanics. Most of the material I share in this part of the book is drawn from people’s experience of going through a formal complaint pro cess, with a focus on what hap- pens early on in that pro cess. My concern throughout this part is with the gap between what is supposed to happen in accordance with policy and procedure and what does happen. I consider how complaints are stopped or blocked by the system set up for handling them. In the second part of the book, I go back in time to explore some of the experiences that lead people to consider making complaints. I consider the significance of immanence: how complaints are in the situations they are about. In the third part of the book, I consider how and why doors come up in many of the testimonies. If complaints teach us about doors, doors teach us about power: who is enabled by an institution, who is stopped from getting in or getting through. This part of the book is premised on a simple point: to complain about an abuse of power is to learn about power.

The concluding part of this book turns to the work of complaint col- lectives. I mentioned earlier that I became part of a complaint collective begun by students. The first conclusion, chapter 7, is written by members

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26

Introduction

of that collective, Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, and Alice Corble, with sup- port from Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia, and others. They describe how and why they formed a collective, which was fluid as well as pur- poseful, created to push complaints through, to get them out. In the final chapter I reflect on what complaint can teach us about collectivity, how we can assem ble ourselves, sometimes without even being in the same time and place. There is hope here; when you hear us together, we are louder. Although complaint can be a shattering— yes, I am picking up many sharp pieces—to make a complaint is often to fight for something. To refuse what has come to be is to fight to be. Doing this work has left me with a sharper sense, a clearer sense, a stronger sense, of the point of that fight.

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