{"id":156731,"date":"2022-01-14T16:41:44","date_gmt":"2022-01-14T21:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156731"},"modified":"2022-01-19T13:15:39","modified_gmt":"2022-01-19T18:15:39","slug":"you-pose-a-problem-a-conversation-with-sara-ahmed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/01\/14\/you-pose-a-problem-a-conversation-with-sara-ahmed\/","title":{"rendered":"You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo of Sara Ahmed by Sarah Franklin.<\/p><\/div>\n

Who hasn\u2019t had a boss, supervisor, or mentor worthy of complaint? The first person I worked for, who was white, was in the habit of calling me \u201cweak.\u201d Her boss\u2019s boss, also white, one day gave a company-wide address during which he called someone, a childhood friend, by an ugly racial epithet. When I complained about his speech, I was told there was no recourse. That\u2019s simply how my boss\u2019s boss\u2019s boss <\/em>was. No one felt the need to specify exactly what this meant. They just invoked some vague idiosyncrasy to explain away his bad behavior, which might otherwise be confused for something sinister\u2014heavy and historical and violent\u2014something that could, if it were named, prove to be a liability. I repeated my complaint twice: first at a mandatory \u201cdiversity and inclusion workshop,\u201d during which employees were encouraged to share grievances, and then again after I had decided to quit, during my exit interview with HR. Both times, my complaint, once spoken, seemed to disappear. But complaints, according to the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, never really go away. If you are the complainer, they tend, as she puts it in her newest book, <\/em>Complaint!, to \u201cfollow you home.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Sara Ahmed was born in Britain in 1969 to a Pakistani father and an English mother. Soon after, the family moved to Australia, where Ahmed grew up before returning to the UK to complete her doctorate. She is the author of eleven works of nonfiction, the earliest of which are totems of feminist postmodernism, affect theory, and queer phenomenology. Her most celebrated contribution has been the figure of the Feminist Killjoy, who shares a name with Ahmed\u2019s popular blog, which she began writing alongside her 2017 work, <\/em>Living a Feminist Life. \u201cWhen you expose a problem,\u201d she writes in that book, \u201cyou pose a problem.\u201d Being a Feminist Killjoy is a matter of identification; it is also, as Ahmed describes on the blog, what she does and how she thinks, \u201cmy philosophy and my politics.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In <\/em>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\u2019 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\u2019re 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\u2014they\u2019re trying to make something out of nothing\u2014and on the other, they\u2019re presented as malicious and threatening, as if they have the power to singlehandedly take the whole institution down.<\/em><\/p>\n

Complaint! is among Ahmed\u2019s most personal works. In tandem with <\/em>On Being Included, her 2012 study of diversity initiatives, it mounts a compelling case against the long-term viability of institutional life as it\u2019s currently configured. For over twenty years, Ahmed was employed as an academic, first as professor of women\u2019s studies at Lancaster University and then as professor of race and cultural studies and director of the Center for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, from which she resigned at the end of 2016. Her resignation was an act of protest against the institution\u2019s culture of sexual harassment and thus, as Ahmed wrote on her blog, a \u201cfeminist issue.\u201d She had begun the research that comprises <\/em>Complaint! before resigning, but doing so allowed the work to find new life, traveling beyond the closed doors and brick walls of the university, into the wide-open field of public discourse.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There was a lot of media coverage of your departure from academia, but I\u2019m curious to know more about your early relationship to it. What promise did the university hold for you as a young person?<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

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\u2019t lead to a proper career, so I wasn\u2019t allowed to go. I was also a philosophical child, so it then seemed obvious to choose the humanities.<\/p>\n

I came to academia with a lot of hope, interest, and enjoyment. I still remember the sense of wonder\u2014that it was possible to stay a student, to stay in a place of learning, to be surrounded by learning. I didn\u2019t really know what an academic job was, but I loved writing essays, doing research, and going to the library. While I was doing my Ph.D., I realized that being a lecturer was something that was possible for me. It just so happened that there was a job opening in women\u2019s studies at Lancaster. I didn\u2019t have any publications, but they interviewed me, and they hired me, partly, I think, because I was so enthusiastic. I was very lucky. It was a permanent job in one of the largest women\u2019s studies programs in Europe, and I was in an incredibly supportive feminist environment. I was so moved to be part of that. It wasn\u2019t that I didn\u2019t experience the other side of academia\u2014the narrowing of what counts as knowledge, the ways in which what appears to be an open and inclusive environment can actually be a hostile and difficult one for people who don\u2019t fit. I became aware really early on of the gap between what appears to be the case and what is the case. But it was still the promise and interest in learning that took me there, and that stayed with me. It was a lot to give up, when I did resign.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So many people seem to go into academia with the idea that it will be a kind of refuge for their wonder. I\u2019m curious how hopeful you feel that scholars can continue to find intellectual nourishment there.<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really use the language of refuge. I don\u2019t know that universities can be places where you can go to have breathing space, given the kinds of pressures academics are under, and given the extent to which these institutions rely on precarious staff. All that makes it much, much harder to fight for alternatives. At the same time, the most inventive academic work comes from those who occupy precarious positions. A lot of the really important work\u2014in Black studies, in gender studies, in women\u2019s studies\u2014comes out of a battle with institutions for something. When people become more secure and better resourced institutionally, they also tend to become more conservative and more willing to do, as I call it, the work of institutional polishing\u2014play by the rules, make the institution look good\u2014because there are benefits attached.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In the early years of your academic career\u2014when you focused on postmodernism, postcolonialism, queer phenomenology, affect theory\u2014you were, essentially, producing theory. But with On Being Included<\/i> and Living a Feminist Life<\/i>, your research and methods shifted. They began to resemble something like sociology. And those books weren\u2019t purely descriptive or analytical\u2014they also formed part of the real-life work you were doing to try to change the institution you inhabited. What occasioned that shift?<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

For a while, I had been doing work on race and strangers\u2014who gets seen as a body out of place within neighborhoods\u2014but eventually I turned my attention to the university itself. Lancaster was an incredibly white institution, and I\u2019d already been aware of that, obviously, as one of the very few academics of color employed there. But I began to hear the justifications of that whiteness in faculty meetings. My ears were filling with the sounds of institutional machinery. I became director of women\u2019s studies, and we were precarious\u2014we were fighting to keep our autonomy, and I could begin to feel the withdrawal of the institution\u2019s support. I could tell we weren\u2019t going to have a future. So I was getting a little desperate.<\/p>\n

By chance, a colleague in the management school, Elaine Swan, had gotten funding to do research on diversity in further education. She asked if I wanted to work on the project with her, and I said yes, primarily because it was a way of bringing money into the Institute. It was pragmatic, really, but then once I began the research, it changed everything. I ended up being involved with this group that was writing a race equality policy. Writing that policy was my first hard institutional lesson. We brought what I thought of as a critical language into it, but the university was able to use the policy\u2014which was about articulating racism in the institution\u2014as evidence of how good<\/i> it was at race equality. What I learned from that was how easily we can end up being interpellated. It\u2019s not only that there\u2019s a gap between statements about inclusivity and diversity and what actually happens. It\u2019s also that we end up working to create the appearance of what isn\u2019t the case.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I was so compelled by your point, in On Being Included<\/i>, that the term diversity<\/i> \u201ccan be used as a description or affirmation of anything\u201d\u2014that it\u2019s often seen \u201cas a \u2018good\u2019 word precisely because it can be used in diverse ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

I like to call diversity practitioners institutional plumbers. You have to work out where something gets stuck, and how to get it unstuck. And in working that out, you have to become quite inventive. There\u2019s a way in which \u201cdiversity\u201d can be emptied of its more antagonistic content\u2014i.e., the entire point of it\u2014but that emptying can also be used strategically. I was very conscious of how administrators in charge of diversity initiatives would try to maximize the distance between themselves and the complainers. They were not going to be using the language of racism, those so-called negative words that are about rendering the institution accountable for reproducing violence. Sometimes people use words like \u201cdiversity\u201d\u2014friendlier, happier words\u2014because they\u2019re just trying to get things unstuck. They think that word might enable certain people to be at the table with them.<\/p>\n

When I was researching Complaint!<\/i>, I became more aware of the limits of that strategy. If we have to give up so much of our language\u2014and ourselves\u2014to get people to the table, then it might be that the table keeps its place. A lot of people talked to me about how when they tried to make complaints, it was often the diversity agenda that would be used against them\u2014as if they weren\u2019t doing this the right way, as if they weren\u2019t being appealing enough, as if by even using certain words they were trying to make life difficult for other people, including other minoritized staff.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s not always clear, in the context of people\u2019s actual lives, how to complain effectively. It might be, for instance, that you have a complaint to make about how racism enables your white peers to get more research time. But you\u2019re already the only person of color in the department, and so in order to give yourself any chance of getting what you need, you might try not to appear like a troublemaker. That kind of institutional passing isn\u2019t about identifying with whiteness or with power, and it\u2019s certainly not about using happy language in order to get somewhere. It\u2019s just about trying to be safe. So, we can move between the registers. We can sometimes refuse to be positive because it takes too much out of us, and we can decide not to be negative, because that takes too much out of us, as well.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In Complaint!<\/i>, you write, using Audre Lorde\u2019s famous phrase, that \u201ccomplaints procedures could \u2026 be understood as \u2018the master\u2019s tools.\u2019 \u201d 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\u2019ve laid down is always likely to be a losing game?<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

Formal complaints can sound just like the master\u2019s tools\u2014bureaucratic, dry, tedious\u2014but they\u2019re also where you actually come to hear and learn about institutional mechanics, how institutions reproduce themselves.<\/p>\n

To use the Lordeian formulation, the effort to rebuild the master\u2019s house so that it can accommodate those for whom it was not intended cannot be understood purely as a reformist project. It is, potentially, revolutionary. Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. It\u2019s the sociability of complaint that leads it in a direction similar to a protest. You find your co-complainers, the people who get it, who have been there, your comrades. Some people cannot survive these institutions. Some people do not survive them. It is a fundamentally life-affirming task to build institutions that are not dependent on the diminishment of the life-capacities of others.<\/p>\n

At my former university, a group of students put together a collective complaint, anonymously, about sexual harassment and misconduct. The fact that people need to work collectively is often a measure of what we\u2019re up against. I could hear how these students were being talked about by others in the institution, I could hear how complainers were pathologized, accused of moaning about minor matters, and of being unwilling to let the institution recover from\u2014that is, cover over\u2014the problems they were trying to address. When you make a complaint about harassment that\u2019s endemic to a university, you\u2019re pitting yourself against people who don\u2019t want that problem to be recognized. People are put under so much pressure to stop their complaints. They\u2019re told it will end their careers, that it will end the careers of the people they should be in allegiance with and depend upon, that it will end everything. There\u2019s some truth in those dire predictions. When bullying and harassment are institutionalized, it\u2019s really hard to challenge them without challenging everything. And so, everything can begin to fall apart.<\/p>\n

Through the collective, you can assemble and laugh and eat and drink, and remind yourself that the institution isn\u2019t everything. The collective is what enables you to keep going. I am so grateful to Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble\u2014with support from Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia, and others\u2014for writing one of conclusions of Complaint! <\/i>about the work they began when they were students. I am grateful that their collective became ours.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I was so compelled by that story of the students in the anonymous collective, how once they recognized that their formal complaints against a particular professor would go unaddressed, they decided to inscribe all the library copies of his books with an acknowledgement that the author had been accused of sexual abuse. It made me wonder when complaint needs to cross over into sabotage. Is it possible to actually change an institution without stealing from it, disfiguring it, or vandalizing it?<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

There are a few different instances of what we might call sabotage in the book, which come from people\u2019s often quite inventive approach to getting information out. When complaints pass through a formal inquiry, the information is usually contained. Universities will use the language of confidentiality\u2014the need to protect the identities of those who make complaints\u2014to justify that containment, and there is some truth to that. But confidentiality is also misused. It becomes a way of keeping secrets. In my research, a lot of people talked about ending up in a file. The file is put away in a cabinet, and the cabinet is in a room, and the door to the room is locked, and that\u2019s that. It might be that you\u2019re at an event surrounded by peers, and maybe you signed a confidentiality agreement, or the institution that\u2019s hosting the event is the institution in which the thing happened\u2014there\u2019s a restriction on what you can say about what went on. So the file isn\u2019t just the papers locked up somewhere in the institution\u2014the file becomes you. You<\/i> have to keep it closed. And that weighs you down, it holds you back. It can be incredibly painful to know what happened, to know what you went through, but still you can\u2019t say it, you can\u2019t get it out.<\/p>\n

And so, a lot of the instances of vandalism and sabotage are about what you have to do to get the story out. The institution has ways of handling these histories of violence to make them disappear, just like the family can contain the violence that\u2019s happened inside it as a skeleton in the closet. A lot of the work of complaint is releasing the story of that violence into a wider world and seeing what happens to it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s often a kind of onomatopoeia at work in the language you use to describe the circuitous processes people have to go through to complain. In both Complaint!<\/i> and On Being Included<\/i>, you sometimes seem to mimic, stylistically, that sense of claustrophobia. Your sentences can feel like a closed loop, in which the same phrases keep iterating\u2014but then they shift such that a new possibility is illuminated. In other words, they model a way out. I wonder if your prose style has shifted as your ideas have been taken up\u2014through Feminist Killjoys and your recent books\u2014by readers outside academia?<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

I think my writing began to change before that. <\/i>It kind of changed when I wrote Queer Phenomenology<\/i>, which in a way is, of all my works, the most located in a philosophical tradition. I became interested in \u201cthe table\u201d in Husserl\u2019s philosophy, which was only a passing reference for him. I was supposed to pass over it, because the point of the table was to point elsewhere. But I became totally fascinated by it. I got a tape recorder, and I started reading out what I was thinking about the table. I picked up the table, I felt the table, and my thoughts weren\u2019t words so much as sounds. My writing became more and more about sound, and then, as I was writing the blog and Living a Feminist Life<\/i>, it just got looser.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it was a conscious decision, but once it happened, I became more interested in writing itself and in what I was doing with it. With the blog, you\u2019re reaching people in a different way. You\u2019re not dependent on the infrastructure of the university\u2014the classroom or the seminar. We\u2019re so used to it now, but back then it was still relatively new to me, the idea that I could write something and it would be out there, and I could get a response from someone straight away. There was some connection between the loosening of my writing style\u2014trying to get at the affect and the sound of the thing I was describing\u2014and feeling more directly connected to readers.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Are there other people who have influenced you as you made that transition, loosening your attachment to the genre of academic writing?<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

I\u2019m working on The Feminist Killjoy Handbook<\/i> right now, in which I have a chapter about the feminist killjoy as a poet. I use a very simple expression, \u201cto let loose.\u201d To let loose is to express yourself. It can even be about losing your temper. But it can also just mean to loosen one\u2019s 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\u2014of pronouns, say\u2014can be experienced as giving you no room. You have to experiment with combination. There\u2019s a connection between moving words around and opening lives up.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one line in Audre Lorde\u2019s \u201cPower,\u201d a very difficult and painful poem, about power lying loose and limp as an unconnected wire. I\u2019m interested in the idea of language as a connected wire. You keep it going so that something can pass through. It could be electricity. When I think of electricity, I think of snap, snap, snap, sizzle. You have to let the violence in to get it out, to express it. In an interview with Adrienne Rich, Lorde talked about writing that poem after stopping the car because she heard about the acquittal of a white police officer for the murder of a Black child. She had to stop the car, she said, otherwise she was going to have an accident. She had to stop the car, and a poem came out. She had to stop the car to get the poem out. That\u2019s the connection, I think, between my auntie, and Lauren, and Audre\u2014the absolute willingness to register the impact of violence, so that that registering is also the creation of a possibility for being otherwise.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Practically everyone I know who earns their living within an institutional setting has considered leaving it. Most don\u2019t. The idea of escape becomes difficult to separate from the hardships it might bring\u2014reduced access to funds, community, and so on. But it seems as though your resignation acted as one of those possibilities for being otherwise. You\u2019ve written that it enabled you to find a role that institutional life had inhibited, to act for others as a \u201cfeminist ear.\u201d Could say more about that, the communities or modes of communicating that opened themselves up to you once you made your exit?<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

[Laughs<\/em>]<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Or maybe they haven\u2019t!<\/p>\n

AHMED<\/p>\n

Maybe they haven\u2019t. It\u2019s a good question! I wouldn\u2019t ever want to under-describe how difficult it is to leave. But for me, it didn\u2019t feel like a decision. It was something I had to do. I just couldn\u2019t do it anymore. And I had this idea that I could become a writer and work independently. It would be very difficult for me, now, to get a job in the UK. I don\u2019t think I quite understood that when I left. But resigning changed how I could do the work. I didn\u2019t realize at first how much it really mattered to people that I had resigned. It led people to me, and it led them to feel that speaking to me wasn\u2019t speaking to the institution. I was somewhere else, in my little cottage in the middle of Cambridgeshire, and being out meant all the stories could come out with me. I don\u2019t think I could have written Complaint!<\/i> if I\u2019d stayed in the institution.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot I miss about being part of the university. We created solidarity in the Center for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, and I really miss that. That space had a sense of urgency. We weren\u2019t sitting around talking about, I don\u2019t know, affect theory\u2014which is not to say it\u2019s not interesting to sit around and talk about affect theory! But it was a different set of conversations that together felt like an emergency. We were trying to change the conditions of our own material possibilities. I miss my course on race, which I\u2019d taught every year since I became an academic in 1994. I miss the students. But wherever you are and whatever you\u2019re doing, you\u2019re missing something. You just have to decide what you\u2019re willing to miss. And missing all that has given me so many other opportunities to share, to communicate, and to think with people outside of those institutional spaces. So I\u2019m willing to miss it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor at<\/i> The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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