Complaint!

August 2, 2021
Feminist scholar Ahmed (What’s the Use?) analyzes in this scholarly account the shortcomings of the formal complaint process at universities. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with students and faculty who have made complaints, as well as her own frustrating experience trying to help a group of students navigate the process of making a collective sexual harassment complaint, Ahmed indentifies “institutional mechanics” that keep complaints from being heard. These include an insistence on formal written letters of complaint, which require students to give up their anonymity and may imperil their future careers, and a tendency to give more weight to accusations made or supported by those in positions of power. Ahmed also discusses how people who make complaints often discover that others have done so previously, and suggests that by “forming a complaint collective... those who are cast out can pull together, leap into the unknown.” Ahmed anonymizes and obscures these cases in order to protect people’s privacy, which makes it difficult to keep track of which example she’s talking about, and her knotty prose sometimes muddies the waters (“The sociality of how complaints are expressed is another way of considering the effects of how complaints are contained”). This hyper-focused study leaves the broader implications of Ahmed’s research unexplored.