Sometimes we need to stop the car, stop we are doing, to bring the violence that happens, that keeps happening, to the front of our consciousness. In letting the violence travel through us, our responses will take whatever form they need to take; a poem, a newsletter, a scream.

Or a report.

Journalist Barry Malone begins an article published on May 2nd, in the following way, “A Muslim man, Ishmail Hussein, was stabbed in London last Wednesday. His alleged assailant has now been apprehended and charged with attempted murder.”

A report is a matter of fact presentation.

A report can also be a critique.

Or a complaint. Or a protest.

The next sentence reads, “but you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you read the headlines, watched the breaking news reports, or listened to the opinions of the commentariat and the political class.” Malone explains, “That’s because the accused, Essa Suleiman, was the same man charged with stabbing two Jewish men later that day in the city’s Golders Green area, home to a large Jewish population.” Shloime Rand and Moshe Shine are the names of the Jewish men who were attacked. Ishmail Hussein is not mentioned or barely mentioned in how the events of that day are reported.

Why not? “It would kill the story,” Malone suggests.

That this man attacked another person, a Muslim, complicates the story, which is always more than an account of what happened. The story being told is of a crisis of antisemitism. That a Muslim person was attacked by the same person on the same day does not mean that there is no such crisis. But we need to learn from how facts are put to one side to tell this story and not another one.

When Muslims appear in so many stories as those who cause harm, they disappear when they are the ones being harmed.

Who appears and disappears?

I think of the figure of the stranger. I wrote a book on the figure many years ago. The cover of the book evokes the stranger as a shadowy figure.

We might assume the stranger is anyone we don’t recognise. This book is based on a simple suggestion: some people are recognised as strangers. Some people are seen as not belonging here or as not from here. They might be questioned about who they are or what they are up to, where they are from, because they are deemed suspicious, lurking or loitering without legitimate purpose.

The story of a stranger is how some appear as suspicious. A stranger to a story is about who disappears. When some people are not seeable as suspicious, they are not seen at all.

Even after Ishmail Hussein’s name was released, the story held its shape. It kept being told in the same way by politicians and in the mainstream media; two Jewish men were attacked. When there is an acknowledgment of a third attack, it is an after-thought or an “also.” As Malone notes, “The word ‘also’ is the key: ‘Suleiman also,’ ‘he also faces charges of,’ ‘he is also alleged to.’”

Hussein becomes an “also.”

Who else becomes an also? The barely mentioned? After thoughts?

To become a stranger, sometimes, is to remain in the shadows, at the edges of social experience, not registered as living and breathing.

Until.

Why would mentioning the third attack kill the story? If the story told is about the crisis of antisemitism, that crisis is just not announced but also explained, and by this, I mean, a cause is identified.

Suspicion falls as it so often falls.

The marches for the cause of Palestinian freedom are identified as the cause of that crisis. That causality is mostly asserted. Or just assumed. Or just implied. One article in Evening Standard quotes from Jonathan Hall, an “independent reviewer of terrorism legislation” who said it is “currently ‘impossible’ for such marches not to ‘incubate’ antisemitism.” Note the choice of word “incubate,” as if antisemitism is birthed, organically, from the act of protesting a genocide. The same article then states that Mr Hall’s comments are “echoed” by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirivis, who said “‘hate marches’ together with ‘purposeful anti-Israel demonisation’ had contributed to ‘a tone of antisemitism’ in the UK.” I think this use of tone is telling. All over the world, people are protesting against Israel, because they see what Israel is doing, see through the propaganda, to the brutality of colonial dispossession, the ongoing theft of Palestinian land and life. To see through such propaganda is certainly to be threatening to the status quo. Hence the tone policing. And so many other kinds of policing.

The story is enlisted to justify even more attempts to restrict demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine in the UK, including the May 17th march organised by the Solidarity with Palestine Campaign, “to commemorate the Nakba – for 78 years, Palestinians have been subjected to a racist system of oppression including ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide.  We march to reaffirm our commitment to the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, including the refugees’ right to return home.”

To march is to keep reaffirming that commitment to Palestinian freedom for as long as it takes for freedom to be realised. And so, we question how the crisis is being used to suppress the expression of that commitment. That means exposing many lies, contradicting many claims. No, protesters did not deliberately march in front of Synagogues. And yes, many Jewish people have been out marching for a free Palestine and to protest the genocide in Gaza. And yes many Jewish and non-Jewish people have being showing with meticulous care, the dangers of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. As Jewish Voices for Peace argue “the Israeli government, U.S. government, and anti-Palestinian organizations run concerted campaigns to redefine and misstate the meaning of antisemitism, aiming to falsely conflate it with criticisms of Israel or Zionism. They do this so the Israeli government can avoid accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”

Those who point to the falsity of conflations end up being seen as a threat. Jewish politicians such as Zack Polanski who support Palestinian rights and freedom are depicted using antisemitic caricatures in the very platforms in which a crisis of antisemitism is announced. This is evidence enough that when the crisis of antisemitism is instrumentalised, the main motivation is not the protection of Jewish people from harm but the protection of an alliance with Israel.

So much of political discourse is about the location of a threat. To challenge that location is to become the location of the threat. I think again of how Ishmail Hussein disappeared from the story of the attacks that took place on April 29th. If you can threaten a story by not being a threat, being a victim can make you a threat.

A stranger to a story becomes a stranger in one.

We might assume that fear is directed toward an object. When fear is not a contained by an object, when an object passes by, fear escalates. The others become all the more threatening if we can’t see them.

When the object passes by: I began writing on how emotions circulate through objects in part in response to what happened after September 11th, 2001. I shared some ideas in my 2004 book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Warnings were passed down in my own family, reminders that it is risky to travel as a Muslim or to travel with a Muslim name. I ended up on the “no fly list” back then, possibly because I asked a border force officer if he asked everyone where their fathers are from. I will always remember how it felt to be pulled into rooms for interrogation at airports. As Muneer Ahmad describes, after September 11, there was “an unrelenting, multivalent assault on the bodies, psyches, and rights of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian immigrants.” Leti Volpp suggests that the responses to September 11 facilitated “a new identity category that groups together persons who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’”

Racism is a blunt instrument. The vaguer the threat, the more people can be stopped by it. You are brown! You could be a Muslim! A terrorist! I think of Frantz Fanon who taught us that racism is inventive. When Black and brown people are seen through these inventions, the stuff of nightmares, the consequences are very real.

Racialisation turns many a body into an object.

For real.

An invention can be an incitement to violence. When three children, Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice Dasilva Aguiar were murdered in Southport on July 29, 2024, it was quickly and widely and falsely claimed that the attacker was a Muslim man named “Ali Al-Shakati,” who had entered the UK illegally on a dingy boat in 2023. The name was made up. The story was made up. No such person existed.

It did not seem to matter that Ali Al-Shakati was an invention; people still took to the streets, chanting “Pakis out” and “stop the boats,” threatening those they deemed threats, vandalising Mosques, trying to burn down a hotel in which asylum seekers were accommodated. Journalist Mannal Ejaz notes, “The reality is that no such person as Ali Al-Shakati exists. This misinformed narrative incited individuals to take violent measures, who were swiftly labelled as far-right extremists by much of the Western media. However, the use of politicised language obscures the hateful nature of these acts and mischaracterises the protests as mere far-right demonstrations. In reality, they represent far-right extremism, Islamophobia, and extreme levels of racism.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) attended one protest outside Downing Street. TBIJ summarised what they found:

Protesters had plenty of different motivations and political beliefs, but there were clear common threads…. Only a small number of people told TBIJ that they believed the attacker was Muslim. Some protesters who acknowledged the suspect was not Muslim nevertheless expressed Islamophobic and racist views. One woman said she believed migrants were trying to force British people to practise Islam, and one protester repeatedly referred to migrants who arrive in boats as “cockroaches.”

People did not need to believe that the perpetrator was Muslim in order to feel they had to protest because of Muslims. They did not need to believe something was true for them to act as if it was true. Think Islam, think terrorist; think migrant or asylum seeker, think threat.

Associations are sticky.

History is what sticks.

Conjure cockroaches. Contamination.

Act as if they are forcing us to be what we are not.

These kind of racist sentiments are hard to argue against. Facts are not likely to help us, pointing to errors of detail, to missing persons or invented ones. When racism becomes common sense, it is more than a belief. It goes deeper. Further back. Himani Bannerji describes common sense racism thus, “Whereas clearly stated racism definitely exists, the problematic aspect for us is the common-sense racism that holds the norms and forms thrown up by a few hundred years of pillage, extermination, slavery, colonization and neo-colonization.” Common sense racism, rather like common sense itself, is a hodgepodge of statements, facts, ideas, fantasies, stories, about “the others,” which combine to create a sense of who we are, of what is being taken away, and by whom. We could also call this reserve racism, ideas about the others that are not always articulated or made explicit, but are kept in reserve, in store for future use.

It is common sense not racism to be concerned about immigration, they might say. Whiteness goes without saying, as the saying goes. As an Australian who is not white, I know which parts of my biography are not a cause of concern. I know who they are not worried about. They don’t want too many people who are not white, to turn us into an “island of strangers,” to borrow words from our Prime-Minister. You are told to go back to where you came from. Some of us who are told that are born here. Some of us who are not told that are not born here.

Whiteness can be the sum of that difference.

There are so many ways you keep being reminding that you are “not one of them,” to borrow words from a woman of colour I interviewed about racism. Comments pile up over a lifetime. If these comments are a hodgepodge, the fragments when pulled together, can feel like a wall; yes a wall can be built from common sense. One of the tasks in my forthcoming book Common Sense and its Others is to show how being estranged from common sense is to learn more about it. We see what is and is not seen to keep hold of an old story, such as the one we call racism, rubbing out what does not fit, who does not fit, filling the empty spaces with fabrications.

Common sense is how a story holds despite the facts. How can we square this indifference to facts with the common sense view of common sense as a matter of fact? History might help. Sophia Rosenfeld is one scholar to have given common sense a history. She tracks how, in the early eighteenth century, it came to have an expanded meaning, providing “a minimal form of authority on which a common identity could be founded.” Rosenfeld cites Joseph Addison’s contribution to the journal, The Spectator (1711) in which he imagined common sense as a “neutral body,” to which anyone could belong if they adhered to a “basic set of mathematical axioms and linguistic distinctions,” such as “two plus two makes four.” To belong to common sense would mean “we shall upon all Occasions oppose such persons that upon any Day of the Year shall call black, white, or white, black, with the utmost Peril of our Lives and Fortunes.”

In my forthcoming book, I also explore how many different kinds of claims are treated as analogous to, or on a continuum with, a “basic set of mathematical axioms and linguistic distinctions.” These axioms end up being social as well linguistic distinctions, what some people know, and what they make. If common sense tells you spades are spades, common sense means being willing to call spades “spades,” to put it bluntly. Note that the claim to a shared body of common sense is a call to oppose those who oppose it (who don’t call things as they are, white is white, black is black).

Today, those judged to be most opposed to common sense are typically called “the woke.” Piers Morgan published a book Woke is Dead about how “Common-sense triumphed in an Age of Total Madness.” His evidence for the triumph of common sense? The election of Donald Trump to a second term as President of the United States. Morgan describes Trump’s presidency not just as a victory for common sense but “the single most vivid illustration of woke’s demise.” Morgan is merely parroting Trump himself who described his own presidency in his 2025 inaugural address as a “revolution in common sense.” Trump uses common sense like the royal we, another word for his own will. How can he justify the claim that DEI led to a plane crash? “Common sense.” Or the decision to deploy national guard troops to deal with crime in Chicago? “That’s not war. That’s common sense.” It is not that Trump says it because it is common sense; it is common sense because he says it.

Common sense ends up being about the emptying of speech of any propositional content. We can track that emptying by listening to those in power. Rishi Sunak, for example, said during his stint as Prime-Minister, “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman – that’s just common sense.” When woman or man is the answer to the question of what a woman or man is, the answer is there is no question. Common sense can be used to eliminate the question. Or the questioner. But think of how little ends up being said. How little is learnt. When common sense tells us spades are spades or tables are tables or women are women or men are men, common sense is not telling us anything about anything or anyone.

When statements of reality are emptied of any content, they can then be filled with the content of will. Common sense can end up being an assertion that that’s that, whether or not that is that, and a demand to repeat that assertion. Reality itself can be turned into a threat, by which I mean, unless other people go along with common sense claims even when they have evidence they are not true, they lose proximity to power. That’s why blunt speech is not really about reality, calling a spade a spade, putting things bluntly, but the power of some to frame reality in accord with their own will and to oblige others to act in accordance.

Immigration can be a euphemism for race. And blunt speech can be a euphemism for violence. I think of all the times I have heard the expression “he just calls a spade a spade” to describe someone who turns being mean or cruel into a way of life. In my work on complaint, I’ve explored how harassment and bullying are often redescribed as blunt speech. I have collected many such instances. Here are just a couple: in a report, bullying was described as “a direct style of management,” in a letter, a man accused of sexual assault was described as a “rough diamond.” To treat violence as a manner or style of expression is to give people permission to keep acting that way. Some forms of violence become defensible as free speech. Some violence, even extreme forms of violence, legitimated as defence.

And so, those who lack common sense – “the woke” as they like to call us now – can be framed both as losing a relation to reality and too invested in it, too blunt, not willing to hide behind euphemisms, to pass politely over inconvenient facts such as racism. We speak too bluntly, or too bluntly about the wrong things, the wrong kind of racism or the wrong genocide. Hence our forms of expression, our marches, must be stopped, yes, even in the name of free speech. It is so surreal but that’s where we are. Many of the people who speak of common sense, of what is obvious and certain and real and true are lying. They lie in the service of a story. They lie to protect the interests of an elite. They lie to keep hold of an alliance with a racist and genocidal state.

They lie about violence as if those who protest it cause it.

Surreal is a good word to describe how it feels to be living and writing now, with an ever widening gap between what we are told is real and what is actually happening. Omar Sakr wrote a blistering piece, “The End of Reality,” after the US and Israel bombed Iran in 2025. Commenting on the use of the claim, “Iran must turn to the negotiating table,” Sakr observes, “To assert that Iran must return to the negotiating table (a talking point always coupled with calls not to strike back, to ‘de-escalate’) when said table had just been blown up, and the people sitting at it killed, is bizarre to say the least.” Assertions do not just contradict the reality; the create another so detached from what is happening that it leaves you without a handle on things. And maybe that’s the point. Sakr notes, “I’ve called this piece ‘the end of reality” because I started it thinking about this latest break between what’s real and what is presented as such by the status quo. I might have more accurately called it ‘the beginning of reality.’”

That the status quo has become surreal has not just happened; it has been engineered, made to happen, so that those who protest genocide and imperialism, admitting a reality that seems impossible not to admit, and yet here we are, are treated as extremists. They do not do what they say, but they can still stop us from saying what they are doing.

There is so much violence to the obscuring of so much violence. And hence our need to keep writing, speaking, protesting, because even we do not get through, it helps to see others see through it.

I have been working on a new lecture this week, my last for this academic year, so I thought I would post an old lecture here. It was given over a decade ago, at the Lesbian Lives conference held in Brighton. Lesbian lives, by which I mean the programme of conferences, is still going. Last year, for the first time, it took place in New York. The 29th one will be held at University of Cork, 15-16 May, 2026. Lesbian Lives is still going no doubt in part because of how it is radical and open, queer and trans affirming. An expansive vision of lesbian lives means expanding our ideas of sex, sexuality and gender too, assembling, embracing, all of our letters.

We are still going too, living our lesbian lives in so many ways.

Would I give this lecture now? Not in so many words. And yet there are many threads in it that I am still pulling. Our writing evolves and changes, as we do. Each lecture, each book, or whatever comes out of us to give form to our feelings and thoughts, is another step on a path leading here.

Sometimes, it helps to go back over the trails. Other times not.

Sometimes, it helps to be seen. Other times not.

This lecture was given in 2015 and posted less than a week later on my blog. It draws from the chapter, “Lesbian Feminism” in Living a Feminist Life, which was published in 2017.

The chapter “Lesbian Feminism” was originally intended as the conclusion to Living a Feminist Life. Quite late in the process, I decided to add a “A Killjoy Survival Kit” and a “A Killjoy Manifesto.” Writing these two conclusions was what inspired me to give the feminist killjoys a book of their own, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook.

I referenced Lesbian Lives conferences in the handbook. I wrote about Nila Gupta a dear friend who I met at the very first one I attended.

“I think of the Lesbian Lives conferences I have attended over the years; we talked so much, but the dancing is what I remember. I danced with my friend Nila at those conferences, dancing can be queer, how we move together in our different bodies. Nim Ralph in a beautiful memorial to Nila describes their dancing: “Nila, committed to finding the joy of embodied movement and collective sweat, was the master of adapted dancing. I’d often look across a dance floor and see them expertly vibing in a chair, or making shapes assisted by their stick, frequently adding a point of leverage from the wall.”

To remember the conference is to remember the dancing. And to remember the dancing is to remember you.

We carry so many with us.

In killjoy solidarity,

Sara xx

“Living a Lesbian Life,” Sara Ahmed, Lesbian Lives conference, February 20, 2015, University of Brighton

I speak today from a conviction: in order to survive what we come up against, in order to build worlds from the shattered pieces, we need a revival of lesbian feminism. This lecture is an explanation of my conviction.

Right now might seem an odd time to ask for such a revival. It might seem we are offered more by the happiness of the queer umbrella. I think the erasure of lesbians as well as lesbian feminism (often via the assumption that lesbian feminism is a naïve form of “identity politics”) would deprive us of some of the resources we need because of what is not over, what is not behind us. In some recent queer writing, lesbian feminism appears as a miserable scene that we had to get through, or pass through, before we could embrace the happier possibility of becoming queer. For instance, Paul Preciado (2012) in a lecture on queer bulldogs refers to lesbians as ugly with specific reference to styles, fashions and haircuts. The lesbian appears here as elsewhere as an abject figure we were all surely glad to have left behind. I suspect this referencing to the ugliness of lesbians is intended as ironic, even playful. But of course much contemporary sexism and homophobia is ironic and playful. I don’t find it particularly amusing.

We need to refuse this passing by holding onto the figure of the lesbian feminist as a source of political potential. Lesbian feminism can bring feminism back to life. Many of the critiques of lesbian feminism, often as a form of “cultural feminism,” were precisely because of how lesbian feminists posed feminism as a life question, as a question of how to live. Alice Echols in her book Daring to be Bad, which gives a history of radical feminism in the United States, describes: “With the rise of lesbian-feminism, the conflation of the personal with the political, long in the making was complete and unassailable. More than ever, how one lived one’s life, not commitment to political struggle, became the salient factor” (1989: 240) Note this not: the question of how we live our lives is separated from a commitment to political struggle; more than that, it is implied that focusing on living our lives would be a withdrawal of energy from political struggle. We can hear a similar implication in Juliet Mitchell and Rosalind Delmar’s argument: “the effects of liberation do not become the manifestations of liberation by changing values or for the matter by changing oneself, but only by challenging the social structure that gives rise to the values in the first place” (cited in Echols 1989: 244). The suggestion is not only that life change is not structural change but that focusing on how one lives one’s life might be how structures are not transformed.

I want to offer an alternative argument. When a life is what we have to struggle for, we struggle against structures. It is not necessarily the case that these struggles always lead to transformation. But to struggle against something is to chip away at something. Many of these structures are not visible unless you come up against them and this makes doing the work of chipping away, I call this work diversity work, a particular kind of work. The energy required to keep going when you keep coming up against these structures is how we build things, sometimes, often, from the shattered pieces.

Walls

I am currently writing a book, Living a Feminist Life, which concludes with a chapter on lesbian feminism. One of the aims of the book is to bring feminist theory “home” by generating feminist theory out of ordinary experiences of being a feminist. The book could have been called “everyday feminism.” Feminist theory is or can be what we might call following Marilyn Frye “lived theory,” an approach that “does not separate politics from living” (1991: 13). Living a lesbian life is data collection; we collect information about the institutions that govern the reproduction of life: it is almost too much data; we don’t have time to interpret all the material we collect. If living a lesbian life generates data, then lesbian feminism provides the tools to help us interpret that data.

And by data I am referring to walls. I first began thinking about walls when completing a research project on racism and diversity within institutions. Diversity practitioners would talk of how the very institutions that appointed them would block their efforts. Diversity work was described by one practitioner as “a banging your head against a brick wall job.” A job description becomes a wall description. And what I learnt from doing this research was that unless you came up against the walls, they did not appear: the university would seem as happy as its mission statement, as willing as its equality statement.

In one interview I conducted quite late in the research process, a practitioner described one of her experiences of a brick wall. It was a click moment: you know that kind of moment, when something is revealed to you that you realise retrospectively you had been trying to work out or to work through. She described to me what happened within her university when they tried to change a policy around appointment procedures: she had got the change agreed at the diversity committee, but the agreement went missing from the minutes; when the minutes were sent to council someone noticed because she had chaired the diversity committee; the minutes were rewritten and resubmitted and the policy was approved by council; but then people acted within the institution acted as if the change had not been agreed. The diversity officer said that when she pointed out there has been a change of policy “they looked at me as if was saying something really stupid.” I learnt so much from her account: I learnt how the mechanisms for blocking structural transformation are mobile; things can be stationary because what stops things from moving moves. I learnt how an effective way of stopping something from happening is by agreeing to something. A “yes” can be said when or even because there is not enough behind that “yes” to bring something about.

It is the process of trying to transform a situation that allows this wall to become apparent. And I realised that this was the difficulty I had been trying to describe throughout my work: how you come up against things that are not revealed to others. Indeed what is hardest for some (I mean literally, ouch) does not even exist for others. I now use diversity work to refer not only to the work that aims to transform institutions, but the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution. When we fail to inhabit a norm (when we are questioned or question ourselves whether we are “it,” or pass as or into “it”) then it becomes more apparent, rather like that brick wall: what does not allow you to pass through.

A life description can be a wall description.

Things are fluid if you are going the way things are flowing. Think of a crowd: if you are going the right way, you are being propelled forward; a momentum means you need to make less effort to keep going. If you are not going that way, a flow is something solid, a wall; an obstruction. Lesbians know a lot about obstruction. And it might seem now for lesbians that we are going with the flow. Hey, we can go; hey, we can get married. And if you talked about what you come up against now, those around you may blink with disbelief: hey what’s up, stop complaining dear, smile. I am not willing to smile on command. I am willing to go on a smile embargo, if I can recall Shilamith Firestone’s “dream action” for the women’s movement (1970: 90). Talking about walls matters all the more when the mechanisms by which we are blocked are less visible.

The everyday is our data.

A lesbian experience: you are seated with your girlfriend, two women at a table; waiting. A straight couple walks into the room and is attended to right away. This might also be a female experience: without a man present at the table, you do not appear. I have experienced my female solidarity around these sorts of experiences: say, you are pressed up against a busy bar; two women who do not know each other, and over and over again, the men are served first. You look at each other both with frustration but sometimes affection, as you recognise that each other recognises that situation, as one in which we are perpetually thrown: she too, me too, “we” from this too. For some, you have to become insistent to be the recipient of a social action, you might have to announce your presence, wave your arm, saying: “Here I am!” For others, it is enough just to turn up because you have already been given a place at the table before you take up that place.

Of course more than gender is at stake in the distribution of attention. But gender is at stake in the distribution of attention. Every now and then you encounter something that reveals that distribution: that allows the feminist groan of recognition. One time I was at the London feminist film festival. They were showing A Question of Silence. It is a table scene, of course: there is one woman seated at a table of men; she is the secretary. And she makes a suggestion. No-one hears her: the question of silence is in this moment not a question of not speaking but of not being heard. A man then makes the exact same suggestion she has already made: and the other men turn to him, congratulating him for being constructive. She says nothing. It is at that moment she sits there in silence, a silence which is filled or saturated with memories of being silenced: her memories, ours, having to overlook how you are looked over. Sexism: a worn thread of connection. And yes: there was a collective groan.

Feminist philosophers has taught us for over a century how men becomes universal; women particular. Or perhaps we might say women become relatives, female relatives, existing by existing in relation to men. To become woman is to become relative. Women encounter the universal as a wall when we refuse to become relative. Note how we come to know these distinctions (such as universal and relative) not as abstractions, but in everyday social life, which is to say, in being in a world with others.

I want to add here that the requirement to become a female relative is not simply about the privileging of heterosexuality. Working in the academy I have noticed this expectation that to progress you must progress through male networks: you have to declare your love for one dead white male philosopher or another (if not Derrida, then Lacan, if not Lacan, then Deleuze, if not Deleuze, then, who Sara, who are you following?). You have to cite men and give more time and attention to their work; you have to have references by men in order to validate your own work. Of course, we do not “have to do” what we “have to do.” But if it is easier to refuse that requirement from a position of relative security then we learn how that requirement is enforced through insecurity, the sense that, to reach somewhere, you have to go in this direction, or you might not get anywhere at all.

For her to appear, she might have to fight. If this is true for women, it is even truer for lesbians. Women with women at a table are hard to see (and by table here I am referring to the mechanisms of social gathering, a table is what we are assembled around). For a gathering to be complete a man is the head. A table of women: a body without a head. Male privilege is not simply about being seen but being seen to, having your needs attended to. This is why I describe privilege as an energy saving device: less effort is required when a world has been assembled to meet your needs. You don’t need to raise your arm to have a standing. I will return to willful lesbian arms in my conclusion.

Data as wall.

You turn up at a hotel with your girlfriend and you say you have booked a room. A hesitation can speak volumes. This reservation says your booking is for a double bed, is that right madam? Eyebrows are raised; a glance slides over the two of you, catching enough detail. Are you, sure madam? Yes that’s right; a double bed. You have to say it, again; you have to say it, again, firmly. Some have to insist on what is given to others. In previous work I have offered a formula:

Rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy

When you are known as a feminist, you do not even have to say anything before eyes roll. You can hear them sigh “oh hear she goes.” I now have another formula.

Raised eyebrows = lesbian feminist pedagogy

The raising of eyebrows: lodged as a question: Really, are you sure? This happens again and again; you almost come to expect it, the necessity of being firm just to receive what you have requested. One time after a querying, are you sure madam, are you sure, madam, you enter the room; twin beds. Do you go down; do you try again? It can be trying. Sometimes it is too much, and you pull your two little beds together; you find other ways of huddling.

Questions follow you, wherever you go. For some to be is to be in question. Is that your sister or your husband? Are you sisters? What are you? Who are you? As a brown woman I am used to be asking “where are you from” as a way of being told I am not from here. There are many ways of being made into strangers, bodies out of place. “Are you a boy or a girl?” they ask her, this time, a question that drips with mockery and hostility. Some of these questions dislodge you from a body that you yourself feel you reside in. Once you have been asked these questions, you might wait for them. Waiting to be dislodged changes your relation to the lodge.

It can be exhausting this constant demand to explain yourself. A desire for a more normal life does not necessary mean identification with norms, but can be simply this: a desire to escape the exhaustion of having to insist just to exist. A history can become concrete through the repetition of such encounters, encounters that require you to put the whole of your body, as well as your arms, behind an action. Maybe these actions seem small. Maybe they are small. But they accumulate over time. They feel like a hammering, a chip, chip, chip, against your being, so that eventually you begin to feel smaller, hammering as hammered down. Actions that seem small can also become wall.

An ordinary battle

An ordinary is what we might be missing when we feel that chip, chip. An ordinary can be what we need to survive that chip, chip. Susan Griffin remembers a scene for us, a scene that has yet to happen :

I remember a scene … This from a film I want to see. It is a film made by a woman about two women who live together. This is a scene from their daily lives. It is a film about the small daily transformations which women experience, allow, tend to, and which have been invisible in this male culture. In this film, two women touch. In all ways possible they show knowledge of. What they have lived through and what they will yet do, and one sees in their movements how they have survived. I am certain that one day this film will exist ((cited by Becker, Citron, Lesage and Rich 1981).

Lesbian feminism: to remember a scene that has yet to happen, a scene of the ordinary; of the movements, little movements, which tell the story of our survival. It is a touching scene. Sometimes you have to battle for an ordinary. When you have to battle for an ordinary, when battling becomes ordinary, the ordinary can be what you lose.

But you have a glimpse of it even when you lose it.

Think of this: how for many women, life has been understood as a sphere of immanence, as dwelling in not rising above; she is there, there she is; not transcending things by creating things. A masculinist model of creativity is premised on withdrawal. She is there, there she is: engaged in the endless repetitive cycle of housework. We can follow Adrienne Rich who makes this starting point into an instruction: “begin with the material,” she says, with “matter, mma, madre, mutter, moeder, modder” (1986: 213). Lesbian feminism is materialist right from the beginning. If women are expected to be here, in matter, in materiality, in work, at work, this is where lesbian feminism begins. We begin in the lodge where we are lodged. We begin with the lodge when we are dislodged.

A poignant lesbian scene of ordinary life is provided by the first of the three films that make up, If These Walls Could Talk 2. We begin with that ordinary: we begin with its warmth. Edith and Abby: they have been together a long time. The quietness of intimacy: of going to see a film together, of coming home together. Yes maybe there are comments made by some kids on the street, but they are used to it: they have each other, a place to return to; home as shelter, a place to withdraw to. If the walls could talk, they would tell their story, photographs cover the walls, photographs not only of each other, of their friends, but of lesbian and gay marches, demonstrations. A wall can be how we display a lesbian feminist history.

Everything shatters, when Abby slips and falls.

Everything shatters. A life can shatter.

We are in the hospital waiting room. Edith is waiting to hear how Abby is. Another woman arrives. She says: “they just took my husband in, he had a heart attack.” When this woman asks about Edith’s husband, Edith replies, “I never had a husband.” And the woman says, “That’s lucky, because you won’t have the heart break of losing one.” The history of heterosexuality becomes a history of broken hearts, or even just the history of hearts. To be recognised as having a heart is to be recognised as the one who is broken. With such recognition, comes care, comfort, support. Without recognition, even one’s grief cannot be supported or held by the kindness of another.

We know this history; it is a history of what we know.

And so Edith waits. When she asks the hospital staff to see Abby they say “only family are allowed.” The recognition of family ties, as the only ties that are binding, means Abby dies alone; it means Edith waits all night, alone. When lesbian grief is not recognised, because lesbian relationships are not recognised, you become “non-relatives.” You become unrelated, you become not. You are left alone in your grief.

Heterosexuality could be described as an elaborate support system. Support is how much you have to fall back on when you fall. To leave heterosexuality can be to leave those institutional forms of protecting, cherishing, holding. You have less to fall back on when you fall. When things break a whole life can unravel.

When family is not there to prop you up, when you disappear from family life, you had to find other ways of being supported. When you disappear from family life: does this happen to you? You go home, you go back home and it feels like you are watching yourself disappear: watching your own life unravel, thread by thread. No one has willed or intended your disappearance. Just slowly, just slowly, as talk of family, of heterosexuality as the future, of lives that you do not live, just slowly, just slowly, you disappear. They welcome you, they are kind, you are the lesbian aunties from London, say, but it is harder and harder to breath. And then when you leave you might go and find a lesbian bar or queer space; it can be such a relief. You feel like a toe, liberated from a cramped shoe. And we need to think about that: how the restriction of life when heterosexuality remains a presumption can be countered by creating spaces that are looser, freer not only because you are not surrounded by what you are not because you are reminding there are so many ways to be.

So much invention comes from the necessity of creating our own support systems. Note here the significance of fragility to this history: how we too can be shattered, how we need each other to put our lives back together again. And: if we are recognised as fragile, breakable, broken, we are often assumed to have caused our own damage. We after all have willingly left the apparently safer paths, the more brightly lit paths of heterosexuality. What did you expect, dear: what did you expect? Feminists are often assumed to cause their own damage, as if she, rather like a broken pot, flies out of hand. When we say she “flies out of hand” we usually means she speak out of anger, caught up by a destructive impulse, and that in breaking ties, she breaks herself.

Shattering; it is shattering; she is shattered.

There are many ways of telling the story of the struggle for recognition because there are many stories to tell. The struggle for recognition can be about having access to a good life. It can be about wanting inclusion in the structures that have been oppressive, wanting inclusion in the very structures that remain predicated on this dispossession of others. But that’s not the only story. The struggle for recognition can also come from the experience of what is unbearable, what cannot be endured, when you lose your bearings, becoming unhoused. The struggle for recognition can be a struggle for an ordinary life, an ordinary that is more far more precious than property; indeed an ordinary as what is negated when things become property, when things become alienable things. We learn this from If these Walls Could Talk 2: when Abby’s family ask what things are hers so her things can become theirs, Abby’s things, her loved worn things, her memories, can become family possessions. A family possession is a dispossession. Perhaps a lesbian feminist struggle for recognition comes out of rage against the injustice of how some dwell by the dispossession of others. We want the walls to come down. Or, if they stay up, we want the walls to talk, to tell this story. A story too can shatter: a tiny thousand little pieces, strewn, all over the place.

Lesbian feminism: in making an ordinary from the shattered pieces of a dwelling we dwell. We dwell, we tell. How telling.

A Willfulness Archive

In this first part of this lecture I noted how actions that are small can also become wall. Lesbian feminism might also involve small actions. Maybe the chip, chip, chip of hammering can be transformed into a hammer: if he is a chip off the old block, we chip, chip, chip away at that block. Chip, chip, chip, who knows, eventually it might come right off. To persist in chipping at the blocks of hetero-patriarchy, we have to become willful. I want to think of lesbian feminism as a willfulness archive, a living and a lively archive made up and made out our own experiences of struggling against what we come up against.

Why willfulness? Let me share with you a typical definition of willfulness : “asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse.” To be called obstinate or perverse because you are not persuaded by the reasoning of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before?

Lesbian, feminist and anti-racist histories can be thought of as histories of those who are willing to be willful, who are willing to turn a diagnosis into an act of self-description. Let’s go back: let’s listen to what and to who is behind us. Julia Penelope describes lesbianism as willfulness: “The lesbian stands against the world created by the male imagination. What willfulness we posses when we claim our lives!” (1992: 42, emphasis in original). Marilyn Frye’s radical feminism uses the adjective willful: “The willful creation of new meaning, new loci of meaning, and new ways of being, together, in the world, seems to me in these mortally dangerous times the best hope we have” (1992: 9). Alice Walker describes a “womanist” in the following way: “A black feminist or feminist of color… Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one… Responsible. In charge. Serious.” (2005: xi, emphases in original). Together these statements can be heard as claims to willfulness: willfulness as audacity; willfulness as standing against; willfulness as creativity.

Willfulness is usually a charge made by someone against someone. Willfulness becomes a charge in Alice Walker’s sense, to be “in charge.” If we are charged with willfulness, we can accept and mobilize this charge. To accept a charge is not simply to agree with it. Acceptance can mean being willing to receive. A charge can also be thought of as electricity. The language can be our lead: willfulness can be an electric current, passing through each of us, switching us on. Willfulness can be a spark. We can be lit up by it. It is an electric thought.

We can distinguish here between willfulness assumed as behind an action, and willfulness required to complete an action. Sometimes to stand up you have to stand firm. Sometimes to hold on you must become stubborn. Remember my example of going the wrong way in the crowd? For some bodies mere persistence, “to continue steadfastly,” requires great effort, an effort that might appear to others as stubbornness or obstinacy, as an insistence on going against the flow. You have to become insistent to go against the flow and you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent. I think of this as a life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being. You might have to become what you are judged as being to survive what you are judged as being.

We are often judged as willful when we are not willing; not willing to go with the flow, not willing to go. To become lesbian might require not being willing women; lesbians as willful women. Monique Wittig’s (1992) audacious statement “lesbians are not women” could thus be read through the lens of willfulness. She argues that lesbians are not women because to be “women” is to be is being in relation to men: “women” for Wittig is heterosexual term or a heterosexual injunction. Remember woman becomes from the conjunction of wif and man: wif as wife, as female servant. To be a woman with a woman or a woman with women (we do not need to assume a couple form) is to become what she Wittig calls an “escapee” or a stray. To be a lesbian is to stray away from the path you are supposed to follow if you are to reach the right destination. To stray is to deviate from the path of happiness. So if lesbians are women, if we wrestle woman away from this history of women as being for men, we are willful women.

Willful women: how striking. Willfulness as a style of politics might involve not only being willing not to go with the flow, but being willing to cause its obstruction. Political histories of striking are indeed histories of those willing to put their bodies in the way, to turn their bodies into blockage points that stop the flow of human traffic, as well as the wider flow of an economy.

Willfulness might seem here to be about an individual, the one who has to become willful just to keep going, although we see how a strike only works when it becomes collective, when others too are lit up by that spark. We might think of characters like Molly Bolt from Ruby Fruit Jungle (1973) as part of our willfulness archive: girls who want girls are often those girls whose wills are deemed wanting. As a lesbian feminist reader it is was characters like Molly Bolt with a spring in their step that picked me up; feisty characters whose vitality is not at the expense of their lesbian desire, but is how their desire rooms across the pages.

If we think of lesbian feminism as a willfulness archive we are not simply directing our attention to characters such as Molly Bolt, however appealing. A willfulness archive would derive as much from our struggle to write ourselves into existence, as from who appears in what we write. This intimacy of audacity, standing against and creativity can take the form of a book.

A willful girl in a book

A willful girl as a book

I am rather taken by you

Gloria Anzaldúa describes her book Borderlands as follows: “The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will. It is a rebellious, willful entity, a precocious girl-child forced to grow up too quickly” ([1987]1999: 88). A book, a survival strategy, comes alive, acquires a life of its own, a will of its own, a willful will; history by the bone, own but not alone. Words are sent out: willful words; they pile up, they make something. Words can pulse with life; words as flesh, leaking; words as heart, beating.

Lesbian feminism of colour: the struggle to put ourselves back together because within lesbian shelters too our being was not always accommodated. Where does she take me? Not white, lesbian out of not; here she comes. I think of a brown history, a mixed-history as a lesbian history, another way in which we can tell a history of women being in relation to women. I think of my own history, as a mixed lesbian, with so many sides, all over the place. I think of all that lesbian potential, as coming from somewhere. Brownness has a lesbian history; because there are brown lesbians in history, whether or not you could see us, whether or not you knew where to find us. As Nila Gupta (2014) has noted it is sometimes assumed as brown queers and trans folk that we are rescued from our unhappy brown families by happy white queer communities; but not, what if not, what if not; what if brownness is what rescues us from the white line, the line takes us in a direction that asks us to give up part of ourselves?

I will not give you up

A willful will; not willing as willing not

Lesbian feminism of colour is a lifeline made up out of willful books that insist on their own creation. Books are themselves are material, paper, pen, ink, blood, the sweat of the labour to bring something into existence. Words come out of us.

A poem weeps

Audre Lorde spoke of herself as a writer when she was dying. For Lorde, writing and speaking and living as a Black lesbian (Lorde never refused the demands of this “as” nor assumed it can abbreviate an experience), survival is militancy; words are her weapons. She says : “I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes–everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!” (1988: 76-77).

And so she did

And so she did

She goes out, she makes something. She calls this capacity to make things through heat “the erotic.” Lorde notes: “There is a difference between painting a black fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love” (1984: 58).

A love poem

A lover as poem

I warmed by the thought. I am warmed by Cherrie Moraga’s poem, “The Welder.” Moraga speaks of heating being used to shape new elements, to create new shapes, “the intimacy of steel melting, the fire that makes sculpture of your lives, builds buildings” (1981: 219).

We build our own buildings when the world does not accommodate our desires. When you are blocked, when your very existence is prohibited or viewed with general suspicion or even just raised eyebrows (yes they are pedagogy), you have to come up with your own systems for getting things through. You might even have to come up with your own system for getting yourself through.

How inventive

Quite something

Not from nothing

Something from something

A kitchen table becomes a publishing house.

To stand against what is we have to make room for what is not. Lesbian feminist world-making is nothing extraordinary; it is quite ordinary. We might think of the work of making room as wiggling, a corporeal willfulness. Remember that toe, liberated from its cramped shoe. She does not toe the line. Lesbians (as lesbians well know) have quite a wiggle; you have to wiggle to make room in a cramped space. We can be warmed by the work required to be together even if sometimes we wish it was less work. To recall the vitality of lesbian feminism as a resource of the present is to remember that effort required for our shelters to be built. When we have to shelter from the harshness of a world we build a shelter.

I think of lesbian feminism as willful carpentry: she builds with her own hands; she is handy. What we build to survive what we come against, the very materials, are how values materialise or are given expression. How easily though without foundations, without a stable ground, the walls can come down. We keep them up by keeping up with each other. A fragile shelter, a looser shelter: walls made from lighter materials, blowing haphazardly in the wind. It is a movement. We might recognise this fragility not so much as what we might lose, or will lose, but as a quality of what we have: values that do not derive or depend on making things safer, more secure or more permanent. There are other ways to survive. Lesbian feminism is another way to survive.

Conclusion: A Lesbian Feminist Army

I want to share a “lesbian lives” story with you. I gave my very first lecture from my research project on will and willfulness in Dublin at the 17th Lesbian Lives conference in 2010. I shared a story I found because I was on a trail, I was following willful girls, going wherever they went. Yes I did end up all over the place. Because I was on this trail, I found this story: a Grimm story, about a willful child. This is not a lesbian story. But perhaps there is a lesbian in this story. Let me share it again.

Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.

What a story. It is quite a story. My book opens with this story, with this figure of the willful child, the one who disobeys; as the one who is punished, who is beaten into the ground. It is the story of a child but also of an arm: the child’s willfulness is inherited by an arm, an arm that keeps coming up, until it too is beaten down. Is the willful child a lesbian feminist? Or is the wayward arm a lesbian feminist?

We could tell a few lesbian stories about arms. One story: a butch lesbian enters the female toilets. The attendant become flustered and says “you are not supposed to be here.” The butch lesbian is used to this: how many of her stories are toilet stories; to pass as male becomes a question mark of your right to pass into female space. “I am a woman,” she says. We might have to assign ourselves with gender if we trouble the existing assignments. With a re-assignment, she can go to the toilet. When she comes out, the attendant is embarrassed; the attendant points to her arm, saying “so strong.” The butch lesbian allows the moment to pass by joking, giving the attendant a “show of her arms.”

With arms we come out, with arm we come in. These moments do not always pass so easily. Many of these histories of passing or of not passing are traumatic. Arms can be beaten; they can be straightened. Jack Halberstam in Female Masculinity notes with some surprise how Havelock Ellis uses the arm as a gender test in the case of Miss M : “Miss M. he thinks, tries to cover over her masculinity but gives herself away to Ellis when he uses a rather idiosyncratic test of gender identification: ‘with arms, palmed up, extended in front of her with inner sides touching, she cannot bring the inner sides of the forearms together as nearly every woman can, showing that the feminine angle of the arm is lost’” (1998: 80). If the muscular female arm is measured by a straightening rod, the arm is not straightened. An arm becomes a wayward gift.

So maybe I am thinking too of your arms, your strong butch arms and what they can do, who they can hold. I think of being held by your arms. Yes, I do.

Judith Butler includes the arm in a list of limbs that can symbolise the phallus. Although I always have had sympathy for Judith Butler’s “The Lesbian Phallus” (1993: 88), and by this I mean her argument, I wonder if we make arms into phallic symbols, that we might miss lesbian arms in all their fleshy potential.

Let me share another “lesbian lives” story. When I gave that first paper on willfulness at Lesbian Lives in 2010, Kath Browne said to me afterwards, I am not sure if she remembers this, that my lecture concluded with a real “call to arms.” I think you were referring to my call for us to be willful, to be killjoys, to be willing to cause the unhappiness we are assumed to cause. It took me a long time before I heard the arms in that expression “call to arms,” even though I had already been struck by the wayward arm from the Grimm story. Once I heard the arms, the call sounded differently: the call to arms as the call of arms. A call can mean a lament, an accusation; a naming, as well as a visitation (in the sense of a calling upon). Can we put the “arms” back into the “miserable army” of the inverted described in Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness? Can we hear in the sorrow of their lament a call?

A wayward arm is a call of arms. A call of arms can be a recall. Just recall Sojourner Truth speaking to the suffragettes, having to insist on being a woman activist as a black woman and former slave, having to insist that abolitionism and suffrage can and should be spoken by the same tongue : “Ain’t I a woman,” she says. “Look at me,” she says, “look at my arm.” And in brackets, in the brackets of history, it is said that Sojourner Truth at this moment: “bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power” (cited in Zackodnik 2011: 99).[1] The muscularity of her arm is an inheritance of history; the history of slavery shown in the strength of the arm, the arm required to plough, to sow the field. The arms of the slave belonged to the master, as did the slave, as the ones who were not supposed to have a will of their own. No wonder we must look to the arm, if we are to understand the history of those who rise up against oppression.

Those who have to insist on being women are willful women, and the arm becomes your resource, something that can lend its hand in a battle to be. Trans women are willful women; women who have to insist on being women, who have to keep insisting, again and again, often in the face of violent and repeated acts of misgendering. Any feminists who do not stand up, who do not wave their arms to protest against this misgendering, have become straightening rods. When I ask for a revival of the militancy of the figure of the lesbian feminist I am imagining lesbian feminism as in a fundamental and necessary alliance with trans feminism. Trans feminism has also brought feminism back to life. And can I add here that an anti-trans stance is an anti-feminist stance; it is against the feminist project of creating worlds to support those for whom gender fatalism (boys will be boys, girls will be girls) is fatal; a sentencing to death. We have to hear that fatalism as punishment and instruction: it is the story of the rod, of how those who have wayward wills or who will waywardly (boys who will not be boys, girls who will not be girls) are beaten. We will not be beaten. We need to drown these anti-trans voices out by raising the sound of our own. Our voices need to become our arms; rise up; rise up.

There are many arms, they keep coming up, arms that are muscular, strong, labouring arms, arms that refuse to be employed, striking arms, arms that break, Gloria Anzaldua said once, “I’m a broken arm” (1983: 204); arms that are lost in service to the industrial machine. Willful arms not only have a history; they are shaped by history. Arms are history made flesh. Arms that exceed an idea of the arm (an idea, say, of how a woman’s arm should appear) have something to say to us. It is the arms that can help us make the connection between histories that otherwise do not seem to meet. Intersectionality is army. If histories meet in arms, then histories meet in the very limbs of our rebellion. The arms that build the master’s residence are the arms that will bring the walls down. Audre Lorde entitled an essay with a proclamation : “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (1984: 110-113). In that unflinching “will never” is a call to arms, do not become the master’s tool!

Chip, chip, chip, when our arms become tools, we hammer away at the house of his being. We make our own houses, lighter, looser; see how the walls move; it is a movement.Chip, chip, chip, a lesbian feminist army is being assembled.

Here we are; here we come; here we arm.

Thank you.

References

Ahmed, Sara (2014). Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999) [1987]. Borderlands, La Fontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

———————- (1983). “La Prieta” in Cherrie Morago and Gloria Anzaldua (eds). The Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour. Watertown: Persephone Press. pp.198-209.

Brown, Rita Mae (1973). Rubyfruit Jungle. New York: Bantam Books.

Butler, Judith (2003). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London:

Echols, Alice (1989). Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America,1967-1985. University of Minnesota Press.

Firestone, Shulamith (1970). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Bantam Books.

Frye, Marilyn (1991). “Introduction”, Are Your Girls Travelling Alone? by Marilyn Murphy, Los Angeles: Clothes Spin Fever Press. pp.11-16.

————————- (1983). The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press.

Gupta, Nila (2014). Presentation in Black British Feminism panel, Centre for Feminist Research, Goldsmiths. December 11.

Halberstam, Jack (1998). Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hall, Radclyffe (1982) [1928]. The Well of Loneliness. London: Virago Press.

Lorde, Audre (1988). A Burst of Light, Essays. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books.

——————–(1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg: Crossing Press.

Morago, Cherrie (1981). “The Welder,” in Cherrie Morago and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds). A Bridge Called by Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour. Watertown: Persephone Press. P.219.

Penelope, Julia (1992). Call Me Lesbian: Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Theory. New York: Crossing Press.

Preciado, Paul (2012). “Queer Bulldogs” Documenta 13.

Rich, Adrienne (1986). “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Walker, Alice (2005). In Search of Our Mothers Gardens. Phoenix, New Edition.

Zackodnik, Teresa (2011). Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

[1] Zackodnick is citing here from Frances Dana Gage’s Reminiscences in which Gave, a leading feminist, reformer and abolitionist, gives us this account of Truth’s speech as well as “bodily testimony” that has been crucial to how it has been remembered. It is important to note the status of this description as citation: our access to Sojourner Truth’s address is through the testimony of others, in particular, the testimony of white women. Maria Zackodnick notes that other accounts of this event did not include references to Truth baring her arm (2011: 99). We learn from this to be cautious about our capacity to bear witness to arms in history: we might only be able to read (of) arms through the mediation of other limbs.

What better way to begin than with the sound of no?

It’s the first event of the tour at Harvard Book Store. I am seated alongside Durba Mitra who has just published a wonderful new book, The Future that Was, which gives a history of how third world feminists fought against authoritarianism.

A history can be in the room. What we are fighting against.

As Durba was introducing the book, she said no. She said it loudly, no in bold, as a bolt. And you heard it. Felt it. Movement. Like a jolt. The electricity, the snap, the sizzle; crackling. The energy seeping into the room, into each other

That’s what it felt like throughout the tour, energy seeping into the room, into each other.

It was super intense to be talking about refusing complicity with violence at a time of escalating violence.

Intense and necessary.

I loved how we spilt into Harvard Book Store, folks seated cross legged in front of other folks seated in chairs.

The book store is independent of Harvard University. But that neighbour loomed large, with its deep and increasingly well documented connections to Epstein and not just via disgraced former President Larry Summers. Disgraced should be the right word. The Conversation quotes from him, “‘Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,’ Summers said in a statement released on Feb. 25.” Yana van der Meulen Rodgers describes his “fall from grace” as “a soft landing,” and yes, for Summers “consequences” sound rather like freedom.

After asking Durba Mitra to be in conversation with me, I learnt that she had been denied tenure by Harvard. Durba is a brilliant and influential scholar. She was also the first full-time faculty member in the Women, Gender and Sexuality program at Harvard. As William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus note, “The denial also comes at a sensitive time for the WGS program, whose faculty worry whether their own work will eventually be a casualty of the Trump administration’s assault against diversity, equity, and inclusion and reinforcement of conservative beliefs on gender.”

That Harvard is so implicated in Epstein’s network is why it should be supporting its Women, Gender and Sexuality program (though this is not the only reason why). It is also why it probably won’t. Historian Joan Scott has pointed to the connection between the Epstein network and the attacks on Gender Studies. She notes, “Gender studies – feminist-initiated scholarly programs in schools and universities across the country – brought a critical lens to the biological determinism Trump invokes. And this critical lens extends to revealing how gender hierarchies enable the kind of abuses that some men in Epstein’s circle seemingly believed they had the right to commit. ” Look out for Durba Mitra’s forthcoming essay, “On Anticipatory Complicity,” in Feminist Studies for a sharp and illuminating critique of how institutional compliance with the Trump administration has led not only to the rapid dismantling of oppositional fields of study but to a sustained campaign of harassment against Black women and women of colour, as well as queer and trans students and scholars, no doubt in part because of what they can do, diagnose the falsity of conservative ideas about sex, race and nation.

Durba invites us to think about complicity as well as compliance, how feminist faculty working with limited resources and aware of the conditional nature of support for some programs might stress the “benefit of silence,” and a “tactic acceptance of poor working conditions.” In No! I discuss how many people are advised not to complain or be too critical of institutions until later when they are more established. The problem with later is that it usually comes too late. By the time people are given permission to be critical of institutions they seem to have lost the capacity or will to be so. If you acquire resources (including feminist resources) by saying yes to the institution, agreeing not to speak out about institutional violence, or stopping other people from speaking out, not saying no might be how you keep those resources.

Too many nos, endlessly delayed.

Whether we do our feminist work in the university or outside of it, now is the time for a loud collective no. But the time for such a no is also behind us. Now and then.

Because it was always the time to draw on our radical histories.

A no can be what we bring up. A no can be turning up. A no can be how we turn the volume up.

After Durba introduced our event by animating no, I read the first pages from the preface of the book (as I did in three of the events). My book begins with my own story of walking out of the institution because of the sexual harassment it buried and thus reproduced over decades. It was important to begin No! with a fuller account of what it felt like to be that person walking out of that job, using words like sad and tired and shattered to capture the experience, as I boxed my work up, leaving through the back door.

It was not just a sad story.

A back door, another path.

Leaving was how I came to do this work, giving not just complaints but myself somewhere else to go. I intend to write another post about leaving institutions because I was reminded on tour how much there is to learn not just from leaving but reactions to leaving. I commented in an earlier note that it is now 10 years since I left the academy. No wonder the tour felt like a loop.

Looping back, going over.

A no to an institution can be expressed through the withdrawal of labour from it. When you leave because of a complaint, you don’t just leave the problem behind. You leave a record of confronting that problem, which can be another kind of legacy although one that often has to be unburied by those who come after.

Leaving also meant I was freer to express myself. And that I had left allowed other people to be freer to share with me what happened to them when they complained. Hence a no can be loosening; when one no comes out, others follow.

I imagine that loosening of nos as the creation of a noticeboard. We create, also share, a surface upon which other people can post their complaints including old complaints they had not made before. A no noticeboard is rather like that complaint wall created by the ever-inspiring Guerrilla Girls, how I pictured the hopefulness of complaint.

The event at Harvard Book Centre was not planned as the first event of the tour. I was meant to give a public lecture at Vanderbilt the week before. I had to cancel that lecture when Vanderbilt failed to say no to Trump’s compact, claiming they were “giving feedback” instead. My solidarity with feminist, disabled, queer, trans, Black, and brown scholars and students at Vanderbilt. I am so sorry I could not speak to you, to share solidarity in opposition to fascism.

A yes can be the failure to say no.

A yes can stop a no circulating.

In the introduction to the second part of No! I reference Timothy Snyder’s critique of “anticipatory obedience.” When citizens obey in advance of an order, they teach “power what it can do.” Snyder also suggests we should, “Defend institutions.” But so many institutions function to teach people to obey, to say yes in advance of an order, not least because of how they reward compliance. Using Snyder’s logic, institutions are sowing the seeds of their own destruction, creating citizens ill-equipped to fight for them by fighting back against those who seize power by illegitimate means.

Institutions that reward compliance become compliant.

Any act of compliance, of not saying no to coercive regimes, widens the force of those regimes.

Complicity can mean: agreeing or pretending to agree that there are two biological sexes as if that’s science not ideology.

Complicity can mean: agreeing or pretending to agree that DEI is discriminatory rather than a tool for countering discrimination (and often not a successful one, given there is not always a will behind a policy).

And this is happening in the UK too, where at best “gender critical” feminists admit to being “uncomfortable” that they agree with Trump and other patriarchal fascists (whilst being quite happy to extend their attacks on trans people by speaking against EDI as if valuing equality and diversity compromises academic freedom).

The next day I headed to New York City, for a conversation at CLAGS with Roxane Gay. CLAGS is a breathing space in an academy that is becoming increasingly hostile to trans and queer people.

We need such spaces to keep going so we can!

I am so grateful they were able to host my first conversation with Roxane Gay. In truth, it feels like I have had many conversations with Roxane in the form of what I imagined a bad feminist and feminist killjoy would say to each other. This is what I had written about Roxane Gay in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: “I am a mega-fan of Roxane Gay not only for her written work, fiction and non-fiction, but also for her public role in creating space for minority and marginal artists and writers, and her lively and fierce contributions to feminism through her social media presence. I think of the feminist killjoy and the bad feminist as close kin!” I was so delighted when Roxane included one of my essays on feminist killjoys in her best-selling collection, The Portable Feminist Reader.

You can watch our first actual conversation here. I was grateful for the questions from Roxane, and from the audience. I especially loved Roxane’s answer to a question about gossip (you can find it at 1.17.17). One of my favourite lines from Bad Feminist is “It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.” I learnt from Roxane that resistance to the patriarchal instruction to lighten up leads not to the loss but sharpening of humour.

Laugher can be in the critique.

Our conversation took place the same day Trump had threatened Iran and the world that a “whole civilisation will die tonight.” Imperial violence. Warmongering. Genocide. When the unthinkable becomes sayable. Doable.

To gather is to say no to the violence that is made sayable and doable. We call for free Palestine, we get called extremists.

We keep calling, keep gathering. In whatever pockets we make or find, fighting for each other’s freedom.

The next event was a conversation with queer academic, Heather Love in Philadelphia at Public Trust. Heather did more than share the time and space and words. We had been trying to secure a venue in Philly for a couple of months and had almost given up. But then Heather found this venue for us– so perfect for the launch given its commitment to public education.

I have drawn on Heather’s important book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History in my own work especially in The Promise of Happiness. In No! I cite Heather in explaining how complaint can be a queer method:

“In her book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love reflects on how queer critics have turned to the past for redemption: ‘In attempting to construct a positive genealogy of gay identity, queer critics have found themselves at a loss about what to do with the sad old queens and long-suffering dykes who haunt the historical record.’ Love suggests those figures who haunt our history should not be abandoned. A queer method might then not be the motion of looking forward but ‘feeling backward,’ going over what is hard and painful and difficult. Complaints too have a backward temporality. We go back over what isn’t over but is often treated as if it is” (page 209, No!, US edition).

It was a delight to be able to reflect together on the queer nature of at least some complaints. In the book, I note how many people use the language of coming out to describe the process of complaining (you have to come out as somebody this happened to). You can come out with a complaint only to end up in an institutional closet, a shadowy room, with the door shut.

We have to work to get complaints out not just of ourselves but institutions.

That work we do with others, so they cannot contain us in their little rooms.

We need doors to tell that story.

And wait, they will.

I then headed to Washington DC for a conversation with Soraya Chemaly at Politics and Prose. You can watch our conversation here. Thanks to Soraya for putting us in contact with the bookshop. I have been a committed reader of Soraya’s work since I read her wise and wondrous book, Rage Becomes Her. Soraya also just had a new book out, All We Want is Everything, which I highly recommend (and you can listen to her talking about it at Politics and Prose here). I especially love her generous citational practice. Soraya suggests that each new word or concept introduced by a feminist is an “act of sovereignty,” beginning with Saidiya Hartman’s “wayward women” and ending with Legacy Russell’s Glitch.

Generosity in critique: in order to dismantle the system of male supremacy, we find in each other’s words and concepts another way in. I was feeling a little tired on this day and Soraya picked me up in more ways than one.

I flew back to London the following day. But on the way, I stopped at Bol Coop, Washington’s first worker-owned radical bookstore for a final, more informal, community conversation. What a beautiful way to talk about the work of saying no to institutional violence in a space created by those who have said no to institutional violence! Because, after all, the more universities are complicit including with the police state, the more protest is criminalised, the more we need our own spaces for radical education. Another way of putting this: we keep no alive by moving it underground, working in the shadows.

I was reminded during the conversation how in protesting violence we search for ways to look out for each other, look after each other, acknowledging that some of us are more precarious, more at risk from the violence we are protesting. To share the costs of protesting violence, to protect the people most at risk, we create safer spaces including for nourishment. We protest and take care of each other at the same time because they are the same task, or at least they should be the same task (we don’t do either if we do one and not the other).

I was so nourished by sharing the work in this space and not just because they baked me a feminist killjoy cake!

I was invited to come to Bol by Mariam Durrani (as she put it, she “slid” into my DMs, for which I am so grateful). After I arrived and just before I began munching a samosa, Mariam told me that she too had resigned from her institution in protest, and that she had shared her resignation letter in public.

As soon I got home, I read Mariam’s letter. She describes how, as a tenure-track woman of color faculty member, her employment has been shaped “by a pattern of targeted harassment by right-wing elements in and around the College” and “a pattern of institutional inaction and gaslighting when I raise these concerns.” Mariam shows how institutional violence includes the violence of how institutions respond to violence. When violence is minimised and legitimated, it will keep happening, an expression of institutional will.

I remember how my former institution had responded to the targeting of a student of colour by racists as if said racists had raised “legitimate concerns.” One time, a senior administrator came up to me and said something like, “Sara, there is another side to the story.” She knew I was angry about the college’s response; just as she knew I was angry about how they were handling the sexual harassment cases by keeping a lid on the enquiries. I knew what she meant by “another side of the story.” She was going to be justifying the college’s actions by making the students the problem, again. She was going to imply racism was a problem with two sides. I turned away. She then grabbed my shoulder, her fingers pulling my sleeve. I did not say anything but pulled away firmly, even forcefully.

When I think back to that moment, I still feel emotional. It was a turning point even though I did not realise it at the time. I was not going to be pulled into discourse with the administration anymore. I was not going to be pulled away from the students. I relived that moment many times on the tour. The freedom of not being pulled back in. That is how I found the time and space to keep working on what was important to me, to keep hold of my feminist and antiracist commitments, all of my nos.

Back in 2017, less than a year after I resigned, I wrote a blog post with the snappy title No. It began with 10 nos, all in bold.

NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo

We have to keep making the same complaints when the same things keep happening.

That broken record: we are heard as repeating ourselves.

The structure, what we point to, is not seen. So we are seen.

We push until we snap, that break, a connection.

Stories of resignation can be interwoven rather like stories of complaint.

Mariam told me she posted her resignation letter on her door. I was rather reminded of Viola’s testimony. Viola had read her resignation letter, which was also a complaint, out loud to her dean “in a performative kind of way.” It filled the room she left. But she wanted to do more, to put the letter on the wall, “I just thought, I am not the kind of person who would put my resignation letter on the wall, but I just wonder what it is that made me feel that I am not that kind of person because inside I am that kind of person, I just couldn’t quite get it out.”

Sometimes we have to help each other get our letters onto the doors and the walls, putting them in the places where they can be read, plastering them all over the surfaces that institutions use to contain our complaints.

Viola came to a lecture in which I shared words from her testimony. The words she gave to me, I gave back to her. “It was only after the lecture,” she wrote, ‘that I realized how undignified these complaint processes are, and how, yes, my dignity was stripped. In my dealings with the union, they had advised me at the time that my dignity at work had been breached, but that word did little then for me, as it felt like another procedural piece of jargon ‒ but when I felt a swell of pride at the lecture, indeed, when I felt a sense of dignity about it all, I realized that this must have been somewhat lost.”

Words can be emptied of meaning, becoming polish, how we are removed from our own stories. When we share our complaints with each other, giving them back to each other, they acquire meaning and value. As I travelled with all of your words, I felt the swell of your company.

When Mariam posted her resignation letter on the door, it was not just her letter than ended up on the door. Her letter soon had companions. Students posted notes in solidarity, of solidarity, until the door was covered by them.

A no can turn a door into a noticeboard.

A door, a tour, so beautiful, that gathering.

With thanks and my endless solidarity

to those complaining for a more just world

Sara xx

Ps some tour photos below

with Durba

with Roxane

with Heather

with Soraya

with Mariam

a feminist killjoy cake!

I was at a faculty meeting, seated at a table of whiteness. I was the only person of colour in the meeting, which was not unusual as there were hardly any people of colour employed by the university. The Dean was leading a discussion of race, prompted by new legislation that required all public bodies to have a race equality policy and action plan. He was rather dismissive. He said something like race is “too difficult to deal with” and the conversation moved on.

This was back in 2000. I was already a killjoy at work. I knew speaking of a problem meant becoming a problem and I did not aways have the confidence to become one. So, I did not say anything during the meeting but sent the Dean an email after, an informal complaint, claiming that racism is reproduced by treating race as “too difficult to deal with.” The response? The Dean put my name forward for a new group that had been set up to write the race equality policy and action plan. That complaint was how I ended up in an institutional role that, at least on the surface, was about institutional change. Whatever it was about, taking on that role changed my work in so many ways. Why? Because it led me to be in conversation with diversity practitioners about our efforts to change institutions.

I was given some hard political lessons. The policy we wrote used a critical language – we talked about whiteness and referred to “institutional racism.” That policy was then judged by the then Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) to be “excellent.” The Vice Chancellor waved the letter from the ECU around in a meeting, congratulating us all for being good at race equality.

A policy intended to redress race inequality is used as evidence of race equality.

I learnt that making critiques of institutions does not stop us from becoming complicit in them; critique might even be how we become complicit. I also learnt what was important about a policy was not in it, but what it was used to do, where it goes, where it does not go. In my 2000 book, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, I offered a discussion of multiculturalism through a close reading of policy documents. I was a humanities scholar by training; I was doing what I had been taught to do. But after this political lesson, I didn’t really see the point of reading such documents anymore (or at least just reading them). I wanted to follow them around, doing something akin to what sociologist Dorothy Smith called “institutional ethnography.”

The empirical research I conducted on diversity and complaints in universities in the twenty or so years that followed led to two monographs, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life published in 2012 and Complaint! published in 2021. Although these two books were published almost a decade apart, they belong together. I understand better now, from working outside an institution to the extent that’s possible, how and why the conversations I had for these two empirical projects showed up in all of my intellectual work, in how I theorized happiness and will and use and, most recently, common sense.

Policy came up all the time in my conversations about changing institutions. This is not surprising. Equality policies exist because equality doesn’t. Those who push for change by policy end up with so much data, snapshots of institutional life and of resistance to change (what I call wall stories).

Hence think policy, also procedure, think documents, thinks materials, think walls.

To every tired diversity worker out there: thank you for all the labour and what you helped pull to the front. And thanks to all those who shared with me their wall stories. The conversations we have when we are trying to change institutions, or because we are trying to change them, have much to teach us about the nature of power. Hence this post. Learning from the labour of policy might give us another angle on the Epstein files for those in need of one. Hence this post.

One conversation I had with Helen, a diversity practitioner, back in 2014 gave me so much to think with. Helen was trying to get a new policy agreed, which would require all academic members of appointment panels to receive diversity training. The policy was modest. Helen knew it would take a lot more than more diversity training, to stop the same old people being appointed in the same old way. It would be a step in the right direction, perhaps a signal of an institutional will to change. She learnt the absence of will the hard way. Helen went through the proper or formal mechanisms. The policy was agreed by the diversity committee and then sent to the council to be ratified. But the head of Human Resources removed the decision about the policy from the minutes. Somebody at the council who had been at the diversity committee noticed the decision had been removed. So, the minutes were sent back to be corrected. The policy was eventually agreed and adopted. But then other people in the organization acted as if it did not exist. When Helen pointed to the policy, “they looked [at her] as if she was saying something really stupid.”

The Head of Human Resources did not need to remove the policy from the minutes for it not to bring anything into effect. People just had to act as if the policy didn’t exist, making the person who pointed to it appear “really stupid.” The point of this story is not that there is no point to developing new policies. It is that a new policy is not sufficient to bring about a change in culture. We have to push not just for policies but for them to do something. It can be tiring to have to keep pushing, which is why exhausting those who push for change is a much-used technique for stopping it from happening.

By “keeping institutions as they are,” we need to avoid institutional fatalism whilst accounting for its effects. Institutions can be a collection of habits. If you need a policy to change habits, habits override the policy. I am using the word habits to get at how appointments are not just formal mechanisms but ways of acting that, with time, become unthinking. Policy, as a formal solution, can be limited given many problems are not just formal. Another example: Becky’s university had introduced a numerical system for evaluating the performance of job candidates in an effort to ensure equality of treatment. She described what actually happened during the appointment process: “Someone would say that woman’s presentation was outstanding, but, really, he’s the guy you’d want to have a pint with, so let’s make the figures fit.” They made the figures fit so they could get still the person they wanted, someone whose company they could enjoy, “the guy you’d want to have a pint with.”

Hiring is habit; the people appointed are those who reflect back who is already there. When new policies come into existence without coming into use, the same practice continues (in this case, the same person is appointed who would have been appointed without the new policy).

The push for new policies does not always derive from diversity workers. When cases of sexual harassment end up in the public domain, perhaps as a result of someone blowing the whistle, many organisations develop new policies. If policies create evidence of doing something, creating evidence of doing something is not the same thing as doing it.

Policies as public relations.

New policies can be how organisations send messages to the wider public about their commitments whether or not they have them. Mia called her university’s new policy on sexual harassment “window dressing,” it was how the institution appeared from the front. The new policy had been developed by a new member of staff who left once it was agreed (in leaving she probably took knowledge of the policy, and thus in effect the policy itself, with her).

When Mia tried to make use of the new policy to support a complaint, she realised it was “not meant.” When there is no meaning to a policy, there is nothing or no one behind it.

Organisations can say yes when there is not enough behind it to bring something about. In fact, many complaints are stopped not by nos but by yeses, managers and administrators nodding to do nothing. Policies that are “not meant” are still likely to be displayed on the window otherwise known as a website. I use the term nonperformative to describe policies that do not bring about what they name (borrowing from how Judith Butler defines performativity in Bodies that Matter). Nonperformativity can mean living and working in a strange, queer world; what appears is not what you experience and what you experience is not what appears.

So, what does the title of this post, “policies are for the others” mean?

I am not just referring to the people who use policies, although it is those who experience institutions as hostile environments who can likely tell you whether policies against them mean anything. I am borrowing “policies are for the others” from Penny, who talked to me about what led to her being dismissed from her post and position as a senior manager at a top university. Penny had been the first Black woman to hold that position.

Penny’s case was not straightforwardly a complaint, but then again, most complaints are not straightforward. It began as an administrative dispute about how marks were allocated at examination boards. Penny had evidence that the university had not followed its own policies and procedures. She said, “we looked at the college’s procedures,” which clearly stated what Penny stated. “These were clearly written documents,” she explained, “we were able to say we are working within our capacity to do this and here’s your document which says this and still they didn’t accept it.” Administrative disputes can be how we are reminded that administration itself, not just what’s written down on paper but to whom the papers are applied, how they are interpreted, has life consequences. Penny explained, “We were talking about students’ life chances, which are dramatically changed whether you have a 2.1 or a first.” She didn’t back down because she knew students’ lives would be impacted.

Penny interpreted the dispute as being not about the content but the form of disagreement. “Whatever you think of the university’s procedures, you don’t challenge them in that way; you swallow it,” she explained. Penny had not swallowed her disagreement, by just accepting that some people have the right to be wrong. She observes, “the more you challenge, the more they come back. I also found the more clearly evident they were wrong, the more I was challenged.”

Although Penny was herself a senior manager by not exiting the disagreement with a smile or an apology, she became one of the others. Becoming is probably the wrong word; that Penny was expected to be compliant might be because she was already one of the others. She explains, “Race and gender are always in there. I thought, this has never happened before. The first time it happens is when you have a Black woman dean.” However far some of us progress, it does not take much to be demoted to the rank of “the others.” Pointing out that organisations have failed to follow their own procedures is treated as an act of insubordination because it implies that those who govern organisation should be bound by something other than their own will (as, of course, they should be).

“Policies are for the others” is how Penny summarised their position.

It is defiant to refer to policies and procedures as if they limit power.

Power can be the right to suspend what is binding for the others.

This suspension of what is binding might bring to mind how a state or a sovereign can declare a state of exception, to enable the handling of emergencies like wars or pandemics. Many readers will know how the philosopher Giorgio Agamben drew on Carl Schmitt to describe how the exception can become the norm. When a temporary measure is turned into a permanent tool of government, it frees a sovereign from legal restraints that would otherwise apply. There is an important difference between a state of exception and the suspension of procedure and policy that occurs within organisations. A state of emergency or exception is officially declared even when a temporary measure is turned into a norm. When procedures or policies are suspended, there is no official declaration. The point is for business to appear as usual so the procedures that are bypassed can be kept in operation for the others.

Policies and procedures could be called the written-down or official rules. Power is how some people do not have to follow the rules, but other people do. Of course this is not surprising. Moira Donegan ends her exceptional analysis of the disdain for morality shown by elites evidenced in the Epstein files with a pithy remark, “maybe to them, morality is for the little people.”

The bypassing of rules becomes part of the architecture of institutions in more and less obvious ways. Some rules might be a matter of convention or usual practice, a way of handling people as well as papers. Think of a queue. We know the rules for being in one, each person waits in turn. Anyone tries to push ahead, other people in the queue will tutt and complain. If queues acquire independence from individual action, they are still built from compliance. [I have been reading ethnomethodology for my common sense project, and Harold Garfinkel has some interesting thoughts on queues]. If the people who are more important kept being hurried to the front, it could stir up complaints, leading to non-compliance. Hence the need for secrecy. The bypassing of the rules needs not to be seen if other people are still expected to follow the rules, which is why secret rooms in institutions are multi-purpose; they do not just keep complaints confidential but provide passageways for important people so they do not have to be kept waiting.

Look for power, find a vestibule, a small entrance hall, serving as a transitional space. Some entryways are, as it were, hidden: they are behind a door rather than being a door. That way important people can be hurried to the front (literally, and also metaphorically) without being seen. Some people might never get to the door let alone through it because they are following the rules. When compliance is for the others, they are the ones who end up patiently waiting in the queue.

The usual way for handling papers can also be suspended. When papers pile up, we might go through them, one by one, paper by paper. Some papers marked important go to the top of the pile. One way of stopping complaints, which are piles of papers, is by slowing them down in the hope that the people who make them get tired of waiting and drop it. Other complaints travel faster; those made by important people such as wealthy donors, who can follow complaints by other actions such as the withdrawal of funds. Their complaint will end up on the top of the pile, bypassing the slow administrative process I call institutional plumbing. That policies and procedures are bypassed for some papers, and some people, is a measure of inequalities, what and who is given more importance.

Policies intended to redress such inequalities (sometimes summarised as DEI/EDI) are treated not just as for the others but imposed by them.

I think of a conversation I had with Stephanie. She was the first woman let alone the first lesbian to be head of her department. For Stephanie, becoming more senior, acquiring, or appearing to acquire, more control over institutional resources led if anything to an increase in hostility. “I was the first female head of department,” she reported, “and everything became stuck to me. The fact that there had been fire doors put in all the rooms to replace the solid wood ones, ones with windows in, that was my fault, that was me wanting to spy on people; the fact that faculty was going over to electronic calendars, and I said, what do you think, shall we use these, how shall we use them, that was me wanting to spy on people. It was absolute scapegoating.”

Stephanie refers to the solid doors being replaced by glass ones. She explained that the LGBTQIA+ network on campus knew “why those solid doors were turned into windows.” The replacement of the doors was the result of decades of complaints about sexual harassment in her discipline. A sexual harassment policy is treated as forcing change, depriving people of a privacy they would otherwise enjoy. The implication is that she, as the first female (and lesbian) head of department, has imposed these changes because she is an imposter not only one of the others but not who she says she is; a spy, no less.

I hear an old homophobic trope at work: that queer people are recruiters, trying to recruit other people into our lifestyles or lives because we cannot reproduce ourselves. Even the most superficial or small signs of queer inclusion can be treated as evidence that institutions have fallen under a malevolent or sinister influence.

Take rainbow flags and Progress Pride flags. They have been described by politicians as monstrous as well as malevolent. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman stated, “The Progress flag says to me, it says to me one monstrous thing: That I was a member of a government that presided over the mutilation of children in our hospitals and from our schools.” The Progress Pride flag, designed by non-binary artist Daniel Quasar, includes “black, brown, pink, pale blue and white stripes, to represent marginalized people of colour in the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the trans community, and those living with HIV/AIDS.” The flags themselves have been removed from some public institutions on the grounds of “imposing beliefs” such as “gender ideology.” Superficial gestures that include trans and non-binary people are framed as an imposition of an ideology that such people exist. I noted in an earlier newsletter how “gender critical” commentators such as Alice Sullivan typically describe trans people having access to human rights and basic health care and being counted in data as “policy capture.”

A policy can be treated as one of the others, depriving us of what is ours.

Policy as imposition.

Sexual harassment policies are often treated not just as forcing change but as impositions on our freedom. One book on radical politics, describes “the whole sphere of human activities must be ceaselessly regulated, normalised, supervised and guided.” The author notes, “we see the old Victorian moral panic now dressed up in the new guises of political correctness and strictures on sexual harassment.” The use of “political correctness” implies that new norms and rules about appropriate behaviour in the workplace are simply a mechanism for policing the flow of play and desire.

Sexual harassment is thus treated as imposed on a situation rather than being what is imposed by a situation. It is as if we speak of sexual harassment to justify more regulations rather than we need more regulations because of sexual harassment.

An individual, beleaguered like an over-regulated state. That liberal fantasy.

The investigation into the Epstein files have already been framed as a moral panic. Just one headline, “The Epstein Scandal has Morphed into a Moral Panic.”

Moral panics about moral panics are useful because they imply that outrage has been manufactured not just to justify the tightening of rules and regulations but to persecute people for not following them.

In The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I show how two anti-feminist tactics often work in tandem, the minimisation of harm and the inflation of power. I wrote then, “Even to identify something as harmful is treated as an attempt to exercise or to hold power over someone, as if feminists make slights bigger than they are to make themselves bigger. This is how the terms and concepts introduced by feminists to explain how power works, such as sexual harassment, also become killjoys, carriers of bad feeling, impositions made by outsiders.” Those who critique power are also accused of just wanting power for ourselves. Moralism is mainly used as a character judgement as if those who refuse a sexual advance or refuse to participate in a sexualising culture are being rigid or uptight, wanting to deprive other people of joy because they are joyless.

In an early blog post written just after I resigned, I shared some thoughts offered by a former colleague. He said there was an investment in the distinction between “consensual relationships” between staff and students and abuses of power because of how many academics are in relationships with former students. This rang true. I remember when I first became a lecturer being told that when there had been a discussion in the department of a new policy on staff-student relationships (such policies are mostly called “Conflict of Interest”), staff who had relationships with students were asked to leave the meeting. All the men got up and left.

The students whose collective complaint I supported in my second and final academic job read such a “Conflict of Interest” policy. It included the following paragraph, “The College does not wish to prevent, or even necessarily be aware of, liaisons between staff and students and it relies upon the integrity of both parties to ensure that abuses of power do not occur.” Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble, Chryssa Sdrolia and Heidi Hasbrouck later explained what the policy told them, “We had looked up their process and found that as a matter of policy the university considered faculty‒student relationships a private matter. For us, this meant that, by policy, the institution actively did not want to know about abuses of power.” It is hard to complain about conduct when institutions state they endorse it or do not want to know about it. We needed a policy to state that the conduct was not permitted even if changing a policy would not be sufficient to change the culture.

Getting that policy amended took a huge amount of pushing. One student in particular invested a huge amount of her time and energy in getting it changed. She emailed the rest of our group in frustration, “I’ve just checked the college website and discovered that the ‘conflict of interest’ policy remains unchanged, a full two years after I first began advocating for it to be removed and rewritten.”

Resistance to naming sexual harassment is often about a demand for privacy, a space that some are free to do as they wish or will. That’s another door you will find in many a story of complaint, one that turns a workplace office into a private room. Hence when Andrea had the door closed on her complaint by the colleagues of her abuser, who is called by one of them, “an important man,” that same door was kept open for him, so he could keep doing what he had been doing where he had been doing it, behind closed doors.

So yes, secret rooms are multi-purpose.

Feminist critiques are dismissed as moralism because we refuse to privatise such forms of conduct. We show what follows that evocation of individual freedom, how it functions as an institutional norm. I remember how one academic suggested that banning of sexual relationships between academics and students would be “the end of life as we know it.” Patricia told me about a former colleague of hers who had multiple relationships with students. She said he “was just going through one woman after another after another after another.” When complaints were made against him by ten of these women, Patricia said he justified his conduct by saying, “it’s a perk of the job.”

Having sex with students as a perk, like having a company car.

Men who treat cohorts of students as recruiting grounds for sexual partners oft-speak of themselves as flying in the face of norms.

When they are not.

The same old often appears in flight.

Patriarchy needs no procedure.

I suggested earlier that it can be defiant to refer to a policy or procedure because it implies some people should be restricted by something other than their own will. If we are non-compliant because we point to a procedure, some people justify non-compliance with procedure as if it is defiance.

When it is not.

It is how some people keep doing what they had been given permission to do too many times before.

Until the feminist killjoys came along; the party-poopers.

With all their papers.

Take performance reviews and record keeping. Such practices are useful for picking up problems in departments without requiring individual complaints. Sexual harassment is often reproduced by the suspension of such practices. Non-compliance with such methods can be a “fuck you” to the organisation.

Not keeping records can be how problems remain unseen.

The boundaries those with less power in the workplace need to protect themselves are judged as restrictions by those with more power. All sorts of practices can be dismissed as managerialism, as the imposition of moral norms from the top down.

When a complaint is made with reference to a policy, the policy as well as the complaint are treated as tools for punishment.

That old stick.

We can draw on Mariame Kaba’s important distinction between consequences and punishment. For Kaba, punishment means “inflicting cruelty and suffering on people.” In contrast, “Powerful people stepping down from their jobs are consequences, not punishment. Why? Because we should have boundaries. And because the shit you did was wrong and you having power is a privilege. That means we can take that away from you. You don’t have power anymore.”

For those with power, being deprived of power is (treated as) punishment.

In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, I discuss why research is an important tool for complaint activism (a way of getting complaints out of the closet). I referred to Madison Marriage, Antonia Cundy and Paul Caruana Galizia’s article in the Financial Times about sexual harassment and sexual assault claims against hedge funder Crispin Odey. Their reporting created a complaint collective of many women, nine of whom had “never told their stories publicly before.” Most women “requested anonymity for fear of social, professional or financial retaliation.” In an early draft of No!, I discussed their article at length, sharing quotes from their sources. I was asked to remove most of the discussion by lawyers. Odey had already indicated his intent to sue the FT for defamation. It seems the risk of being sued for defamation could be passed on by citation alone.

Crispin Odey is currently in the courts, having taken legal action against the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) after it fined him £1.8m and banned him from the UK finance industry. Journalist Martin Arnold describes, “The only person the 67-year-old financier seems to consider largely blameless is himself. This is despite being the subject of more than 46 sexual harassment allegations by female staff, as well as accusations aired in court of falsifying company minutes, misleading investors, blackmailing the regulator, bullying colleagues and trying to silence victims.”

So yes, consequences are treated as punishment. Odey’s case is that the FCA is out to get him, to make an example of him as if the examples of misconduct were not provided by him.

People who harm often represent themselves as harmed by how the harm comes to light. Many of those whose communications with Epstein revealed the extent to which they were his beneficiaries have treated the revelations as harmful to them. Journalist Anand Giridharadas offers astute observations of emails by cognitive scientist Joscha Bach based at MIT who received multiple funds from Epstein. Giridharadas notes that the only time Bach talks about surviving in his statement on Substack is in relation to himself (“I understand why targets of this sort of media maelstrom do not always survive”). Bach also uses the word hounded (“I am not angry at the people who hound me, because this is just how public discourse works today”). Bach narrates the revelation he was a beneficiary of a rapist and paedophile as what he has to survive because of “public discourse today.” The women and children who were trafficked and raped by Epstein and his network of abusers, who had to survive not just the abuse but bringing it into “public discourse,” are nowhere to be seen.

When harm is reversed, so too is power.

Note the recent efforts by multiple commentators to minimise the harm caused by Epstein and his network. How do you minimise the harm caused by the trafficking and rape of children? By claiming that the children he raped are not really children but underage girls. Journalist Megan Garber offers an important critique of the use of the figure of the “underage woman” in how Epstein’s rape of children is reported. She cites his 2018 interview with James Stewart, when Epstein claimed “that criminalizing sex with teenage girls was a cultural aberration and that at times in history it was perfectly acceptable. He pointed out that homosexuality had long been considered a crime and was still punishable by death in some parts of the world.” The implication of Epstein’s comparison of raping children with homosexuality is that he is the one being stigmatised. Garber compares this argument to his “glib comments,” in 2008, when he said he was not “a sexual predator; I’m an ‘offender,’” and that difference is the same as the difference “between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.” Yes, even the rape of children can be treated as a minor thing.

Make the harm small. Keep the person big.

Moira Donegan has noted, far from being ostracised for his crimes, Epstein “believed the #MeToo movement increased his cachet among certain powerful men.” She quotes from one of his emails where he claimed he had moved up the reputation ladder because of all these men “getting busted for harassment.”

Policies are treated as tools for punishment.

Feminists are treated as policies.

Feminists are treated as the police (“getting busted”).

In “Whose Secrets do We Keep,” I noted that those who abuse power often position themselves as free radicals, transgressor of moral norms, unbound to institutions even when they are resourced by them. They might also justify their own conduct – professors having sex with students, bosses with secretaries – as a refusal to comply with moral mandates.

For the free radical, a complaint comes from the state.

In The Cancellers I referred to an article, which lists a number of people who had been disciplined for being “unwanted or uncooperative critics” of institutions because of “after-hours recreations or of political convictions.” In this list, a person who kept her job despite having a complaint about sexual harassment upheld against her is casually positioned next to a Palestinian academic left unemployed after a university used complaints about his criticisms of Israel to justify a withdrawal of a job offer.

Sexual harassers are positioned (or position themselves) as if they are critics of institutions rather than abusers of the power given to them by institutions.

I remember a conversation with Lily, whose abuser was a well-known radical intellectual. She said he would often cite other works by radical intellectuals as if the words from such works justified his conduct. He turned one radical manifesto into “a manifesto for abusers,” she said, calling himself a “rebel without a policy.”

Policies are treated as police.

Sexual harassment as: rebelling without a policy or rebelling from a policy.

Sexual harassment as: resistance to being policed.

Policies are framed not just as for the others but as coming from them. What is enacted as resistance to policy is how institutions remain difficult, even impossible, places for other people to be.

I remembered Lily’s words when Binnie wrote to me about a man who had multiple complaints for harassment and bullying against him. She also told me he had a feminist killjoy sign on his door. We can tell him to get the sign off his fucking door. But who knows, he might just turn it into a placard and march it onto the streets, protesting what he is enacting.

It’s painful, but we need to know what our work can paper over.

I think back to my starting point, the first policy story I shared in this post. When institutions use our critiques to paper over what we critique, so too can other people.

Those fighting for justice know a policy is not a tool for liberation. A policy agreed by an institution belongs to it in more ways than one. A policy is at best a form of nonreproductive labour: we need a policy to stop the same things happening, the reproduction of an inheritance. That is why a policy that only allows us to do so much can be too much. When we push for such policies, they end up without much force behind them. But we also know that nonperformative policies can suddenly acquire force when they are used against people fighting for justice, to suppress the voices of those speaking for a free Palestine, for instance.

Anything we come up with in the slow struggle for justice can be used against us from policies, to critiques, to words, to concepts - identity politics to universalism. That our words and our work are used against us makes it harder to do the work. It is another reason for doing it. We keep doing it, collecting more and more data. And yes, the eye of the institution will land on us. And so, we keep an eye out for each other. We do what we can, the best we can, sharing the labour with love.

I feel like this post has become a love letter to diversity workers.

So it has.

With killjoy solidarity,

Sara xx

Last week, I wrote about how by collecting stories of complaint, I collected secrets.

A complaint can end up in a file, treated as a secret document.

Secrets are not always declared secrets.

Secrets can be about consciousness, what we keep from ourselves.

You might shut the door of your consciousness to the violence you had to endure because if the violence got in, it would get everywhere.

Secrets can be about communication, what we keep from others.

You might shut the door so that other people don’t have to see the violence you endure, so what is everywhere for you, all over you, all over for you, is not there for anyone else.

A secret can be a story you have been stopped from telling, one you don’t even tell yourself. A secret can be what we carry around, like liquid in a container, what can spill, what we can spill.

I shared my post on Wednesday morning. Later that day, like many of you, I read the article about Cesar Chavez by Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes, based on extensive research including interviews with several women as well as sixty other people, and the reviewing of “hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs and other material.”

We learn that Chavez, cofounder of the National Farm Workers Association and civil rights icon, groomed, sexually abused and raped many girls and women who were part of the labour movement.

Like many of you, I read civil rights activist Dolores Huerta’s words.

And was undone by them.

In her own words.

“I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor—of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

“The knowledge that he hurt young girls sickens me. My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years. There are no words strong enough to condemn those deplorable actions that he did. César’s actions do not reflect the values of our community and our movement.”

At the age of ninety five, Dolores Huerta said it.

That she had been raped by him. Had his children. Whom she kept secret.

Secrets can be kept to protect the movement. Such secrets, if they protected the movement, protected him, but not the girls, the women, who were also part of the movement.

The grief of this: how a political movement can be turned into a network of abuse.

If an abuser is a network, what happens when the abuser is a comrade?

Abuse ends up travelling through a movement that carries with it so many hopes for liberation.

Hope can be why you keep a secret, for whom you keep it. Hope can be what you fight not to lose when you can no longer keep a secret, by separating it from the movement (“does not reflect the values of our community and our movement”).

When I read Dolores’s words, I stopped. I stopped doing what I was doing. Writing what I was writing.

A secret can be how you keep grief in.

When spilled, a collective.

I felt the grief of so many secrets.

Squeezed out from the container.

Grief for all the silence. For all the violence.

Grief for everyone left alone. Made alone.

Silence about violence is violence.

I left my job because I could not stomach being silent about violence. I knew being silent was sufficient to become part of a network of abusers.

If I felt alone when leaving, in listened to other people’s secrets, I felt less alone. Was less alone.

Secrets gave me a handle. How I held on.

It can break, that handle.

And then it hits you.

You are flooded by grief and not just your own.

It came back to me, when I read your words.

The intensity of that time. The necessity of that work.

Your heart aching for all the others. Our hearts aching for you. And for all the others, too.

Grief for all the silence. For all the violence.

When I left my post there were secrets, I was supposed to keep. I didn’t keep them or not all of them. A resignation letter can be a secret spilt.

I didn’t say much. I didn’t put it all into words. Since then I have shared so many words. But still there is much that I have not shared. Not in so many words.

Just let a little bit out and more comes out.

That’s the hope.

That’s why secrets can require keeping everything so tight. Everybody so tight.

I was told to keep secrets not because it would damage the abusers, but because it would damage the institution. And not just any institution: a radical one. I was told to keep the abuses (and the enquiries into the abuses) secret because if I didn’t the “right wing media” would use it as a tool against the radical institution. I was told that if people knew what was going on at the institution, it would damage feminism because the institution would no longer be known for its feminism but as another place where sexualised abuses of power happened. Where they were allowed to happen. Let happen.

Does being known for feminism require keeping abuse secret?

If it does, doing feminism might require not being known for it.

I was told if I had any allegiance to a radical project, I wouldn’t say anything. When I shared information, I became not just a bad colleague but a bad comrade.

A bad comrade would let a complaint get in the way of the political project. I have since heard of many secrets kept not out of loyalty to an institution in an abstract sense, but to a political project.

I heard from Anna who was told not to complain about sexual harassment “because it would stop this innovative work happening.” I heard from Rohina who told herself not to complain about racism because it could “threaten a programme that is supposed to diversify the faculty.” They both complained anyway, despite what they were told or told themselves.

There’s a problem with a project if to keep it going requires accepting conditions of abuse. When you accept these conditions to keep a project going, it is not just that problem that’s obscured.

Abusers often entangle their projects with institutions whilst presenting themselves as against them. You might be told that you can’t complain about a radical centre housed by an institution because the institution would use the complaint to dismantle the centre. And, there might be truth to that threat, which makes it more useful to those who want to free themselves from complaints and their consequences.

It goes something like this: if you are with us, don’t complain about us because they are out to get us.

It is not that radical movements or projects or centres have more abusive men than those that make conserving the existing order the primary point or purpose. Of course not. It is not even that we have higher expectations of cis het men in radical movements – speak of the problem of men’s chauvinism on the left and most feminist activists will roll their eyes knowingly and get on with the job.

It is more that our political commitments to freedom from violence are used to enact violence.

That is so devastating, that our will for freedom can be used against us. That it works until it doesn’t, with too many lives, also hopes, crushed before it stops working, before enough secrets are spilled for the truth to come out.

And we don’t even have to be told to keep this or that secret. All around us, right from the beginning, we receive messages that tell us it is better to keep quiet, that making harm more visible would cause more harm, extending it beyond ourselves to a family or a community or an organisation or a movement.

The message is an instruction; keep harm to yourself as if it is small. Make yourself small, so they can be bigger.

So much is kept secret to preserve not just legacy, but reality.

That idea of what is going on.

Which is also the origin story of the feminist killjoy:

To expose a problem is to pose a problem.

Unless you bring it up, it does not exist or not really.

Or if exists, not here, not now.

Over there, back then, the violence

is brought in by those who are not us.

Abusers are treated as foreign, if here not from here, not part of our family, not one of our colleagues, our comrades. Or if an abuser is one of us, then he becomes an individual, an exception, an aberration, not expressing who we are.

To point to abuse as a system is evidence of not being attached to the system.

The expectation of attachment falls unequally.

Some become loose canons, improperly attached, firing off at anyone or anything. Others become free radicals, freed not only from attachments but restraints, doing whatever they so will or wish, turning equality into a “fuck you” policy.

Anyone who speaks of harm can be treated as a loose canon, intending to cause damage. After I left my radical institution - its radicalism depending on concealing all the ways in which it was not radical - I heard that harm being minimised despite all that had come out. How those who said no were treated as suffering from “hysteria” about the “abuse of women,” to quote from Noam Chomsky’s letter to Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, that old complaint about feminists.

The abuse was sometimes minimised by being transformed into the romance of rebellion, treated as transgression. Even by feminists. One time I was in another country and a radical decolonial feminist scholar casually referenced someone in a way that led me to realise she had remained part of the abuser’s network.

You can be part of an abuser’s network and float around radical spaces talking about abolition.

That broke my heart in too many places.

Another time I was contacted by a student after giving a virtual lecture. She apologized for having left early and explained she had done so because she “saw the name of her abuser in the chat’.”

Think about this: you have to leave a discussion about abuse because the person who abused you is in that discussion.

That’s how they abusers take over the spaces we created to survive the consequence of their conduct. When those who said no leave, they take our hopes with them. And if we point this out? We would be treated as punitive as well as policing, not doing transformative justice, being carceral feminists.

So much hostility follows a claim that abusers of power, those who use the power given to them by institutions to impose their will upon others, are not part of a project of liberation.

Should not be.

Or you, moralisers, with your goods and your shoulds!

The shunners, the meanies, the mobs.

Radical spaces become harder to inhabit, the more you know how they are not so.

We know, we go.

I will come back to this, why the charge of moralism matters.

Before that, think back.

When I stopped writing what I was writing, doing what I was doing, I thought of Audre Lorde.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a blog post, “Complaint and Survival,” inspired by Lorde (as most of my words are). From that post:

In an interview with Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde described how she was so “sickened with fury” about the acquittal of a white policeman who shot a black child that she wrote the extraordinary poem, “Power” (2017, 85).

In Lorde’s own words:

I was driving in the car and heard the news on the radio that the cop had been acquitted. I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my note book to enable me to cross town without an accident because I felt so sick and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down – I was just writing, and the poem came out without craft.

She stopped the car to get her feelings out.

She stopped the car and a poem came out.

She stopped the car because she knew that what she felt would come out, one way or another; an accident or a poem.

A poem is not an accident.

I have been thinking about that: how sometimes we have to stop what we are doing to feel the true impact of something, to let our bodies experience that impact, the fury of an escalating injustice, a structure as well as an event; a history, an unfinished history.

Sometimes to sustain your commitments you stop what you are doing.

In stopping, something comes out. We don’t always know what will come out when we stop to register the impact of something.

Audre Lorde teaches us how not to keep secrets not just by what we say but what we do, staying connected, live wires, being of more use to movements because we keep that no in circulation, even if sometimes we have to stop what we are doing. And so, in staying connected, going back, getting out, we circle through grief.

In listening to stories of complaint, I have been learning why so many people don’t complain. I think of Kate’s explanation for why she didn’t complain after she was sexually assaulted by a lecturer in her department over twenty years ago.* She said to complain about abuse would be “complaining to your abuser.”

I spoke to Kate along with Tina and Stephanie who had been undergraduates in the same department. When a story broke about sexual harassment at their university a few years ago, Tina posted a link on Facebook, commenting, “No surprises there.” Kate responded, “Some things don’t change.” They arranged to meet up. Tina described, “We kind of disclosed everything to each other, what had happened.” They lifted the lid by talking to each other. That’s how they learnt that between them they had, in Stephanie’s words, “knowledge and first-hand experience of harassment and/or assault from five male members of staff within one department.”

Hence the clarity of Kate’s observation that complaining about abuse is “complaining to your abuser.”

To complain about abuse would be to complain to your abuser or to the colleagues or friends of your abuser, some of whom participated in the abuse, or to the institution that gave your abuser the power they abused, for whom your abuser is likely an investment, a person to be protected.

An abuser does not just have a network. An abuser is a network.

Kate also said, “they have each other’s backs.”

When they have each other’s backs, their backs become doors.

By listening to those who’ve complained in institutions, and sometimes about them, I gathered not just stories but secrets. It is not hard to understand how complaints become secrets given that to complain, formally at least, is to end up in a closet, a small room with a locked door. You complain in a closet and your complaint ends up in one. When you get the complaint out, it can be quickly contained or “shoved in a box,” to borrow Dee’s words for what happened to hers. A filing cabinet can be a bin, old and rusty, where you place what is to be discarded, what is to become dusty.

Not all complaints are housed or hidden by organisations given there’s no need to file complaints that are not made.

When you don’t complain formally, you might end up creating your own complaint file; putting what happened to the back of your mind, so you can get on and do your work.

What has been filed away has not gone.

And not just because of what goes on.

Having lifted the lid by talking to each other, Kate, Stephanie and Tina ended up making a formal “historic” and collective complaint. They decided to do so in part because they found out from current students that one of the other professors who had harassed and assaulted them was still “at it.” Yes, over twenty years later. When violence is buried, it is repeated. The scale of abuse in this department should have been a scandal. But no, it wasn’t. The institution found a way to bury their complaint, making it history, quietly retiring the professor; his record, its record, cleaned. Stephanie wrote a letter to the university, complaining about how they had “scaled down the problem to one rogue member of staff who has recently retired.” I suspect that letter ended up in the bin they call a filing cabinet.

A complaint that takes a long time to come out can still end up discarded.

In my recent book on complaint, No is Not a Lonely Utterance otherwise known as No!, which is the title I will use from this point on, I share many stories of complaint including non-complaints and almost-complaints and dropped-complaints and delayed-complaints. I think of myself as a caretaker of this mountain of discarded materials, what we can call a complaint archive. Whether or not we make complaint the object of research, to be a feminist at work is to assemble a complaint archive. Our commitment to the project of changing institutions, to dismantling the structures that make institutions so hostile to so many, is how we come to hear each other’s stories of complaint, what happened when we did, why we didn’t.

Our complaint archives can be a handle, also a lens, helping us to sift through the materials in the Epstein files, allowing us to show what we know; what is in the files, however disturbing and shocking, is not novel or new. I write this post in solidarity with all the women who said no to violence and abuse, who kept saying it, reporting and complaining, risking their livelihoods and lives. I write this post in solidarity with everyone who has seen in the Epstein files so many of the fragments that make their work and their world a hostile environment.

So many fragments; each piece, sharp.

We have much to learn from the files about how the networks created by powerful men to participate in the sexual abuse of women and girls are used to protect each other from consequences, with that line between participation and protection so blurred. I am grateful to all the feminists including Celeste Davis, and Kate Manne who have reminded us that we already have a name, patriarchy, for much of what we find in the files. The title of Davis’s essay, “There is one word that explains why so many men can be in the Epstein files” is helpful. She notes, “the bulk of the attention is converged around figuring out who and what exactly enabled Epstein’s rampant sexual abuse—wealth, elite networks, institutional failure and blackmail.” Davis shows how patriarchy is at work in the resistance to naming it. Manne begins her essay by observing that what Davis states is “an important and obvious truth: the common denominator in sexual abuse is patriarchy.”

Patriarchy is at work in the communications between men in the files, their brutal bonding over the demeaning of women and our bodies. However familiar, however normalised, this language is hard to hear. I think of Patricia, a woman professor who ended up being seated at a table of men. She said, “the conversation was not what I would have expected from people at a university, especially somewhere like here, which I believed at the time was a good place to be with its attitudes to women. The conversation was like being in a men’s club, you know. It was really offensive. They didn’t notice me.” The men at that table used the same words to describe women’s bodies that are much repeated in the Epstein files. Because they did not notice her, Patricia witnessed that bonding, heard the conversations that mostly happen in private emails, in clubs, behind closed doors. When she complained to the Deputy Head of Human Resources, a close colleague of most of the men at that table, he nodded and did nothing.

We need to give problems their names because of what keeps happening. So, by problems, think systems. We also have much to learn from the files about how global elites search for ideas that naturalise their power and status, turning their exchanges, their sadism, their cruelty, into virtues. As Ana Marie Cox describes, “Epstein is less the thread that connects the rich and powerful than a lens through which all of those existing connections snap into place: the common denominator for the cursed ideas—white supremacy and patriarchy, a cheapening of human life and human values and human choice—propelling the apocalypse forward.” We hear in so many communications, the utility of positive and negative eugenics, that “the stronger” should be aided to reproduce more and given tools to eliminate “the weaker.” One text from Epstein asks, “if the brain discards unused neurons,” why should “society keep their equivalent.” Ideas are materials. So by ideas, also think systems. We cannot address the trafficking of women without also addressing the system of racial capitalism that renders some people, some populations, more precarious, more easily turned into property or commodity, to be exchanged, used, used up, discarded. I think of how bell hooks always nailed it by naming it, speaking constantly of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” stressing the importance of using a “language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality.”

That we need to find a language to “remind us” of systems of domination is a crucial insight into how such systems work. Why? Because power is so often obscured and not just by language. That the stories of complaint shared with me helped me to see how power works more clearly is, perhaps surprisingly, in the details. Hearing what happens behind closed doors is to witness how systems are not just there but actively maintained by what some people do, and by what they don’t do.

In No!, I share Shazia’s story of complaining about racism. To complain about a racist organisation is to complain to one. Shazia did not get to hear how her complaint was talked about behind closed doors, although she was told by the Head of Human Resources that she had “a chip on her shoulder,” which probably tells us all we need to know about how she (and her complaint) was received. In the middle of giving her testimony, Shazia told me about another complaint made by students. During seminars, the Professors in the department, all white men, kept making derogatory comments about the work of postgraduate students and more junior colleagues. It had become a routine, conversations punctuated by cruelty; jibes, jokes and laughter. The students stopped attending the seminars. When they were reminded that attendance was compulsory, they made an informal complaint explaining that “they actively choose not to go these seminars because they were designed for a handful of senior white men in the department.”

Shazia was at the meeting in which the students’ complaint was discussed. The professors responded thus, “the first thing the director said is that we must defend ourselves, perhaps these people didn’t attend the sessions because they found them too intellectually challenging.” The professors then decided to have an “open meeting,” which was officially framed as a chance for the students to air their grievances but was really about “calming them down.”

The professors were, indeed, receiving a complaint about themselves (“complaining to your abuser”). And in receiving it, they made the same kind of derogatory comments about the students that the students had complained about. Complaints about their conduct were treated as evidence of the students being weak (“they found them too intellectually challenging”). That’s exactly how diversity and equality policies such as “dignity at work” are often judged, as weakening an elite, the guardians of institutions and their legacies.

Complaints about misconduct are often treated as impositions on the freedom of elites to speak and to act however they so wish. And by act, I mean act. One of the findings of my research is that physical and sexual assaults are treated as styles of communication and thus protected as free speech (read here for an extended discussion of this finding). One report into the conduct of a Head of Department who bullied a woman over decades, and then physically assaulted her, cleared him of wrong-doing. How? In the report, he was described as “having a direct style of management.”

Conduct itself can be understood as a transmission system, how messages are passed down about what is acceptable to say and to do, rather like how electricity is conducted by wire. Some people complain in order to try to stop that transmission system from working. But then their complaints are stopped because that transmission system is working.

In No!, I also shared Andrea’s story of complaining about the conduct of a senior man when she was an MA student. When she indicated she might complain about him, she is warned by Bianca, the course leader, “be careful he is an important man.” We learn so much about what warnings are doing from that one! A warning is telling you what to avoid by telling you who is important. That instruction to be careful was really a recommendation that Andrea protect her relationship to the person who abused her.

Many warnings not to complain about abuse are directives; telling you to become part of the abuser’s network. I call it a door deal: if you have their back, you will not be shown the door. Behind many a door, you will find many a deal. Hence a complaint against an “important man” will almost always implicate a wider network. Conduct is about the transmission not just of values but benefits.

Importance is always a social achievement. The more important a person becomes, the more they can do for more people. The more important a person, the more people are involved in protecting them. Andrea herself watched her whole department fall into line “to protect the professor.” Bianca who gave her the warning was a woman of colour, and relatively junior. Maybe she understood that to progress she would need support from “an important man.” The warning she gave was likely one she had herself received.

Andrea said she received “solidarity” from another tutor Kelly, when they happened to meet “on the stairs.” But then the next day Kelly asked to speak on the phone so Andrea “wouldn’t have a record of it in writing” and basically told her she had no grounds for complaint. Andrea said she “sounded scared.” Andrea felt sympathy for Kelly who was on a temporary contract. She thought she was probably “trying to protect her precarious position.”

A conversation that happened on the stairs in which solidarity was expressed. Another conversation on the phone in which solidarity was withdrawn. What happened in between these conversations? Andrea had her own theory; she said someone “got to her.” By someone, think network. Some people are coerced into becoming part of an abuser’s network. When people who are more precarious are easier to coerce, precarity is behind the widening of the network. So, even when protection is achieved through coordinated actions, it does not mean they are all performed voluntarily.

When you complain about the conduct of those with more connections, you will hear the sound of those connections travelling as messages through a network that includes but exceeds internal systems for handling complaints. To make a complaint is to call in, you send an alert by speaking to such-and-such person or persons, perhaps located in HR, about such-and-such person or persons. It just takes one person to indicate they might complain about “an important man” to hear phone lines becoming busy; buzz, buzz.

You can hear so many busy lines in the Epstein files, many emails fired off, followed no doubt by many phone calls: Epstein, a convicted sex offender, treated as the one damaged, in need of help and protection; Epstein, giving his support to other powerful men against the complainers and the killjoy feminists who called them out.

Journalist Moira Donegan, who is herself “in the Epstein files” because of whom she called out has written convincingly about how many of the documents, “paint Epstein as someone for whom elites, and particularly elite men, often felt a sense of camaraderie and affection, maintaining intimate and friendly relationships long after his 2008 conviction on child sexual abuse charges.” She adds that they did not just turn “a blind eye to their friend’s sexual crimes” but “saw him as a thrower of ‘wild’ parties and a listening ear in whom they could confide their anxieties about the excesses of the #Metoo movement.” As Rebecca Solnit describes, “The Epstein files are now like a miasma of contamination, touching more and more members of the elite who continued to socialise with and cultivate Epstein after his status as a child abuser and registered sex offender was clear. In that sense, #MeToo is ongoing.”

I will return to the function of anti-feminism - and, in particular, the association of feminism with moralism -in my next post. In No! I address the widespread use of retaliation against many women who complained about sexual harassment after #MeToo went viral. I had no doubt there was a network of powerful men behind these retaliations, although we did not have the direct evidence we have now been given with the release of the Epstein files. Reporter Bryce Court suggested in 2023 that #MeToo led to a quiet but effective legal backlash, “The accused have turned around and sued their accusers, effectively silencing them.” Another reporter, Ali Medina, describes how survivors are silenced by “bringing or threatening to bring defamation suits.”

Retaliation is usually hard to evidence; it is often about opportunities not received, doors not opened. Retaliation is sometimes purposefully evidenced, made spectacular or turned into theatre. But even when retaliation is theatrical, you cannot always see how many are behind it. When the abuser is a network, it is not just the abuser we don’t see. We don’t see the network until it fails to do what it is meant to do, protect those with power from any consequences.

And then, it can be an avalanche, a mountain of materials, crashing down.

Still, with many names redacted. Still, with so many being protected.

From consequences.

And this, we do know: they can still make a mountain into a molehill. Find ways to minimise the abuse. The violence. The harm.

And yes, we are watching that happen.

As ever, we learn from revelations; how much work it takes, over generations, to force out what so many people pretend not to know.

To force the force out is often to be forced out.

The more other people invest in a person, the more power that person acquires. That is why, when power is concentrated, it can appear distributed or even diffused. The fewer heads, the more hands. When you see so many hands at work, you might mistake that movement for something else, something collective, even elusive.

Hence there is more to this picture of power.

When an “important man” is brought down, we see it: how power does not reside in just one person, magically, as if a possession. We observe it, how an abuser has an army of assistants, whose careers progress because they say yes. We show it, how those who said no, who refused or complained, were silenced by another army, including of lawyers, through secret deals, many sealed by NDAs.

Some people who enable other people to be abusive will recognise this picture without recognising themselves. I have learnt from my research that some of the people who have spoken out publicly about abusive conduct, who have even led the development of new policies on sexual harassment, have quite happily protected their own colleagues from complaints about abusive conduct when called upon to do so.

A door deal, a yes behind a door.

Protection can sometimes be achieved by what people do not know, or will not know. I spoke to Lily, a student, who had been sexually harassed by a senior man in her department, probably another “important man.” Lily sought advice from Tammy, a feminist lecturer in the same department. Tammy said she could not “do anything” because “she did not know enough.” Tammy did not take any time to find out more about what was going on: Lily said she was hurried out of her office. Tammy was probably shutting more than her office door.

It is not so much that some people don’t do anything because they don’t know enough.

Some people don’t know enough so they don’t have to do anything.

You don’t have to do anything to become part of an abuser’s network. Doing nothing will do.

The doors that keep so much in the shadows are used by institutions, and some people in them, to obscure what is being done and by whom. There is a profound investment in keeping things unclear. This lack of clarity is superficial. When workplace abuses come out, it is common for people to say it was “an open secret.” As Soraya Chemaly has observed, Epstein’s sexual abuse of women and girls was an “open secret,” which “just means people were colluding, throwing hundreds of girls away as they did.” An open secret is information that people know without it having to be officially disclosed. Some people manage to protect abusers by working to keep that abuse almost a secret from themselves, trying not to learn the full extent of it, pulling the blinds down to stop themselves seeing too much or seeing any more. That’s how some people can be shocked by revelations about serial abusers whilst participating in the very culture that created them.

*All names in this post are pseudonyms

I am so grateful to Duke University Press, and my editor Ken Wissoker, for giving so many authors, myself included, room to write other kinds of books.

My gratitude also to everyone who picked up and read Queer Phenomenology and survived its obsession, ok my obsession, with tables.

I have been away from social media as I have been finishing another book, Common Sense and Its Others. I think of it as a sequel to Queer Phenomenology. Yes, that was a long time coming. And yes, there are more references to tables. How could there not be?!

I have selected some paragraphs from the draft to show why following common sense led me in this direction.

…………………………………………

Common sense is often referred to as a teacher such that it is not uncommon to ask, “what would common sense tell us to do?” What is practical or sensible at any given moment of time will depend upon the situation you are in. Common sense might be not just how we determine what is practical in a given situation, but what determines the situation that makes something practical. So, it might be common sense not to complain about your boss if you need a reference. It might be common sense to use the same word other people use to describe what you are doing. It might be common sense to nod in agreement with someone who has the power to withhold resources you need.

When it is common sense to do what is “in agreement” with what is going to be done or with whom has the power to determine what is going to be done, common sense is about the status quo. Or a relationship to it. Or an expression of it. It does not follow that common sense is uncontested. It might mean that what contradicts common sense, what is not in agreement, including as it happens, many complaints, go underground, filed away under the heading absurd.

…

An agreement can be what is harder to see.

…

Historian Sophia Rosenfeld describes how common sense “comes out of the shadows and draws attention to itself at moments of perceived crisis or collapsing consensus” (2011, 24). By “drawing attention to itself,” Rosenfeld is referring to how commonsense is turned into an object of discourse, spoken of, cited, claimed, by commentors or politicians. For Stuart Hall, following Gramsci, “Common sense is not coherent: it is usually ‘disjointed and episodic’, fragmentary and contradictory. Into it the traces and ‘stratified deposits’ of more coherent philosophical systems have sedimented over time without leaving any clear inventory” (1996, 431).

It is not just that common sense as an idea has a history but that the more ideas become common sense, the less distinct they appear.

…

Common sense might be doing more when it is not called upon.

To approach common sense phenomenologically, would be to show not only how it “knocks on the door of consciousness,” to borrow a term from Edmund Husserl ([1952] 1989, 105) but recedes from view, moving in and out of the shadows. A shadow is an area of darkness, caused by light being blocked by something. But it has many other meanings attached to this one: a shadow can be anything unreal or ghost-like; what follows a person, an imitation or copy, a faint trace; it also carries the meaning of an “uninvited guest.”

…

If Queer Phenomenology ended with the question of disorientation, that’s where this book begins. It is those who are not at home, who do not have their bearings, who help to bring common sense out of the shadows, making not just common sense but the worlds it brings with it, more perceptible.

To be seen as a stranger is to be questioned. You might be questioned where you are from or whether you are real. For Alfred Schutz, the stranger is the one who questions, who “has to face the fact that he lacks any status as a member of the social group he is about to join and is therefore unable to get a starting point to take his bearings” (1944, 504). The stranger, “finds himself a border case outside the territory covered by the scheme of orientation current within the group. He is, therefore, no longer permitted to consider himself as the center of his social environment, and this fact causes again a dislocation of his contour lines of relevance” (504).

…

We can, of course, be here or even from here, and still feel like a stranger, as if we do not understand the rules or are not starting from the same point or experiencing the world in the same way. Or we can be here, allowing ourselves to pass into the familiarity of common sense only for something odd or strange or unexpected to happen. Maybe then we might look up and see things in another way.

…

In Queer Phenomenology, with reference to Merleau-Ponty, I noted “queer moments do happen” (2006, 55). Merleau-Ponty was discussing experiments, “If we so contrive it that a subject sees the room in which he is, only through a mirror which reflects it at an angle at 45 degrees to the vertical, the subject at first sees the room ‘slantwise.’ A man walking about in it seems to lean to one side as he goes. A piece of cardboard falling down the doorframe looks to be falling obliquely. The general effect is ‘queer.’”

Merleau-Ponty asks how the subject’s relation to space is re-orientated: “After a few minutes a sudden change occurs: the walls, the man walking around the room, and the line in which the cardboard falls become vertical” ([1945] 2002, 289). This reorientation means that the queer effect is overcome and objects no longer appears “off-centre” or “slantwise.” Merleau-Ponty offers a queer phenomenology by how he does (and does not) explain how queer effects are overcome. He does not argue that the “vertical is the direction represented by the symmetry of the axis of the body” (291). So, in the experiment, if the subject keeps looking at the mirror, he has a range of possible actions available such as “walking, opening a cupboard, using a table, sitting down” (291). If at first “the subject is not at home with the utensils it contains” after some time “the reflected room miraculously capable of living in it,” such that “the virtual body ousts the real one,” and “he feels he has the legs and arms he would need to walk in the reflected room” (291).

You can end up living in that reflection, the virtual arms ousting your real arms, allowing you to get the angles right, so you can pick up this or that utensil. Merleau-Ponty concludes, “What counts for the orientation of my spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation. My body is wherever there is something to be done” (291). My task in Queer Phenomenology was not to bring queer to phenomenology, but to bring it out. That action of bringing queer out, which means showing how it was already there, even if only in glimpses, is still a method, a way of reading for queer effects. Queerness might be an experience of common sense being disrupted, however temporarily, when you lose your bearings but not your task. In my conclusion to this book, following Kara Keeling (2007), I consider how changing the conditions of what is perceptible might make common sense itself rather queer.

It was a disorientating experience of working not just in but on an institution that led me to write about common sense. On November 3, 2013, I attended a meeting with students who had made a complaint about sexual harassment. Their complaint had led to an enquiry. The students called the meeting because, the enquiry had been closed without their complaints having been heard. On that day, we sat down together in my own department’s main meeting room. The students spoke of what happened that had led them to complain and what happened when they did; how they had been put under pressure to withdraw their complaints. They spoke of earlier complaints that had led to earlier enquiries, none of which I had known about.

Behind one complaint, a shadow of so many others.

I think of how Jennifer Doyle titled a book that gave devastating detail to her experience of filing a complaint, Shadow of my Shadow (2024).

Complaints are mostly made confidential once made. And so, to complain is to end up in the shadows of institutions, behind closed doors, in poorly lit rooms. Over three years, I worked with the student closely. The work of complaint did indeed feel like shadowy work. I was pulled out of my day job even if some of the activities were the same as before, attending meetings, organising events and reading groups, sending letters after letters to colleagues and administrators, trying to get other people to stop what they were doing and to pay attention to what I understood to be a crisis or even an emergency. But I was still at work. And, when I went back to my day job, that world, which was supposed to be the real world, upright, brightly lit, busy, felt increasingly unreal. Everything became topsy-turvy, upside down.

It helped that we worked as a collective, what I was later to call a complaint collective. That’s how I got my bearings, sharing not just the task but the situation. Later some of the students, Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble, Heidi Hasbrouck and Chryssa Sdrolia reflected on how they began working together, “We started having meetings. We started writing together. As we came into this work, some of us already knew one another well, and others amongst us hadn’t met before. Some of us who came together at that moment to begin to write are the same as those of us who gathered to contribute to this piece. Some are not” (2021, 264).

Collectivity can be a gradual process not just of finding each other but reorientating your attention. Some of our work ended up being about trying to get the complaints out of the shadows and into that brightly lit world, into departmental meetings, formal minutes and memos, informal conversations between colleagues as they rushed down narrow corridors. We pushed to get an acknowledgement in public that the enquiries into sexual harassment had taken place. That didn’t happen. When you come out with complaints, you can feel like you end up in another closet, an institutional closet, the air made stuffy by secrets. As I would come to learn, many complaints end up in the institutional closets we sometimes called filing cabinets. One student said that her complaint was “shoved in a bin.” Another that her complaint “went to the complaint graveyard.”

Complaints are not just buried by institutions. I knew that to keep my job I too would have to become a closet, a keeper of the institution’s secrets. I could not do that. I would not do that. I resigned from my post and profession on May 30, 2016. Before resigning, I had already decided to begin an empirical project on complaint having learnt that those who complain know so much about institutions but often can’t do much with that knowledge. It was not long after leaving my post, that I decided to work on common sense. Right from the beginning, I thought of common sense as coming “after complaint.” I shared the idea on social media at pretty much the same time it first occurred to me.

I came to common sense from complaint because my experience was of having so much that was familiar disrupted. My project on complaint has given me companions, who gifted me their stories, so many more familiars disrupted, some of which I share again in this book.

I know my complaining companions will travel with me, wherever I go. I now think of complaint less as a distinct project and more as my life’s work. Although I complained many times about sexism about racism over the course of my academic career (you have to keep making the same complaint when the same things keep happening), I never initiated a formal complaint. There are good reasons for not formalising complaints given doing so requires using the institution’s own forms. There are, of course, good reasons for formalising complaints: it is easier for institutions to avoid problems when they are not addressed in forms they recognise.

…

If I did not formalise my complaints, I came to realise that I made them in my own time and in another way, in the longer and painstaking work of calling institutions to account. The data of complaint is phenomenologically rich, the more we refuse to go along with things, the more we see of them. Hence the objects we find in common sense appear quite differently when seen through the lens of complaint.

….

When I engage with the work of scholars who defend common sense as the proper basis for knowledge or make use of common sense as a way of understanding social processes, I read their work as forming an archive, considering what does not (and does not) come into view, the objects and others that appear and disappear along the way. That’s how I bring a queer phenomenological lens to the archives of common sense.

Works Cited

Doyle, Jennifer (2024). Shadow of my Shadow. Durham: Duke University Press.

Schutz, Alfred (1944). “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” American Journal of Sociology, 49, 6: 499-507.

Hall, Stuart (1996). “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. New York, Routledge, 411–40.

Husserl, Edmund. (1989 [1952]). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second book. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.

Keeling, Kara (2007). The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2002). [1945] Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge.

Rosenfeld, Sophia (2011). Common Sense: A Political History. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

We need to name a problem in order to address it. But naming problems does not make them go away. And yet, naming matters. Complaining about problems does not make them go away, either. And yet complaining matters. Even to give a problem a name, to say, say, that’s sexual harassment, that’s racism, that’s transphobia is to say no. Saying no not just in institutions but to them is risky. If you say no to those who control resources, you risk losing access to those resources. And yet, some of us are can only do the work we do, live the lives we live, because of how many before us said no, risking the consequences.

That no brings us here, brings us together, to do this work.

For over a decade now, I have been gathering no’s, listening to other people’s complaints, finding different ways to release them, with No is Not a Lonely Utterance, or No! being the most recent release. I am sharing my dedication for the book, which is also a content warning. It is my dedication for this lecture too, and thus also a content warning.

No Is Not a Lonely Utterance is dedicated to everyone who needs to take care in reading it because of what they have been through. It tells stories of harassment, bullying, assault, and hostile environments from the point of view of those who have said no to them.

I no longer think of complaint as a distinct research project but as a way of learning from the slow and painstaking labour of calling institutions to account. So much of this work – the work we are doing here right now – is not recognised let alone valued. So much of it, mundane. Organising another meeting. Writing another letter. Looking after a friend after she’s had a difficult meeting with an administrator. Listening to someone who comes to your office with an experience so painful that they can barely put it into words. Creating room for them. Time for them.

To give time to complaint is to learn from those who refuse to accept violence as just how things how are. I want to talk today about how gathering and releasing complaints led me to hope. By this I don’t mean that I feel hopeful. We can follow Mariame Kaba by thinking of hope not so much as an emotion (which is not to say hope isn’t an emotion) but as discipline, “what you have to practice every day,” how we sustain our projects and communities. We can recall Pauli Murray’s rather beautiful description of “hope is a song in a weary throat,” that sound of persistence in the face of exhaustion. This is not the kind of hope that leads Chelsea Watego to insist with inspirational directness, “fuck hope,” a compensatory hope that is offered instead of meaningful change. That the action of bringing complaints together, even those that do not seem to have brought about meaningful change is hopeful is, I hope, something we can learn from and hold on to.

Institutional Fatalism (and how to resist it)

The labour of complaint does not begin with a complaint. I spoke to Darcy who was being sexually harassed by her supervisor. She is describing why it was so hard to give that problem its name. She said

It’s odd to think back. In this moment, this seems absolutely insane to me, but at the time it was part of the culture of the department we had. A professor I had met with earlier in the programme said that he had to keep a big wooden table between him and his female students so he would remember not to touch them, and then another of our long-time male faculty is notorious for marrying student after student after student. And that was within all this rhetoric of critical race studies, and pedagogy of the oppressed. As I am recounting it to you, I just wanted to say that it is so jarring to look back on it, because it looks so very clear, from this hindsight perspective.

When what you experience “at the time” is part of the culture, you don’t identify it at the time you experience it. The harassment, the misconduct, expressed in the idea that senior men would need a big wooden table order to remember not to touch women students, is happening at the same time that all the critical work is happening, or that the rhetoric of critical work is used to describe what is happening, critical race studies, pedagogy of the oppressed. Darcy has to see through it, how the institution presents itself, to recognize the violence directed towards her and other women. Clarity can be jarring because to see it is not only to see what you did not see before. It is to see yourself not seeing it.

The longer you take to see it, the harder it is to see it.

Once she sees it, what then? Darcy goes to the office dedicated to handling complaints: “they were like, ‘you can file a complaint.’ But then they said, not much is going to happen: he’s really well loved by the university; he has a strong publication record; you are going to go through all of this emotional torment. It was even proposed that he could counter sue me for defamation of character. The line was essentially, you can do this, but why would you.”

In being told that complaining will mean hurtling toward a miserable fate, Darcy met with a set of beliefs I call “institutional fatalism,” statements about what institutions are like, what they will be, who they will and will not love, who they will and will not protect. Darcy was a queer woman of colour from a working-class background. Darcy explained her supervisor came “from a very wealthy, entitled background,” adding “I guess that is what gave him such a strong sense of entitlement.”

It has been all over the news, what the wealthy and entitled can and do get away with.

In the end, Darcy did not file a formal complaint in part because she believed what she was being told: that she wouldn’t get anywhere, it wouldn’t get anywhere, because he was going somewhere.

It is those who indicate they might complain or who do complain who learn about institutional fatalism. I spoke to Black feminist scholar and activist Janine Francois about how she used the skills she acquired from complaining to engage in “advocacy work for BIPOCs in the arts & academia, supporting mainly race-based complaints/ grievances.” I discussed Janine’s inspiring practice in the book (pages 237-239 of the Penguin edition). Janine taught me a lot about institutional fatalism. She said, “I remember I would see some of these senior managers around, they would pull me aside and say things like, ‘it is not me.’ We get directions from above and we are just the messenger. One member of senior staff told me, ‘I get told what to say.’ And I am thinking, but you are head of the department. You have a lot of institutional power. You could say no.” Some people acquire the power to say no by refusing to say it, becoming instead conduits for the smooth transmission of messages that come from somewhere else and someone else.

Janine added, “they hide behind the walls.” When Janine mentioned “the walls,” I was reminded of how a diversity officer described her job as a “banging your head against the brick wall job.” When the wall keeps its place, she ends up sore.

A job description as a wall description.

That same wall can be a hiding place.

When people say, “the institution did it,” they bypass their complicity, and avoid confronting what (and who) they said yes to.

Those who say yes are more likely progress.

Many people are advised not to complain or not to be too critical of the institution until later, when they are more established. The problem with “later” is that it is mostly too late, by the time some people are given permission to say no, they have lost the will or capacity to do so. Perhaps that’s the institutional hope.

When you say no, you come up against other people’s yeses, a wall is built from them. A warning can be how you are told, be part of that wall or be stopped by it.

I spoke to Andrea who made complaint about bullying and harassment by the most senior man in her department. When she indicates she might complain to the head of the programme, she is warned “be careful he is an important man.” An important man has a legacy. Or perhaps he is one. Andrea did not heed the warning. By complaining, she “sacrificed the references.” In reference to the prospect of doing a PhD, she said “that door is closed.” That door is closed: references can be doors, how some are stopped form progressing.

When a no shuts a door, it might seem you are given retrospective confirmation of the truth in the warning, that there’s no point in complaining, as nothing will change but you will suffer. Is that so? Must it be so? Can we make it not be so?

A few years after Andrea gave her initial testimony, she shared with me that she is teaching at another university and is again considering doing a PhD. Having had one door shut, she eventually found her way “to a much more supportive and kinder environment.” She explains “I refused to walk to the beat of the institution, to bend to patriarchal abuses of power in order to get ahead on a particular path.” She added, “I’m so, so glad I shut [that] door.” When you say no because of your feminist commitments, you don’t just lose a path, you make it possible to find another one. I think of the feminist values Andrea is now able to pass on to her students, the different paths she might make lay for them.

Andrea qualified she did not want hope to be turned into a platitude, an empty statement about better times to come. She explained, “I’m not sure how to word those thoughts in such a way that they would not sound like a platitude to someone in the depths of complaint.” When you are in those “depths of complaint,” hope, rather like happiness, can not just hurt but create more burdens, as if getting out of the situation will be up to you. Whether another path is opened up might depend on privilege or luck. It can still be helpful to know that our path is not decided by those who shut the door. Andrea said, “The idea that the gatekeepers of that ‘end’ seem to position themselves as omnipotent - that they are deciding your fate for you.” Institutional fatalism is not just a set of messages telling you institutions are what they are, that they will love who they will love, but the effort to convince you they have all the power by displaying it.

It is terrifying to witness the machinery of power. It can also be radicalising. The clarity that comes with complaint, however jarring, is energising and enraging. One professor, Jules, talked to me about what it was like to watch her institution protect a serial abuser. At the end of our informal conversation, she said, “I just want to put a flame under it.” And, by it, she meant the system. Even if you don’t make a complaint because you are trying to change the system or “to dismantle the master’s house,” to evoke the title of an important essay by Audre Lorde, that’s where some of those who complain end up.

It is a rather hopeful trajectory, from complaint to “complaint activism.” The term “complaint activism” came to me as I was talking to Esther about her experiences of complaining about disability discrimination. After giving her testimony, Esther said, “That’s the nutshell of my complaint experiences: the things I have found not helpful are long complaint processes, writing letters and asking nicely and doing things for no pay. I don’t do that anymore.” I responded, “It almost sounds like you have a style of ‘complaint activism.’ Is that how you would describe it?’ Esther answered, “Yes, it is how I would describe it.” Complaint activism for Esther meant pushing against institutions, not working for them but confronting them, throwing whatever you can at them to stop them from doing nothing.

When Esther initially participated in my study, I anonymised her testimony. In the new book, with her permission, I shared her full name, Esther Loukin, so readers could follow her trajectory. Complaining about inaccessibility led Esther to realize how hard it was to use the Equality Act to bring cases of disability discrimination to the courts. She co-founded the disabled-led campaigning organization Reasonable Access, which aims to “empower other disabled people in the UK to assert and enforce their right to access through peer assistance and information provision.”

And we might also think here of the trajectory of the 1752 group, how it came from the efforts of former students at Goldsmiths to change the culture that normalised sexual harassment. I think back to another conference on sexual harassment organised by Tiffany Page, Leila Whitley and Anna Bull, on December 2, 2015, for which they received 1752 pounds. Behind a complaint collective, so much labour.

We can take what we learn not just from making formal complaints but our internal struggles to change institutions, to form new partnerships and pressure groups. Complaint activism does not come from an optimism regarding the law or complaint procedures but if anything comes from direct experience of the limitations of fighting for change using these tools or methods. Returning to Esther, she realized that the main reason disabled people don’t use the law as a tool to “assert and enforce their right to access” is because of the potential costs occurred in making cases (any claimant is at risk of having to pay the defendant’s costs if they lose the case). So, in 2020, Esther applied for a judicial review. Although Esther’s case did not succeed, the judgment still recognised the barriers Esther identified. As Francesca Di Giorgio, another campaigner for Reasonable Access said, “We are a step closer to justice.” Four years later, on 27 November 2024, the government announced an “open call for evidence,” about cost protection for disability discrimination claims, citing Esther’s application for judicial review as a key background to the call.

It takes many steps to get closer to justice and not all of them succeed.

Haunting is Hope

Complaints can be steps on that path to justice even those that don’t succeed. But if complaints end up buried, how can we follow their lead? And by buried, I mean buried. One person said her complaint was “shoved in the box.” Another said her complaint went “into the complaint graveyard.” A filing cabinet as a bin or a grave, where some complaints go to die, discarded, lifeless or seemingly so.

I call filing cabinets institutional closets, to point not just to how but why information is buried. The word closet evokes a queer history, to be in the closet is to keep something secret about oneself. An institutional closet holds information that institutions intend to keep secret about themselves. The British empire was an empire of closets, so many documents destroyed, so many stories told that buried the violence, filed it away like unread complaints.

Diversity too can be an institutional closet. Shazia, a woman of colour, describes her experience of being on a diversity committee, “I was on the equality and diversity group in the university. And as soon as I started mentioning things to do with race, they changed the portfolio of who could be on the committee, and I was dropped.” Just say the word race and you will be heard-as-complaining, as being destructive or obstructive.

When Shazia was dropped so too was that word race: it was dropped back into that file, and with it, so much history. Burial can be an instruction. When I resigned from my post, I shared information about the enquiries into sexual harassment. A feminist colleague told me I was “unprofessional.” I have been calling myself an unprofessional feminist ever since! To be professional is to be willing to become a filing cabinet, to bury the institution’s secrets.

Burial does not require an instruction, Kate told me she didn’t complain after she was assaulted by a lecturer on her course because “it was part of the course; it was something you had to put up with. It was almost: that’s what they do.” When culture is the reason people don’t complain, culture is how violence is not just buried but reproduced.

A history can be buried without complaint.

It can take a complaint to unbury a history.

We might have to dig into our own pasts. Earlier I mentioned the conference on sexual harassment that took place on December 2, 2015. Heidi Mirza spoke at that event. She spoke of her experiences of being sexually harassed when she was a student; experiences that were “so painful’ that they “lie deep in [her] soul in the place of shame.” Heidi describes speaking and writing about so many years later, as “unlocking the doors of shame” so that she “can begin to exhale.”

When Heidi unlocked that door in that room at that institution, going back to let her no out, with all the vulnerability that entailed, it did something. You felt something shift. When a no is expressed, released into a room, who knows where it might go, who might pick it up.

We do not have to be in the same room to pick a no up. A no can be passed like a baton, a hand me down. I recall a conversation I had with Sally an Indigenous student. She made a complaint about white supremacy in the classroom. She became in her terms a monster and had to complete her PhD off campus. But she said, “an unexpected little gift,” was how other students could come to her, “they know you are out there and they can reach out to you.” She used that expression twice, “an unexpected little gift.” I recall another conversation with Lisa who made a complaint about bullying and harassment by her supervisors. She said, “I got a secret letter in my mailbox saying that they had heard I was having a difficult time with [them] and that there was a history of women leaving the department bullied by them. And there were two personal emails. I contacted them both.”

Communicating complaints can be time travel: a complaint made in the present is how information from the past is released. Release still requires work, writing letters, some secret, others not, reading them, replying to them.

And so, we address each other.

I think too of actions undertaken by Time’s Up Ateneo (TUA) from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. They honoured those who protested sexual violence by distributing postcards to the Ateneo community, inviting them to write to survivors of sexual abuse. A postcard, from Jasmine begins, “One day you will celebrate a victory. It won’t be exactly what you want it to be, but it will be enough. It will fill your life with meaning.”

Complaint activism might involve changing the addressee, addressing our complaints to each other rather than institutions. Hence some activists have organised grievance festivals. Or we might address institutions but not fill in their forms. Zehay Liva Bocretsion wrote to me about how she turned her complaints about racism into songs, which she sent to cultural institutions such as museums. She explains “I got the idea because in Danish klagesang (complaint song) carries both the meaning of elegies, the retelling of a tragedy, and a more sarcastic meaning, like someone who is just wailing on about all the things not going their way.” Zehay sings her complaints with a “monotonousness” ‘to express the matter-of-fact ways in which a lot of people try to disregard the complaints I have had.” We turn the sound of frustration into another way of expressing our complaints.

Sound matters because of how it travels. Because of whom it reaches. Chicana-Palestinian feminist Sarah Ihmoud writes of speaking through grief. She shares exchanges she has with Mona Ameen, a young Palestinian scholar in Gaza. She asks Mona if she has any messages for women and feminists around the world. Mona answers, “Keep posting and posting and posting about us . . . keep us in your prayers.’ A no can be a lament, the sound of grief. Ihmoud invites us to break out of ‘this غصة/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind”. When people use the expression “shouting into the wind” they usually mean it is pointless to make noise against the flow of air. But when the situation is urgent, when a genocide is being conducted in view of the world, there is always a point.

Time can be like wind: a no, blown about. We don’t always know when it will be heard. Or how.

It can feel like we are not doing enough in the face of so much violence. It is not enough, but it is not nothing, I think of Viola who is neuroatypical. She complained because she did get the time she needed to return to work. She described her experience of complaint thus, “a little bird scratching away at something.” When she did not get the time she needed, she left her job. She describes, “I wrote a two-page letter, and it was really important to me to put everything in there that I felt so that it was down on paper. And then I asked for a meeting with the Dean. I kind of read the letter out in a performative kind of way just to have some kind of event.” Her complaint filled the room she left. She wanted to do more, to put her resignation letter on the wall : “I just thought I am not the kind of person who would put my resignation letter on the wall, but I just wonder what it is that made me feel that I am not that kind of person because inside I am that kind of person, I just couldn’t quite get it out.”

Perhaps that’s what the work is about: how we help each other get our complaints out. After I left my post, students put posters with words from my work on the wall. Yes, they were taken down. But they cannot stop them from having been there.

If we are stopped by a wall, we can still turn it into a testimonial, drawing on a long feminist history. The Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous artist activists formed in 1985 ran an exhibition titled Complaints Department at the Tate Modern in London, in October 2016. Participants were invited to “post their complaints” or to make their complaints ‘face to face’ during office hours. They then took their “complaint departments all over the world” and would “paint a wall and invite people to come in and complain about anything they want.” They gathered these complaints together to create “a time capsule of discontent at a certain time and in a certain place.”

A wall covered by complaints is vibrant and lively and colorful and beautiful. And hopeful. It is a hope that comes from our struggles not despite of them.

We can’t always hear that hope when we are in the midst of a complaint or even when we are in the midst of writing about complaining or researching complaint. And so, perhaps it is not surprising that it was only when I began talking about No is Not a Lonely Utterance in independent, feminist and queer bookshops and libraries, a tour that brought me here, that I consciously registered what was there, in the materials, the hopefulness of the stories at least when brought together. In other words, I heard the hope from how it entered the room, in the the snap of an atmosphere, in the proliferation of form, in the complaints that were performed or read out in meetings or sung on tapes or made in prayers or on placards or post its or posters or postcards.

That proliferation of form is necessary because the violence of which we speak makes it hard to speak. And so, we open our feminist ears not just to creativity but constraint, learning to hear nos that are quieter, how some say no to institutions by the withdrawal of labour or affection or by where and to whom they give their time.

We attend also to how nos are pulled out of circulation.

I think of Lieselotte Viaene, Catarina Laranjeiro and Miye Nadya Tom, who wrote about seeing the name of their harasser (a “star professor” no doubt another “important man”) written on the walls of a university. The “walls spoke” to them “when nobody else would.” Many of you will know that star professor named on the wall but not in the article, wrote to the publishers, and the whole book was pulled.

I included their wall story in No is Not a Lonely Utterance. On the first legal read, there was a note next to the text, “I query if we are republishing here the same information in the book that caused the harasser to be identified, that led to the book being withdrawn from publication.” I was later asked to remove identifying details including their names, the title of the article and the title of the book. I cut the whole example, writing a note to the copy editor on April 10, 2025, “I think it would be poor to use the example without citing them so I have cut it.”

Yes, a story of censorship was itself censored, a no removed from a book about the removal of no’s.

A no can have many lives, many deaths.

I know some of you might be listening knowing you cannot say no to the violence that is undermining your life or your work because you could not survive the consequences of doing so.

Still, hold onto that no. Hold on to it, remembering that burials are part of the life course of almost all complaints. I shared with one person the image of a complaint graveyard shared with me by another. She said,

When you talk about haunting, you are talking about the size of the graveyard. And I think this is important. Because when you have one tombstone, one lonely little ghost, it doesn’t actually have any effect; you can have a nice cute little cemetery outside your window, but when you start having a massive one, common graveyards and so on, it becomes something else; it becomes much harder to manage.

In becoming more, little birds, little ghosts, we become more difficult to manage. Hence haunting is hope: that unheard complaints however they are expressed, whether or not they are expressed, will return to haunt institutions, reminding them of the violence they do not just bury but repeat. It is not an easy hope. It is restless and disturbing. But it can also be a handle, a sharp reminder of the point of doing the work. When it seems that you are not getting very far, not getting anywhere, remember. If they have tried to make us smaller, they have failed. If they have tried to keep us apart, they have failed. A no can be a feminist assembly. And so, we end up here, assembled together, with so much work to do.

* I have made some additions and clarifications to the spoken lecture.

That’s a message enough.

I am moved, as ever, by Ahmad Ibsais’s words as he searches for a “language that could hold the weight of thousands upon thousands of my people dead.”

Ibsais writes, “grief this large has no container.” It “spills into every morning.”

Ibsais suggests we “stop waiting for grief to become manageable and instead learn to write while drowning in it.”

How to write grief as a non-Palestinian committed to Palestinian freedom?

Our grief and rage can be an unburial.

What we feel, yes. But also, what we get out.

Let it spill everywhere.

Draw the sharp lines of shared histories, remembering:

The British empire was an empire of closets.*

And remains so.

We have too much to trace.

Lives destroyed, evidence, also.

In 2011, an archive became public, 8,800 files from thirty-seven former British colonies. Among these documents were “a handful which show that many of the most sensitive papers from Britain’s late colonial era were not hidden away but simply destroyed.” These documents instructed that post-independence governments should not access any materials that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government,” that could “embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others, for example, police informers,” that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might “be used unethically by ministers in the successor government.”

We have traces within an archive of the papers missing from it, destroyed because of what they would evidence.

Who they would embarrass.

A legacy, kept shiny.

Historian Caroline Elkins titled her book on the history of the British empire, Legacy of Violence. In the introduction, she explains how her previous book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya “raised unanswered questions about violence in the British Empire.” The research was “arduous,” she explains, “because countless documents were missing from the official archives in London and Nairobi.” Elkins research provided evidence for survivors of Kenya’s detention system who successfully sued the British government “for the systematic violence and torture they had endured in the 1950s.” Elkins tells us that the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the defendant, announced that it had “discovered” three hundred boxes of previous unreleased files at Hanslope Park. What was important was not just in the files but the fact they existed. Elkins explains, “This evidence recalled how British officials had culled and burned files in the eve of decolonization. Similar to the violence they inflicted on subject populations, their document destruction methods became more systematic and intensive over time.”

These destroyed files led Elkins to tell “the bigger story,” of empire as a legacy of violence.

You can bury violence by destroying the documents that evidence it. Or by filing the documents so they become harder to retrieve.

The violence can be buried in a story.

A dusty cabinet, a polished story.

I remember when I tried to get a course on gender, race and colonialism approved. This would have been around 1995. I attended a meeting set up to discuss and approve (or not) new courses. Most are approved without much discussion. When my course comes up, a professor from another department begins to interrogate me, becoming angrier as he went on. And he went on. I was there, seated at the same a table as he, a young woman, the only brown person in the room. The word in the course description that triggered his reaction was the relatively uneventful word implicated. That I had used that word was a sign, he said, that I thought that colonialism was a bad thing. He then gave me a lecture on how colonialism was a good thing, colonialism as modernity, that happy story of railways, language and law that is so familiar because we have heard it before.

I first shared this story in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. I called it a “killjoy encounter” not because I spoke back in response to what the professor said when he said it (I did not), but because I could hear from his reaction that what I was doing was speaking back, refusing to tell that story, that happy story, of imperial progression.

Not to tell that story, the happy story, is to be positioned as stealing not just happiness but history.

Hence in the UK, polishing is a national past-time.

Shiny surfaces. Gloss. Gloss.

How polite. Smiling over the horror.

We learn not just from what is polished away by a story, but from where and to whom it is told. In Life of the United Kingdom, a guide to citizenship tests, empire is referenced in primarily positive terms as what brought “more regular, acceptable impartial systems of law and order” to the colonies. There is mention of the devastating loss of life from two world wars but not from colonialism or slavery.

Citizenship might be the requirement to parrot that shiny, happy story of empire. Consider how India was described as a “jewel in the Crown,” a colony as a shiny stone, of value to the state and the monarchy. Those of us who come from countries colonized by Britain are supposed to gleam as well as be grateful, not just smile for their brochures but gloss over the violence that led many of us to be here.

This might be another way of understanding diversity: as a closet.

More shiny surfaces. Glossy brochures. Smiling, colourful faces.

Smiles as files.

Trevor Phillips, the former chair to the Commission for Racial Equality, gave a speech to the Conservative party in 2005. He described empire thus: “We created something called the empire where we mixed and mingled with people very different from those of these islands.” Yes, the subjugation and enslavement of millions of people described as a bit like a party.

Violence can be buried in a story of empire or by it.

Here; now.

That the empire is not far away in time or space is evidenced by the experiences many people of colour have within institutions.

Mira, a woman of colour, shared with me what happened when she participated in a project on diversity. She had been instrumental to getting the project funded, only to be shut out once it was. She was the only person of colour on the team. She knew she had been used to get them the funding; she said she was treated as a “mascot.” One of the directors of the project was a senior white woman. She was also a direct descendant of colonisers, “she is high colonial British Raj . . . her grandmother’s gravestone is in Calcutta and that’s rare, you have to be really high up in the British Raj.” Mira added, “We have to go back to understand what is happening, the colonial history of Britain, how we are still refusing to have a dialogue about South Asian and East Asian histories, because the relatives are still alive, the descendants are still alive, and reparations is a dirty word for these people; it means having to confront their wealth, the filth of their wealth.”

To complain about racism in the present is to go back, to go over what they refuse to go over, a colonial history living on, living in, the inheritance of wealth.

The British empire remains an empire of closets.

Consider again, always, Palestine.

British imperialists had a key role to play in what happened to Palestine in the early twentieth century, in the form of deals made by government officials: the Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916, the Balfour declaration of 2 November 1917. Balfour’s letter written on behalf of His Majesty’s Government was no secret. Addressed to Lord Rothchild, it both “declared sympathy” with Zionist aspirations and gave “view with favour,” for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people.”

Ramzy Baroud describes how he heard the name Balfour, as a child growing up in a Gaza refugee camp, because the anniversary of the declaration was a day of protest. He concludes: “While Balfour cannot be blamed for all the misfortunes that have befallen Palestinians since he communicated his brief but infamous letter, the notion that his ‘promise’ embodied – that of complete disregard of the aspirations of the Palestinian Arab people – is handed from one generation of British diplomats to the next, the same way that Palestinian resistance to colonialism is also spread across generations.”

Letters do not need to be destroyed or filed away to be hidden.

A history can be hidden by not being told or taught.

What I was taught at school in lessons on the Holocaust will forever remain etched on my skin; the horror of learning what human beings were capable of doing to other human beings. I was also taught that Israel came into existence because of that horror. I came home after one of these lessons and spoke of Israel. My father said to me, “It was Europeans taking that land.”

I can now hear in what my father said something of his own history: as a child, he and his family were forced to leave their home because of another line created and enforced by the colonizer: Partition, the division of India and Pakistan in 1947.

A line for some is memory not map, a place where so much violence happened.

1947,

1948,

Nakba.

Memory not map.

The violence of dispossession.

Kept alive and not just by those who survive.

That was one time my father said something to me that hit a nerve, a spark of realization that there could be another truth, a killjoy truth.

A killjoy truth is what we have to labour to reveal. We have to open the door of consciousness because the violence has been shut out.

Such truths rattle around, unsettling us. I was unsettled by a question: was the solution the problem, another story of empire, Europeans making pay “the others” pay for their crimes against “the others,” crimes against Jewish people, crimes against humanity?

A few years later, when I was studying for my literature degree, I read Edward Said’s classic book Orientalism. I read another sentence that struck me. Another killjoy truth.

It is the one time Said himself appeared in the text.

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of 0rientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

Ever since I’ve been following Said’s inventory. I read his critique of Zionism.

Said shows, through painstakingly close readings of Zionist narratives, how Palestine was rendered “a whole territory essentially unused, unappreciated, misunderstood . . . to be made useful, appreciated, understandable.” Said notes how to be “made useful,” however forcefully uttered, was written in the language of care. Palestine was treated as “an empty and patient territory, awaiting people who show a proper care of it.”

Palestine became empty, waiting, rather like terra nullius, a ‘territory without a master’, how Britain justified the colonial conquest of Australia.

Palestine and Palestinians are emptied of “meaning or life,” to borrow terms from anthropologist Mary Turfah. She explains:

Zionism’s solution for the “problem” of the Palestinians is to empty them of any meaning or life that is not self-referential, such that they can be eliminated without triggering remorse, such that the decision to let them stay ‒ on the land, alive, it doesn’t matter ‒ becomes an act of benevolence. If the Palestinians are allowed historical grievances (or anything beyond “desires and prejudices”) a consciousness before Zionism, beyond Europe, Zionism collapses.

Historic grievances as evidence of existence.

To remove a people, Zionism removed the violence of that removal.

Ideology is an institutional blind, how violence is shut out. The blinds come down because the violence is seen. So, when the violence is shown, the brutal extent of it, the devastating scale of it, and it can be shown because of what happened, the evidence is dismissed as propaganda.

We see that they don’t see it. How they don’t see it.

By not seeing Palestinian people as human beings.

By not seeing human beings.

Humanity as another colonial file.

It is shocking -or it should be shocking - that words like ceasefire remain in use when Israel is taking more and more Palestinian lives, sanctioning murder and dispossession, when more land is being stolen, when Palestinians are having to battle with thinner and thinner materials to survive not just the elements.

The violence of how violence is passed over.

That old closet.

To live in the UK is to live in a state of constant complicity: so many institutions including government remain funders of genocide whilst working hard to ensure theirs nos are as empty of force as possible, statements of objection scattering like letters without a house, so they can recognise the state of Palestine but not the destruction of a people.

Turning away from those who are expressing their defiance by hunger strikes, by refusing to take in what they need to survive.

There are so many ways to cause death, to let die as to will death.

To have deaths on your hands.

To bury the history of violence is to bury those who say no to it, with their bodies, with whatever materials are handy, whatever they have left.

However hard they try to bury the violence, it will not work.

Because once we see the closets, they have stopped working.

They see us seeing it.

Hence a closet is only ever a temporary residence.

And seeing it is feeling it, too, the weight of it.

So grief and rage can be what we send out. Get out.

Or become.

Noisy little birds, little ghosts, to share some of the images given to me in testimonies of complaint; we hear each other scratching away.

Writing on their polished tables.

So that our complaints keep haunting institutions, reminding them of the violence they do not just bury but repeat.

That’s why, haunting is hope.

I hear here the words of the Greek poet, Dinos Christianopoulos

“they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds”

Echoed by so many activists, world over.

Freedom can a plant. We still have to fight for it. Keeping planting, friends, killjoys, trouble-makers. Be seeds.

For each other. For Palestine. For freedom.

*I used the idea of Britain as an “empire of closets” in chapter 6 of No is not a Lonely Utterance. This post draws on some of the material presented here.

The event was part of a series celebrating 20 years of Broadway Books. 20 years of book selling. Of world making.

It was also the last in person event for the No is Not a Lonely Utterance UK/Ireland book tour (there is one virtual event remaining). I am so grateful to have been able to share the work in so many independent radical bookstores, libraries and galleries.

The format of events has varied, but most involved being in conversation with amazing, thoughtful people. I often describe my task as becoming a feminist ear, giving people somewhere to go with their complaints. I too have been surrounded by feminist ears. That is what you have been for me. So many of you have given your precious time and energy to respond to the words and the work, to my thoughts and feelings, not all of them coherent, with such care.

It is so important: to be heard.

I felt heard.

Many thanks to my conversation partners (in order of events): Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Akanksha Mehta, Heidi Mirza, Durre Shahwar, Noreen Masud, Nita Mishra, Carol Ballantine, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, Mónica G Moreno Figueroa, Erin Maglaque, Senthorun Raj and Nisha Ramayya.

Many thanks to my hosts (in order of events): Round Table Books, Feminist Library, Foyles, Queer Emporium, Small City Bookshop, Gutter Bookshop, Abbey Theatre, Lighthouse Books, Glasgow Women’s Library, Heffers, Five Leaves Bookshop, Juno Books, Queer Whitworth, Common Press and Broadway Books. I have also been glad to drop in and sign books at Toppings, Category is Books, Pages of Hackney, Housmans and Gay’s the Word.

Not a lonely no, picked up and shared in spaces of solidarity.

I have so many beautiful photos from the tour. I am sharing just one not from an event but from our visit to Pages of Hackney. Meet Bluebell meeting Albie.

This photo captures something precious.

There are so many ways we meet through books.

So many to meet.

One of the points of writing these two books, I think of them as companions texts, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook and No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining, was to make the work more accessible. I know the hardback is expensive. I would like to gift five people a signed copy of No is Not the Lonely Utterance. Because of the costs of postage, this offer is just for UK-based readers. Send an email to complaintstudy@gmail.com if you would like one! Just to let you know, I’ve given all 5 to readers now.

I shared the Complaint Curriculum in full in an earlier post. If you are in a book club and read No is Not a Lonely Utterance next year, and would like to make use of the curriculum, feel free to get in touch with me using the email above. In February and March, I would be happy to pop into sessions, at least virtually.

If this sounds a bit like a farewell message, it is. From now until the end of January 2026, I will be stepping back from this newsletter to finish Common Sense and its Others. I started working on commonsense a long time ago but stopped to write these two trade books. I am now back at it and hope to have Common Sense and its Others ready to send to my ever-patient academic publisher, Duke University Press early next year.

I may pop back now and then with some messages and notes.

Whether or not I do

I’m with you.

Fighting. Complaining. Writing. Protesting.

Saying no to violence, to business as usual.

To all the feminist ears out there, thank you

For giving no somewhere to go

Sara xx

I was following the word willful, and I found a story, “The Willful Child.”

Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason, God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.

It is a grim, Grimm story.

A word led me to a story. And that story led me to a body, to an arm that kept coming up, before it too was beaten down.

It is like a scene from a horror film.

Well Grimm stories, as moral fables, are horrifying. The morally wayward mostly end up dead.

Buried in a story. Or by one.

But that arm was just so full of life. Can we catch it when it is still rising?

That arm lent me a hand, helping me to notice other arms in the archives.

When I was following the word use, for instance, research that led to a book, What’s the Use, I kept noticing references to the blacksmith’s strong arm. Arms (and hands) often signified the labourer. I was reading about Lamarck’s law of use and disuse, which refers not only to how organs are strengthened by use, or weakened by disuse, but suggests that, if certain conditions are met, the effects of use are inherited as modification of form. When the blacksmith’s arm is used to exemplify Lamarck’s laws, it is implied that the sons of blacksmiths are born with stronger arms, inheriting what they need to do the work more easily.

The strong arm is not really how a work load is eased but acquired. That’s quite a load.

If the blacksmith’s strong arm was used to exemplify Lamarck’s law of use and disuse, it was not used by Lamarck. Hence I called that arm a phantom limb. When the references to the arm became substantial, the quality of substance was transferred to the thing itself. So, it was hard to notice that the arm was missing. Would I have noticed the arm, how it was used, how it was missing, if I had not been so struck by the arm in the Grimm story? Probably not.

And now, writing about commonsense, that striking arm has helped me to see what the philosopher G.E. Moore was doing with his hand when he made “a certain gesture,” to prove the existence of an external world, the proof being in the point.

I might make a case for calling his hand a phantom limb.

It is a work in progress.

Also a method.

When you follow the words you can end up with some odd juxtapositions, pulling together threads from works that are often assumed to belong to different worlds such as fairy tales and philosophy.

Fairy tales can be works of philosophy; works of philosophy, fairy tales.

What we know; how we know.

The arm, you know, inherits willfulness from the child.

How is she willful?

The willful child is the one who is disobedient, who will not do as her mother wishes. If authority assumes the right to turn a wish into a command, then willfulness is a diagnosis of the failure to comply with those whose authority is given. The costs of such a diagnosis are high: through a chain of command (the mother, God, the doctors) the child’s fate is sealed. It is ill-will that responds to willfulness; the child is allowed to become ill in such a way that no one can “do her any good.”

The arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up, acquiring a life of its own, even after the death of the body of which it is a part.

Willfulness involves persistence in the face of having been brought down, where simply to “keep going” or to “keep coming up” is to be stubborn and obstinate.

Mere persistence can be an act of disobedience.

That’s why there is nothing mere about persistence.

In the story, will and willfulness are externalized, becoming property, what can be alienated into a part or thing. The different acts of willing are reduced to a battle between an arm and a rod. If the arm inherits the child’s willfulness, then what can we say about the rod? The rod is an externalization of the mother’s wish, but also of God’s command, which transforms a wish into fiat, a “let it be done,” thus determining what happens to the child.

The rod could be thought of as an embodiment of will given the form of a command.

And yet, the rod does not appear under the sign of willfulness; it becomes instead an instrument for its elimination. One form of will seems to involve the rendering of other wills as willful; one form of will assumes the right to eliminate the others.

What a story. The willful child: she has a story to tell.

So I kept telling it.

I used to read the story out in lectures, making use of my own arm to dramatize the point. Up it would go. Then down, waving around.

It forever changed how I gave lectures, using my arm to make the point.

I learnt from how the story was received.

One time, I was speaking at a conference on race and racism in Canada. I read out the Grimm story of the wilful child. Maria Campbell, an Indigenous writer, was in the audience. At the end of my talk, she stood up and told me that she had heard the story before because the nuns in her residential school used to tell it. It was the arm she remembered, how it kept coming up until it was beaten down. She had not known where the story came from.

Historian Caroline Elkins in Legacy of Violence reminds us that the violence of empire enacted on “bodies, minds, souls, cultures, landscapes, communities and histories,” was “intimately connected to the civilizing mission’s developmentalist dogma.” Elkins explains, “A Victorian-era parents disciplined their progeny, recalcitrant natives in the empire had to be punished.”

The story was a warning: obey!

Or be punished.

We can hear something else in that story, once we know how it travelled. When delivered to an Indigenous child, obedience, identification with the rod, the school, the nuns, with whiteness, the imperial project, meant giving up not just your own will but your hand, your language, your land, your people.

When Maria stood up to tell me she recognized the story from the arm, she thanked me for sharing it. If it helped her to know the origin of the story, it helped me to know it was helpful to know. It is a lesson that is repeated, one I keep learning: to know a history is to be given a handle.

That’s another hand, one we need.

Perhaps that is what we are doing, finding a way to handle histories, the violence of them, creating spaces to share our stories.

Or to tell us each other about stories used as rods.

In No is Not a Lonely Utterance, I share the story again, reading it as an institutional parable.

If you disobey an instruction by complaining, the institution will do what it can to stop you or to cast you out (that relay of authority from colleagues to administrators, to managers, who are willing to use the rods or to become them).

Or when institutions try to render certain viewpoints illegitimate (such as anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel or “critical race theory”), complaints can be how they stop those views from being expressed, with that relay of authority extended from colleagues, administrators and managers to media and government, who are willing to use rods or to become them.

But there’s a difficulty: the rods often pass themselves off as the arms.

This is another way of making the point from my post, The Cancellers.

Those who abuse the power given to them by institutions pass themselves off as the arms, as the one’s being beaten by a disciplinary regime. And when those who abuse the power given to them by institutions pass themselves off as the arms, the complainers become the rods, the managers, the police and the prison guards. This helps to explain why some people who complain formally about sexual harassment are called carceral feminists even though complaining within organizations does not involve calling the police or sending people to prison. That the complainer is called a carceral feminist can be a measure of how passing succeeds; the arm and rod have switched places.

That it can be hard to tell the difference between the arms and the rods is instrumentalised.

Nation-states too speak as if they are the arms, the persecuted, whilst acting as the rods, the persecutors.

Genocidal states. Israel.

Speak as an arm, act like a rod.

There are other grim stories. Present.

Keep telling it. Pull the threads.

In Willful Subjects, I juxtaposed the Grimm story with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic from Phenomenology of Spirit. They both use the same word, the German word, Eigensinn, which is also sometimes translated into English as stubborn or obstinate.

That’s enough of a connection! Enough!

When the same word is used in two different places, it becomes a connecting thread.

Follow the word and watch it unravel. But what?

In the conclusion to Willful Subjects, I offered a rereading of Hegel’s fable of the master-slave as a companion fable to the Grimm fable, calling it my final hand.

Of course, it wasn’t my hand nor a final one.

Reading Hegel’s fable as a story of will and willfulness is a refusal to read it on its own terms as the universal journey of consciousness.

It is a misreading, then.

Sometimes we have to misread a text to hear other histories.

For Hegel, the slave is the one who labours for the master. Labour can be thought in terms of becoming willing to be the master’s limbs (the master is freed from the necessity of supporting his own body). The slave is for. And in labouring the slave “fashions the thing.” In Hegel’s fable, even if this fashioning is frightening (the creation of an “alien, external reality”) in being confronted with the product of her own labour, the slave attains consciousness that would not otherwise be attained in relation to the master, “that he himself exists in its own right” as having “a mind of its own.” Or we could say the slave discovers a “will of her own.”

Even if the slave in labouring is on the way to freedom (more so than the master) that freedom is described as limited. That is how willfulness becomes the slave’s assignment: “Since the entire content of its natural consciousness has not tottered and shaken, it is still inherently a determinate mode of being; having a ‘mind of its own’ (der eigene Sinn) is simply stubbornness (Eigensinn), a type of freedom which does not get beyond the attitude of bondage.”

To become attuned to willfulness is to hear what is at stake in the Hegelian judgment: those who resist the will of the master in acquiring a will of their own (an acquisition is the resistance) are judged as self-willed or willful. The judgment is an expression of the threat of the slave’s independence to the master’s own freedom, which is and which remains, freedom from the necessity of toil.

Echoes from the Grimm story: the judgement of willfulness is also a justification of violence.

But also: the judgement is made because (or when) the arms are rising.

Another way of telling the story: the slave recognizes that she has a will of her own, a will that belongs to herself and not to the master. She recognizes will through her labouring body. The master in treating the slaves as arms ceases to use his own arms. They become flaccid organs. The arms confront the master who henceforth cannot mention them. It is the arms that are taken up in the rebellion of the slaves; arms that are not only involved in the creation of objects but are shaped by the labour of that creation.

Stubbornness or Eigensinn, which we can translate as willfulness if we follow a grim convention, is judged as bondage by those requiring the arms of others to complete the end of their own freedom (if they call this freedom universal, we learn again the uses of universalism in philosophy, the disappearance of labour).

Hence, we have to free the arms or be freed by them.

Of course, Frantz Fanon has been there.

Fanon recognized in Jean-Paul Sartre’s use of the dialectic how blackness can be dissolved as the “objective” phase passed through on the way to universal freedom. Fanon remarks “my effort was only a term in the dialectic,” an effort that becomes the loss of a hand, “every hand was a losing hand for me.”

We cannot let Fanon keep losing his hand.

Not just lost but stolen.

This history of stolen hands is a history we must keep in front of us.

The arms do not appear in the fable because they can smash it. And by it, I do not mean just the dialectic. They can bring the house down. After all, they built it.

Audre Lorde entitled an essay with a proclamation, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In that unflinching “will never” is a call to arms, do not become the master’s tool!

The story becomes about cancel culture by changing the object from event to tradition.

When cancel culture creates an object, a subject quickly follows.

In this instance, the cancellers are “health and safety killjoys.” Cancellers are often called killjoys, shadowy or not-so-shadowy figures lurking behind other people’s misfortune. As I noted in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, with reference to cheese rolling races amongst other examples, the figure of the killjoy often functions as a character diagnosis: as if they are trying to stop us from enjoying ourselves, because they are miserable. The “kill” in “killjoy” is negative but also extreme. So too is the “cancel” in “cancel culture,” as if the motivation behind a critique of something is to bring an end to something because it is held dear by someone else. It creates quite a picture.

The point can be in the picture; cancel culture as crossing out so much, crossing out other people, their speech; crossing out our culture, our history.

Once “cancel culture” has acquired its form so much that happens is folded into it. And so, it expands. He lost his job after an enquiry was held about professional or sexual misconduct: cancel culture! That event was postponed due to security concerns: cancel culture! Give a history of British empire not as a happy story of railways, language and law: cancel culture! Talk about how racism is deflected by, or reduced to, hurt feelings: cancel culture! Talk about pregnant people in recognition that not everyone who gets pregnant identifies as a woman: cancel culture!

Who can forget Rishi Sunak’s comments, “We want to confront this left-handed culture that seems to want to cancel our history, our values, our women.” That the argument that women are being cancelled is expressed with an old sexist possessive (“our women”) tells us something we need to know. What is cancelled (or what is claimed to have been cancelled) is given the status of property. All you have to do is use gender inclusive language to address some people sometimes to be understood as trying to take away something. And then, as we have learnt, they will use the law or policy to force you back into the same old M or F boxes of hetero-cis-patriarchy. Even when you are forced back into those boxes, that you dared use different words to catch more of our complexity will still be used as evidence of cancel culture.

Cancel culture is not just a story told from a certain point of view, it is how we don’t hear about other stories. As I observed in an earlier post, “Hounded” an story off-told by the media is that “gender critical” academics have been “hounded out of their jobs” by “vexatious complaints” or protests about transphobia. You probably will not read about how “gender critical”* feminists have organised collectively to take out formal grievances against colleagues who speak out in support of trans rights. This has led to so much silencing that is not spoken of. One lecturer who had a complaint made against her by a “gender critical” colleague, backed by a network of “gender critical” academics explains, “In many ways, they have silenced me. The stress placed on me during the grievance process and the fears I felt for my job security have meant that I have since kept quiet. I have stopped speaking out in support of trans rights in my workplace. I have also retreated within the workplace in general.” Another academic wrote to me about what happened after her “gender critical colleague” resigned. A right-wing paper made a claim that “was not substantiated except through tips from ‘anonymous sources’” that she had forced her colleague out. And so, she received “another barrage of abuse.” She ended up leaving her job. Where was the article saying she was cancelled? There wasn’t one.

When those who are publicly represented as cancelled have their voices amplified (and not just on their cancellation tours), those who are publicly represented as cancellers often have to struggle to be represented at all. A struggle for representation is then treated as cancel culture, derided as “woke,” a term that functions rather like the killjoy to dismiss change as imposed from the outside. You will be called woke if you wear a rainbow flag, have pronouns in your bio, use colour-blind casting on a miniseries, entertain the possibility of a fictional character such as James Bond being played by a Black actor or not being portrayed as a “womaniser” or include disabled people and same-sex partnerships on a ballroom dancing show on the BBC.

Just let Bond be Bond: you can hear that plea in the panic of headlines such as “If James Bond has gone woke, he might as well be cancelled.”

Woke is not simply used wherever or whenever there is a change to, or widening of, a social convention, but because it pathologizes the sources of change. Hostility is redirected not only to changes themselves, whether it is new policies on sexual harassment, new words or ways of speaking about our identities, new fields of study (such as Gender Studies and critical race theory) or new formats to programmes, but to those judged to be the cause of them. One Conservative politician described “wokeism” as how activists are given power over institutions by forcing their leaders to “fight endless fires of grievance, stifling freedom, embittering the workplace and sowing division.” The anti-woke use woke as a counter-complaint, a complaint about complaints, those mischievous minorities with their minor grievances.

In my previous post, I explored how complaints are increasingly weaponised, made against those who are saying no to institutions, pointing to their complicity in violence including genocide. But there are further complications. Many counter-complaints treat complaints within the workplace as already weaponised (“stifling freedom”). All you have to do to be told you are trying to cancel someone is to describe their conduct as harassment or bullying. Hence many complaints are folded right back into the thing called cancel culture.

When cancel culture becomes the story, you will hear much nostalgia, some of it anticipatory, for what has been lost or will be lost. Take the recent piece, “I miss the great philosophers” by Kathleen Stock. Writing about the death of the philosopher John Searle, Stock remarks, “he would be presented with a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment at Berkeley, where he had taught for most of his life. A petition, signed by thousands of alumnae, would see him stripped of his emeritus professor status. He died last month in a care home. According to a former colleague, Searle ‘never recovered’ from the reputational loss.” It is a curious use of tense, to frame what did happen, which is, of course, Searle’s frame as well as that of his associates and colleagues, as what would happen. What would happen if instead of holding onto that frame we listened to the women who complained? It just takes a small amount of actual research to learn there were multiple complaints made by women students about sexual harassment by Searle over his long career. Maybe if Stock was not so busy missing great philosophers, anticipating the loss of so much brilliance, big brains, what a big theory he had, she might not have missed that many women are likely no longer at the university, doing the work they would have done but for what he kept doing.

We do not know how many said no. We do not know how many are missing.

This is an old patriarchal idea: that there are some great intellectuals who in order to reach their greatness must be given the time and space to express themselves however they so wish.

And by however they mean however.

Complaints about harassment or bullying are often treated as stifling freedom of expression. And even physical and sexual assaults are treated as styles or manners of expression. An example from my research: a head of department physically assaulted Mia, a senior lecturer; she had been trying to leave a meeting after he began shouting at her. Mia complained. He was described in the report that followed as having “a direct style of management.” A vice can be turned into virtue by mere description, being physically violent treated as blunt speech, a rather efficient form of communication. Hence there is nothing mere about description. The head of department kept his post and position. Mia was called uncollegial and was told to leave.

The cancellers can be told to leave or made to leave and still be called cancellers.

Some people’s complaints are already framed as cancel culture, as if made with the intent to restrict or narrow other people’s freedom of expression. That’s why it’s not uncommon to hear of serial abusers described as “quirky” or “eccentric.” Sexual harassment can even be turned into a kind of social rebellion, a refusal to comply with policies and mandates. I observed in some of my early blog posts that many feminist campaigns against sexual harassment are framed as “moralism.”

Take one article, which lists a number of people who had been disciplined for being “unwanted or uncooperative critics” of institutions because of “after-hours recreations or of political convictions.” In this list, a person who kept her job despite having a complaint about sexual harassment upheld against her is casually positioned next to a Palestinian academic left unemployed after a university used complaints about his criticisms of Israel to justify a withdrawal of a job offer.

Sexual harassers are positioned (or position themselves) as if they are critics of institutions rather than abusers of the power given to them by institutions.

Many who have complaints against them frame those complaints as “they’re out to get me.” An example: multiple complaints were made against a lecturer for sexual assault, domestic violence and sexual harassment. Despite the number and severity of the allegations, he was able to convince many of his colleagues that he was being unfairly targeted. I spoke informally to some of the women who made these complaints. A professor, Jules, said, “His narrative was apparently that he was being accused of making sexist comments and the ‘feminazis’ were out to get him.” Terms such as ‘feminazis’ will be familiar to feminists. We only need to consider how quickly #MeToo was framed in this way, as a persecution of innocent men by a feminist mob wielding power through accusation.

What was striking about this case was how his colleagues, including feminist colleagues, were convinced by his claim. Jules, a woman professor, said that many of those colleagues wrote reference letters to support him although “they had no idea of what he was being accused of other than what he offered up to them as his own narrative.” We might assume feminists wrote letters on his behalf because that is what good colleagues do. So many complaints are stopped not because people are obeying an external order from hostile management but because of what they have internalised under the guise of institutional virtue. Simply put, you learn that being a good colleague means not complaining about colleagues. We heard in Mia’s story how complaining about a colleague, even after being assaulted by a colleague, can warrant being called uncollegial.

Even if some colleagues wrote him letters of support because that’s what good colleagues do, I think there was more going on. The lecturer’s own explanation that complaints were used to discipline him for minor transgressions (such as how was speaking) could easily be turned into a story of being disciplined by the institution itself (and not just the “feminazis”). Feminist colleagues who had “no idea of what he was accused of” might have found that story of an institution “out to get him” rather more convincing because of their own experience of being targeted for speaking out or because they know institutions can and do target people for speaking out.

That complaints are weaponised can be used to mask institutional complicity with violence. We could call this masking, the weaponisation of the weaponisation of complaints.

It can be hard to tell the difference between those who are disciplined by institutions for dissidence and those who pass themselves off as being so. It is not hard to understand how this can happen given complaints are mostly made behind closed doors, kept secret, hush, hush. When the complaint apparatus comes alive, that technical and communication network, with so many calling in, old favours, old debts, phone calls, letters, buzz, buzz, that too mostly happens in secret.

Buzz, buzz; hush; hush.

Hence it is hard to see complicity.

It is not hard to see who has power within institutions, who can open and close the doors, controlling access to resources. But when those who abuse the power given to them by institutions pass themselves off as being disciplined by them, power itself is obscured.

Power works by making it unclear who has it.

That sentence is a killjoy truth from No is Not a Lonely Utterance.

Another function of cancel culture is to obscure how power works. There is a reversal not just of power but position. Those called cancellers by that or some other name are stopped from speaking mostly because of who or what their speech implicates. And so, so many are stopped from speaking about institutional complicity in Israeli genocide; stopped from challenging how the state enforces the sex binary as a condition for accessing services or for membership in a civil society, stopped from addressing abuses of power by those given power by institutions, to mention just some examples.

And yet, some of us can only do the work we do, live the lives we live, because of how many before us complained. An open door can be an inheritance. It was a killjoy joy to write No is Not a Lonely Utterance, not least because I could gather past nos, bring them into the text, so they could keep each other company.

It has been an uncanny experience taking this book on tour at this time, speaking of the companionship of no. Because if anything, those who say no to institutions, pointing to their complicity in violence, seem more likely to be stopped by other people’s complaints than by their own. You only need name what is happening in Gaza as genocide to risk being the object of complaints, that you are antisemitic or creating a hostile environment for Jewish people, despite the fact that so many Jewish people are protesting genocide. Facts can be inconvenient.

That complaints can be weaponised against those who say no to institutions is central to the analysis I offer in the book. Admittedly there have been so many more examples of the weaponisation of complaints since I wrote it, that it is overwhelming. Hence I hope to return to this problem from another angle by thinking about common sense as hegemonic complaint.

One example mentioned in the book: On January 10 2025, law professor Katherine Franke announced in a public statement that her employment at Columbia University had been terminated. Franke had supported the rights of students to protest “the Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Palestinians after the October 2023 attacks.” She explained she “truly believed that student engagement with the rights and dignity of Palestinians continued a celebrated tradition of student protest at Columbia University” but that “instead, the university has allowed its own disciplinary process to be weaponized.” In her statement, Franke shows how internal disciplinary processes were used alongside techniques of surveillance: “Colleagues in the law school have videotaped me without my consent and then shared it with right-wing organizations outside the law school. I have had students enrol in my classes with the primary purpose of creating situations in which they can provoke discussions that they can record, post online and then use to file complaints against me with the university.” She claims her own institution failed to correct a Congresswoman who had misrepresented her comments in a hearing in April 2024, even though, in her view, they knew these comments were “grossly inaccurate and misleading.”

We need to remember that institutions tend to reward silence about the violence in which they are implicated. Simply put, they reward compliance. Many people are told not to complain about harassment or discrimination because they will carry that complaint around in the hard-to-challenge-reality of other people’s perceptions; that they will be seen as troublemakers. For some people, to complain is to disobey an instruction not to do so. The institution will then do what it can to stop you, with a relay of authority from colleagues to administrators, to managers, who are often willing to use whatever means they have at their disposal, including intimidation and brute force. When institutions try to render certain viewpoints illegitimate (such as anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel or “critical race theory”), complaints can be how they stop those views from being expressed, with that relay of authority often extended from colleagues, administrators and managers to media and government, who are often willing to use whatever means they have at their disposal including intimidation and brute force,

That people can use complaints as techniques for stopping other people from protesting (or indeed complaining in the deeper sense of expressing one’s refusal to accept a wrong), tells us something we need to know. No, complaints themselves, even when made to right a wrong, are not always right. No, complaints do not provide transparent evidence of a wrong. Complaints are typically made in the situation they are about; they are situational rather than transcendent. Whoever has more power in a given situation will have their complaints amplified not just in the situation but by it.

A bully with a complaints procedure is a bully with another weapon.

The problem I am describing, which I am sure is familiar to many readers of this newsletter, is not specific to formal complaints. Anything we introduce to redress wrongs can be used by those who enact them. And by “anything” I am referring not just to how we diagnose problems (in the use of terms such as hostile environments), and how policies are formed to deal with those problems (including dignity at work and anti-discrimination and inclusion policies), but how we understand and describe our own interventions (from identity politics to universalism).

Co-option is not just something that happens later; it is already there, at least as an potential. Hence the situation is complex. To “get at” this complexity, it helps to focus not just on complaints as materials that pass through an apparatus, but the apparatus itself. The complaint apparatus is a communication and technical network that extends beyond any specific organisation. To make a complaint is to call in, you send an alert by speaking to such-and-such person or persons, perhaps located in HR, about such-and-such person or persons. Many different materials go through the apparatus along with complaints themselves, including reference letters written in support of people who have had complaints made against them. These letters might follow on from phone conversations: it just takes one person to indicate they might complain about a person who is valued by an organisation to hear phone lines becoming busy; buzz, buzz.

The more we speak out about institutional violence, the more the complaint apparatus will be used against us, so many letters, so many phone calls, buzz, buzz. Complaints can then be used to “police the critic.” The complaint apparatus can thus function rather like Neighbourhood Watch, to protect some persons and their property from intruders. Institutions are protected not only by blocking some complaints, or removing those who make them, but by the speed with which other complaints travel (such as racist complaints that treat people of colour as intruders). I first wrote about Neighbourhood Watch in my 2000 book Strange Encounters, considering it as a technique for recognising strangers, as “bodies out of place,” as endangering the “in place.” Neighbours are invited to become “the eyes and the ears” of the police by reporting suspicious activity. Four years later in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explored how, after 11 September 2001, Neighbourhood Watch was turned into a national programme: members of the public were encouraged to report anything or anybody “suspicious” to the police to counter the threat of terrorism.

Some people are more likely to be seen as suspicious. I interviewed Samia, a woman of colour who complained about plagiarism. She ended up “the person to be investigated.” Samia described the complaint apparatus as a “tripwire.” Her complaint sounded an alarm or alert, a beep, beep, as if announcing an intruder. When people of colour complain (about racism or plagiarism or even just the weather), we end up being treated as intruders, as ungrateful for what we have been “given.” That’s of course how we are already positioned by fast-moving racist complaints. Hence some people don’t complain about racism because of racism. They do not want to provide yet more evidence they do not belong here.

When people of colour complain about racism, the eyes and the ears of the police end up on us. That’s true even for people of colour who are the police. Another example from the book: On Wednesday, 15 April 1998, DS Gurpal Singh Virdi was arrested “on the spot” for “sending racist messages to ethnic minority colleagues at Ealing Police Station.” The police then raided his house for over seven hours. “It all seemed so surreal,” he said. “Are they really expecting to find racist hate mail in a bag of lentils?” The previous year, Virdi, along with eleven other Black and minority ethnic colleagues, had received a letter in their pigeonholes with an image of a Black man accompanied by the message, “Not wanted. Keep the police force white or else.” The initials NF (National Front) were printed in the corner. Virdi was accused of sending fascist and racist messages to himself as well as to his colleagues. How did this happen?

The raid itself was authorised by Deputy Commissioner John Stevens. A few weeks beforehand, Virdi had raised concerns about Stevens’s investigation of a near-fatal stabbing of two boys of colour by five white men. As journalist Paul Foot describes, “Mr Virdi complained to his superiors that the attack had not initially been classified as racist”. Virdi’s complaint that the attack was not classified as racist was itself a complaint about racism in the police handling of the case. Virdi went from complaining about racism to being accused of racism not much later. He had his own explanation for why, “As soon as you raise your head above the parapet, your career is finished, and everyone in the police service knows that.’”

By complaining, Virdi ended up under interrogation for what he had complained about. So “the eyes and the ears” of the police landed on him; the police certainly policed their critic. In 2002, Virdi was successful in bringing a racial discrimination case against the London Metropolitan Police. And then in 2007, he won a victimization claim after repeatedly being passed over for promotion. But although Virdi returned to his post, his career was over and he retired early. It was not only his own complaint that was decisive in determining this outcome. The letter sent to Black and brown officers could itself be called a racist complaint, one that came with a clear instruction, to protect an institution by keeping it white. The act of retaliation against a brown officer who complained about racism fulfilled that instruction.

Some complaints travel faster because of their content, because they, as it were, fulfil an instruction. Other complaints travel faster just because of who makes them. Complaints by valued donors are likely to bypass the slow administrative processes I call institutional plumbing, going straight to tops of piles or heads of organizations. Take the decision by Oriel College, Oxford, in 2016 not to remove the statue of slave-trader Cecil Rhodes despite the many successes of the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign. At the time, they offered a weak rationale for the decision. It was later reported that donors had threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million. That some complaints end up at the top of a pile is how others are buried in shiny statues of slave traders or not-so-shiny filing cabinets.

I call the containers in which some complaints are buried institutional closets. What is buried here is what institutions intend to keep secret about themselves. So many cabinets, so many files.

We can think of campaigns such as Rhodes Must Fall as a form of complaint activism, a way of pushing complaints out from their containers and into the public domain. Of course there’s a caveat: if complaints can be directed against those who are fighting for equality and justice, they can also be directed against complaint activism. Those with vested interests in the status quo will borrow any tactics we use in fighting for change to fight against it. If that makes the work harder, it’s another reason for doing it.

To co-opt can mean to add someone to an existing board by invitation rather than election, as a method of ensuring stability or managing opposition. Co-option can be how opposition to a system is neutralised by how the system appears to address it. Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie’s show how institutions “manage and contain” the radical demands of abolitionist feminist and other radical networks by adding “yet another ‘diversity committee’ or another ‘equity officer’ in Abolition. Feminism. Now.

A file, a cabinet, a committee.

The problem of co-option is not just around the work of complaint; it is in the work. It is rather too easy to imagine an organisation setting up a new committee called a “complaint collective.” Of course, it would be a good thing if organizations created spaces in which people could collectivize their complaints. But a “complaint collective” could easily become just another committee, another way organizations go about their business. The very structure of the committee brings with it a history, a way of doing things that can stop something more explosive from happening.

We need something more explosive to happen.

In the book, I share examples of how transformative justice too has been co-opted, used by institutions to avoid rather than demand accountability. Decolonial feminist Xhercis Méndez points to many tactics for resisting this co-option. She points out that the move “to certify people to be transformative justice practitioners” or to create centres for transformative justice would not lead to lasting change. In fact, such moves would just “generate more income for the institution that’s problematic.” If transformative justice becomes another means by which problematic institutions generate income, those of us trying to transform these institutions could end up investing in them rather than each other.

Transformative justice, and indeed complaint activism, means not letting the institution itself form the limits of our political horizons. We expand our horizons by addressing each other, widening our activities, asking what justice might look like, listening to other people so we can learn from them what they need to heal. As Méndez puts it, we are “doing this on our own without hoping the institution is going to save us.” She suggests we should “try as many things as possible” and engage in “a million tiny experiments,” and “knock on a lot of doors.”

It’s a lot of knocking because they are a lot of doors. The labour of complaint is unequal because the system is unequal. We need to recognise that complaints can be co-opted without neutralising complaints as if they are just tools that do different things for different people. Some people do not have to complain to get what they need. You don’t have to complain about not being able to access the building when you can access the building. You don’t have to complain about being harassed and bullied when you are not harassed or bullied. You don’t have to complain about not being promoted when you are promoted.

Those who have more need to complain, who have to work harder just to do their work or to live their lives, have more knowledge of what to do and what not to do to create alternatives. If you have an experience of “hitting all the doors,” to borrow words from a participant in my study, you might be less likely to assume what other people need not just to access spaces but to breathe in them. That too can be what it means to be a feminist ear; lightening the load by listening to each other, staying attentive to our differences, learning from our labours.

I am glad of any opportunity to share the work.

The book is about sharing the work.

No is Not a Lonely Utterance ends with a “complaint curriculum,” made up of ten activities. Copies of the curriculum will be shared shortly with feminist societies - a double page spread of the first four activities. I have included in this post all ten activities complete with links to references. If you are a reading group and/or complaint collective and/or equality network, and would like to make use of this curriculum, feel free to get in touch with me (complaintstudy@gmail.com). I will be glad to hear from you and might even be able to join in some discussions at least virtually.

So, why end with a curriculum?

When we worked together as a complaint collective in my former institution, we read books together, kick-ass feminist books. I included many of these books in a recommended reading list at the back of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Reading alongside complaining helped us to relate the administrative work, which can be tedious and overwhelming, to an intellectual and political project. It helped us to connect our struggles with earlier feminist struggles.

The complaint curriculum is more than a recommended reading list. Complaints can be how we learn about institutions, about ourselves, about each other. They involve so much labour. In the book, I use this image to capture the experience of making a complaint.

Each line can be labour. So yes, it can be heavy going. And messy! And confusing!

The labour of complaint does not begin with the complaint. We have to let something in before we can get it out. That’s why section 1 of chapter 1 is entitled, “Letting it in.” I begin with a simple observation: when people talked to me about their complaints, they would often describe the experience as an internal struggle, or even as an existential crisis. The struggle or crisis was not simply about the need to decide whether to complain. It went much deeper, relating to people’s sense of who they were, their core commitments and values.

By complaining you are expressing the values and commitments as you work them out: what you bring to the world. You are modelling the world you wish for. This positive statement is still about no. By this I mean: you are also working out what you will not accept or tolerate or bear, just as you working out what to do about it.

This book is full of practical lessons. And yet, it does not offer any simple solutions. It is easy to confuse what is practical with simple solutions. In fact, it is easier to offer simple solutions when we work more abstractly, by pulling our stories away from our struggles. You might say, for example, if you have this problem, just do that. It would be simpler if I just told you this: just do that! In this book, you have heard from people who did just that but then came up against another problem. To approach a problem practically is how we realize that solutions to problems are often part of the same situation as the problems.

In this complaint curriculum, I cite many contributions that helped me to think more creatively about complaints; what we can do with them, and what they can teach us to do.

1.Start a complaint biography

I invite you to think about your own complaint biography, the times you did complain, the times you didn’t, and what you learnt along the way.

Communication is key to how we survive our complaints. We can write about our complaints. We can also speak about them. So, begin with the following exercise: can you remember your first complaint or an early complaint? What happened? How did it affect you? Can you recall a time you decided not to complain. What happened? How did it affect you? You could write down these thoughts or record or video yourself voicing them out loud. I found that once you start thinking about complaints made in childhood or early life, you start remembering so much more.

If you are working as a group, you might like to share your complaint biographies with each other or talk together about the process of beginning one.

2 Become a feminist ear

What do you hear in the word “complaining”? In the book I pick up on some of the ways different people describe their complaints – from “little birds scratching away at something” to “one lonely little ghost.” What do you hear in some of the imagery surrounding complaint? What kind of images would you use?

We can be heard and supported in making complaints in unexpected ways, by unexpected people and in unexpected places (and also not be heard or supported by the people we expected to hear and support us). I think of how many people told me they were warned not to complain by colleagues they expected to support them; or of how an administrator gave support in subversive ways in Esther’s story. Reflect back on who has heard or supported you, the unexpected as well as the expected.

I suggested that my task in the book was to become a feminist ear, to listen to other people’s complaints. Have you ever had this role? Reflect back on how that listening was learning. I am not just thinking here about formal roles but of the ways in which we might lend our ears to our companions so they can express their complaints.

Those working in groups, you might like to consider how you are becoming feminist ears for each other and the challenges of taking up this role.

3. Collect examples of workplace grievances

One of the main issues or difficulties in writing about complaints is that they are made confidential. Once a grievance is submitted to a court of law, it mostly enters the public domain. The law is thus how many complaint files get released. Search for workplace grievances that have entered the public domain. Compare and contrast them. Look out for any references to policies and procedures, for details about how the organization handled the original complaint, and uses of key terms such as “hostile environment.”

4. Question how complaints or grievances are represented in public culture

I have suggested that “woke” has been turned into a counter-complaint (a complaint about those minorities who complain). It also now functions as a hegemonic complaint (how those with power frame “the others” who are fighting for room as taking what is theirs). Once complaints are hegemonic, they are often not heard as complaints but are instead treated as neutral reports or common sense. Whole fields of study have been dismissed as “grievance studies.” These dismissals could also be called hegemonic or counter-complaints. Find examples of how complaints and grievances are represented in public culture. Analyse them. Does a consideration of hegemonic complaints and/or counter complaints change your understanding of your own complaints? What do you think about the figure of Karen, the white woman who complains about racism?

5. Read complaint memoirs

Complaint memoir is not an established genre and yet there are a number of texts that would be well described by such a formulation. One of my favourites, which I have cited throughout the book, is Ellen Pao’s Reset. I particularly like how Pao shows how her complaint led her to become a feminist ear, to receive other people’s complaints. Catherine Mayer makes some similar observations in her important book, Attack of the 50 Ft Women: How Gender Equality Can Save the World. I also highly recommend Ana Avendaño’s inspiring, Solidarity Betrayed, which gives many examples of how women workers have organized and combined forces to address sexual harassment within the workplace.

Whilst these are examples of feminists using memoir or life writing to describe their experience of complaint, we could also think about how complaint might allow us to read other feminist memoirs. How useful is it to think of “feminist complaints,” or feminism as a complaint? Are there problems with such formulations?

6. Follow the figure of the whistle-blower

The figure of the whistle-blower is probably the best-known complainer, the one who “blows the whistle” on institutional corruption by releasing confidential files or secrets. What images do you have of the whistle-blower? You can follow up your reading of complaint memoirs by reading stories by whistle-blowers. Famous examples include Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Susan Fowler. Each has written a book about their experience. Read as many of these as you can. Also find out about the protections given to whistle-blowers in your organization/country and follow that figure in public culture.

7. Engage with critiques of institutional power

This book has shown that (also how) complaints are blocked because of who holds power within an organization. I have also shared examples of how those with power can use complaints. But institutions, too, can use complaints to direct our attention and energy. It is thus useful to engage with some strong critiques of how formal complaints are used by institutions to encourage participation and stifle dissent. I am including below the two pieces I have found most useful. One is by Chelsea Watego’s, “Always Bet on Black Power” (cited in chapter 6). This is one of the most powerful essays I have read on complaint, which explains why not proceeding with a formal complaint can sometimes be an act of claiming power. Watego notes, “In the fight against race as told by them, the Black complainant will always be cast as the troublesome protagonist in the institution.” She explains her decision to ‘walk away’ from the complaint as “not walking away from the fight against race, but instead [. . .] choosing a battle more worthy of my time.”

My other recommendation is Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan and Akanksha Mehta’s “Problem and solution: Occupation and collective complaint” (cited in chapter 5). It offers a powerful analysis of how management can channel complaint so that it ceases to cause institutional trouble by encouraging participation in certain formal processes. I am still learning from how they expose the uses of dialogue as a nonperformative tool. They write:

In this essay we discuss one lesson that we’ve learned – the ways in which participants in GARA’s actions [Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action] have been individualized and positioned between being/offering potential solutions to issues of racism in the university and being intractable problems precisely because they/we participated in generating a collective complaint that publicly shamed the institution and its staff.

Read both of these essays slowly and carefully. How do their critiques of formal complaints also offer theories of institutional power as well as of resistance?

8. Gather examples of complaint activism

There are many examples in this book of how those involved in making formal complaints become complaint activists. Esther Loukin, who inspired the term, went on to co-found Reasonable Access, which aims “to empower other disabled people in the UK to assert and enforce their right to access through peer assistance and information provision.” Some of the students I worked with went on to form a lobby group, the 1752 group, to press for change in how universities handle student complaints about sexual misconduct and sexual harassment.

Gather examples of complaint activism in your organization/institution. What do we learn from different methods used?

9. Find different ways to express your complaints (and learn from the creativity of other people’s expressions)

We can be very creative when it comes to expressing our complaints, sometimes out of necessity, because we were stalled during the formal complaint process, at other times as an alternative, to avoid that institutional process, complaint as DIY. In the book I share examples of how people have turned their complaints into songs or performed their complaints by reading them out loud during meetings or standing up in assemblies.

Artists and practitioners have found many different ways to express complaints. One example is Lee Mokobe’s spoken-word poem “Surviving Blackness” a powerful complaint about racism and transphobia that highlights words such as “grief” and statements such as “how we lament”. Creative projects can be about performing complaints as well as showing the art or artifice, the spectacle and drama, in the most banal of administrative processes. That was key to the art activism of the Guerrilla Girls, mentioned in my preface. One of the meanings of the word complaint is a minor ailment or condition. So we can also think of how bodies perform complaints, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Could an object be a complaint? Or a building?

Consider the many different ways complaints can and have been expressed. Find some examples of your own and bring them together to form an archive. What does it do to a complaint to change its form or medium? Who is the audience for more creative complaints? Then: create your own complaint!

10. Write a collective complaint

The students I worked with on calling out sexual harassment told their story of complaint as a story of how they became a collective. I highly recommend reading “Collective Conclusions,” the chapter by Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble et al. in my book Complaint! With thanks to Duke University Press who have now made their chapter open access!

They begin:

There is no one story of how our collective came together. In part, this is because our collectivity took shape slowly, drawing on relationships and trust built over years. There is no single turning point which marked the shift from working alongside one another as peers and fellow students, towards friendship, towards collectivity. Instead, by the time we knew we had formed a collective together, it had already happened.

What do you learn about collectives as well as complaints from this account of forming a collective to make a complaint? For those working in groups, having read their piece, write a collective complaint.

If you do not have a group, feel free to write your own complaint and share it with me (complaintstudy@gmail.com). I will be your feminist ear.

In killjoy solidarity with everyone complaining for a more just world!

Sara xx

In my introduction to the book, I acknowledge that I wrote it in an increasingly hostile environment. More and more messages are being sent out that say to some people: you do not belong here, you have taken what is ours.

I put it this way,

I have been writing whilst those of us who use the word queer to describe ourselves or our projects are called groomers and paedophiles. I have been writing whilst many people in government and the media have been campaigning to dismantle the rights of trans people, with report after report, article after article, representing trans people as dangerous and deluded. I have been writing whilst politicians describe the reform of the welfare system to make it harder to access benefits as “a moral mission,” labelling those who need benefits, including disabled people, the poor and the unemployed, fraudsters. I have been writing whilst Israel has been conducting a genocide in Gaza and when those of us who have protested that genocide, and who are fighting for a free Palestine, are labelled extremists.

I highlighted words from groomers to extremists because of how they stick, to whom they stick. And if I wrote the book in an increasingly hostile environment, we are now meeting in an increasingly hostile environment. That is why it is all the more precious to meet, a meeting can be a breathing space, helping us to hold on, to go on, in the face of so much violence.

In a previous note, I mentioned my gratitude to Round Table Books for the warmth of the opening event, spilling out as we did into a busy arcade in Brixton. I also thanked my complaint collective for sharing many profound reflections on the painstaking labour of complaint at The Feminist Library. In the events we have had since – hosted by Foyles, Queer Emporium, Small City Bookshop and Heffers - I have been in conversation with feminist of colour scholar-activists, Heidi Safia Mirza, Durre Shahwar, Noreen Masud, and Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa. What a privilege to be in conversation with you all! I was so lucky to be asked such thoughtful questions, crafted with care.

I’ve loved seeing photos of the tour on Instagram. It was extra special to travel to some of these events with my partner Sarah Franklin, and our delightful furry companions, Poppy and Bluebell. Just a heads up for those coming to launches in Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Nottingham, Sheffield and Manchester: Poppy and Bluebell will not be there. Sorry! Here’s a photo of me and Heidi with Poppy and Bluebell.

If you are not on social media and would like to share photos from any tour events, please do send them to complaintstudy@gmail.com. I might make a tour album later.

The book tour is in effect the publicity for the book, a way of creating a small but lively public around it. Why highlight the? Despite valiant efforts from our publicity team, there have been no reviews of the book in the mainstream media nor any mainstream engagement with the work itself. This will probably not surprise most readers of this newsletter, and it certainly hasn’t surprised me. There has only been one review of my work in a mainstream newspaper in the UK, a review of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook by a “gender critical” feminist. This is how The Times represented its reviewer’s characterisation of my book:

“A feminist book by an author who’s forgotten what a woman is.”

This statement, even if rather amusing, is telling. Consider the killjoy equation offered in the handbook:

White feminism = blanking

The review itself was an object lesson in forgetfulness including the forgetting of feminist critiques of “what a woman is.” I summarised some of my own critiques of “gender critical” feminism in this newsletter under that same heading, blanking.

There was a long delay in getting No is Not a Lonely Utterance out because I had to make some changes very late in the day to deal with concerns raised by lawyers about the risk of defamation. In order to keep the scheduled launch date, we had to skip one of the steps in the usual publication process: collecting endorsements. The book still does not have any endorsements; we did not want to ask people to give up time to write them given the book is already out.

As the book was not supported by endorsements, I decided I needed to be open to other ways of promoting it. I agreed to write a piece about it for a mainstream newspaper or at least to pitch one. I was going to return to what happened when I resigned from my post. I was going to describe how my resignation got picked up by the mainstream media and turned into a sex scandal. This is not uncommon: complaints often come into the public realm by being turned into scandals.

Behind many scandals are unheard complaints.

I was going to explain that I refused all invitations to speak on television and the radio at the time because I did not want to turn the students’ complaints into my platform. I was going to explain why becoming a feminist ear, listening to other people’s complaints, was thus a political decision. I was told that they were “interested” in the piece but that the editor had asked, “Would she tell us how to complain well? Which would be good!”

No!

That’s what I wanted to write back.

That would not be good!

When you complain not just within institutions but about them, you are typically told the problem is not just that you complained but how you complained. You might be told your complaint is too eloquent or not eloquent enough, too emotional or not emotional enough.

That solution is the problem in new form.

To locate a problem is to become the location of a problem.

I sat with that no for some time. But I was encouraged to try again given that sharing the work in this paper could help me reach so many more readers. So I wrote a new pitch about how complaints are not heard mostly because of who makes them (in the book I do talk about Karen and other well-heard racist complainers). For some people, having their complaints heard would mean changing the conditions in which they live or work. Unheard complaints means unchanged conditions.

I entitled this possible-piece-to-be, “Unheard Complaints.” It took some time before they came back to us. It was a no, “they don’t feel it’s a feature piece.”

Perhaps the more you locate the problem in the system rather than in those who complain about the system, the less likely your piece will feature. Of course, I am telling the story from my point of view. And the point of telling the story is not to complain. The point is the consequences.

To get some kinds of work out, we have to create our own paths. A destination can be a deviation, like the desire lines I wrote about in Queer Phenomenology, lines on the ground created from people not following the official routes.

Word of mouth. Independent bookstores. Queer spaces. Feminist libraries. Also queer podcasts: thanks to Queer Lit, there is a podcast entitled No!

No, and so:

We create our own communication networks.

We give ourselves somewhere else to go.

That’s how I understand a feminist ear:

Giving complaints somewhere else to go.

In our conversation, Heidi Mirza asked me how I protected myself given I listened to so many complaints that were so full of pain and trauma. I said what came to mind. That’s usually how I answer questions: I say what comes to mind, then work my way to an answer by trying to work out that relevance of that initial thought to the question! I answered that I had been helped by listening to other people’s stories of complaint. I felt less alone. Talking to other people who had gone through a complaint process, helped me to process the trauma of what had happened to us. It helped me to understand better what had happened.

I realise now I didn’t really answer Heidi’s question; I didn’t loop back to it. So I will do that now.

Listening as a feminist ear is not just about taking something in but getting it out.

One person wrote to me that she wanted her complaint “to go somewhere other than round and round in my head.” Round and round in my head: it’s a lot of movement not to get very far. So much movement, so much time, so little room left for anything else in our heads.

Time can be room.

To give your story to someone else means it goes somewhere else. That’s why even if telling the story takes time, telling it can give you room.

That’s another reason it mattered that I’d left an institution. It meant that the complaint was being heard not just by someone else but from somewhere else.

It helped to be somewhere else.

It’s the “somewhere else to go” that answers Heidi’s important question. We know some versions of self-protection are about sealing ourselves off from what threatens or endangers our well-being. That’s the conservative version of happiness that Audre Lorde critiqued so powerfully in The Cancer Journals. Anyone involved in a struggle against injustices needs to be open to being affected by other people’s suffering. You also need to hold on, hold yourself together, so you can keep doing the work.

Protection is not about burying our own pain or other people’s. It is about finding different ways to give it expression.

Yes, to give our complaints somewhere else to go.

And that’s what I meant when I said I didn’t want to become another filing cabinet.

Keeping writing and speaking of complaints was how I kept going.

Not a seal but a leak.

To communicate as to seep.

I think of a conversation I had with Laura, a Black woman, about survival. She said, “In order to survive in a hostile environment, you have to do this work of institutional analysis all the time. They are going to do this, and I have to do that, and then I do this, and they do that: you know what I mean? It’s constant, this watchfulness that you have to have in order to protect yourself from being really knocked.”

To protect yourself is not to protect yourself from what you know.

To protect yourself is to protect yourself because of what you know.

partly as writing is hard

with one hand

in solidarity with all

complaining for a more just world xx

On November 3rd 2013, I walked into a meeting with students who had made a collective complaint about sexual harassment.

I walked into that meeting. And when I walked out of it, I had a different path in front of me.

The one that led me here.

To doing this work.

In that meeting the students, some of whom are now academics, others are working in different sectors, spoke about what happened that had led them to complain and what happened when they did. They have since shared their story of complaint, how and why they made it together. Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble, Chryssa Sdrolia and Heidi Hasbrouck (and others who remain anonymous) explain, “There is no one story of how our collective came together.” They came together because of what they faced, working as they did in a department where “sexualized abuses happened in the open,” where they were “grabbed at and touched,” or watched others “be grabbed at and touched.” They came together to try and stop what was happening from happening. “We did not want future cohorts of students to be confronted with what happened to us,” they said. “We knew this couldn’t continue to be the way things were.” I learn so much from this description: how it can take a complaint to stop the reproduction of an inheritance. And so, when a complaint is stopped, so much else does not.

In that initial meeting, I heard that there had been earlier inquiries into sexual harassment in the department. After the meeting, I heard of even earlier ones.

I have since found out how common this is: when you complain you learn of earlier complaints, other complaints.

It is like discovering a secret room full of untold stories.

You come to know how much you had not known. To see what you did not see. And to see yourself not seeing it.

I could not stomach what I learnt.

I left not just my post but my profession. And when I left, I made it a task, perhaps even a lifelong commitment, to become a complaint collector.

A collector “is a person who accumulates special objects, like stamps or coins. If you're crazy about unicorns, you may also be a collector of unicorn figurines, stickers, and paintings…If you can think of an interesting object, it's probably got collectors!”

Complaints are interesting objects but they are not always distinct. Their lives are hard to separate from the lives of those who make them. Although, once made, formally at least, complaints can and do have their own lives, mostly as messy as ours.

I call that messy intersection, a complaint biography, which is the title of the preface of the new book.

To collect as to gather, so many different threads, pulled together.

Some people complain so they can have an object.

What makes it hard to be oneself can then have a life outside oneself. You can point to the complaint – that file, those documents - and say, “there it is.” And you can show even if just to yourself that you did complain, that you had a go. You have a record of what happened. You made that record. So the complaint is not just in your head or your body but in the world.

But even if you send your complaint out, get it out, it can end up buried.

Filing cabinets: where complaints go to die.

The point of receiving complaints is to participate in the task of unburying them.

It is important that we, the complaint collectors, do not rebury them.

It is important that we, the complaint collectors, do not become filing cabinets.

We have too many of them already.

We have different tactics for unburying complaints.

I am telling that story too, of how people get their complaints not just out of themselves but out of institutions.

I might have left academia but in getting complaints out (including stories of how they get out), I still channelled them into familiar forms.

Books. Papers. Posts. Lectures.

Although complaints helped to loosen these forms with their leaky lives.

I spoke of complaint. And again. And again.

In my earliest lectures, I wove the stories I collected on complaint with research on “the uses of use.”

And in my most recent lectures, I wove some of those same stories with research into common sense.

That’s another biography, how the complaints I collected became companions of thought.

But the point is: these are other people’s stories.

I am the caretaker of their complaints.

I mentioned in an earlier post, how one of my participants, Viola, thanked me for taking care of her complaint.

Complaints have taken care of me, too; a complaint collector. In part, because of how they led me to you.

Every time I have shared complaints in lectures, I ended up receiving more of them sometimes in questions asked by audience members, sometimes in comments made in receptions, or in apologetic emails sent after events.

“Is it ok to tell you this?”

So many letters prefaced with that question.

It is ok to tell me this.

I did not even have to tell any stories of complaint to be told more stories.

One time, I was dropping off our dogs to our sitter, Sally. I was on route to give some lectures in the US. Sally asked me what I was lecturing on. I told her: complaint. She then shared with me what happened when she made a complaint about bullying at her former workplace. She said, “They locked the door, and I knew I was in trouble.” I did not tell her my lecture was entitled, “Closing the Door.” Sally kept her hands on her face when she shared what happened, showing as well as telling me how hot and bothered it still made her feel to talk about it, even though it had happened a long time ago. Whenever I’ve talked about complaints, difficult experiences like this have been shared with me, brought into the conversation and also my consciousness.

Sharing this new book on the “art and activism of complaining,” is about creating spaces so we can bring our complaints into the room.

Or at least some of them.

So we can bring them into our conversations and consciousness.

So we can become a chorus of complaints.

Please know, I know this will not be easy. It can be hard and painful and difficult to share what is hard and painful and difficult.

For me, too. I feel vulnerable, sometimes scared, as well as grateful and glad.

In the book, I shared more about how I felt behind the scene of my resignation, as it were; how much I lost, my own grief, that grievance. I speak more openly of losing confidence.

Of losing my voice.

And of finding it again in the companionship of your complaints.

The gift of them.

A collection of complaints, a complaint collective.

Complaint collectives teach us something about collectives as well as complaints (we need many to make them). These are not warm and fuzzy spaces.

What brings us to build these relationships makes it hard to build them.

Because we are easily shattered amidst so much shattering.

And in this time of extreme and escalating violence, we need each other all the more, just as we need each NO; fragile, precious.

To hold onto them is to hold on to each other.

We create spaces to give each other somewhere to go.

I begin the tour with some small events in London mentioned in my earlier post Get NO Out! The first on launch day, September 18th, at Roundtable Bookshop will be more of a party and the second, on the following day, at the Feminist Library, will be more of a discussion. I will be joined in that discussion by some former members of my complaint collective, Tiffany Page, Leila Whitey and Heidi Hasbrouck, how special it will be to speak together in person for the first time in ages; and virtually by Akanksha Mehta whose work (with Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan) on how management can use formal complaints to “cultivate participation while dampening collective rage” has been such an inspiration. Later this month, I have events at Foyles (September 22, London), Queer Emporium (September 23, Cardiff), Small City Books (September 24, Bristol) and Heffers (September 30, Cambridge). For each of these events, I will be in conversation with women of colour scholars, Heidi Mirza, Durre Shahwar, Noreen Masud and Mónica G Moreno Figueroa.

I will then follow these conversations with two small book tours, the first in Ireland and Scotland; the second in Midlands/North of England. I am working closely with Carol Ballantine and Nita Mishra to launch the book at Gutter Bookshop (with support from DSA Ireland) on October 6th. The following day I will participate in a panel, “Complaining for Good – Activism, Feminism and how to Affect Change,” at Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, launching No alongside WTF HAPPENED: #WakingTheFeminists and the Movement that Changed Irish Theatre.

No is Not a Lonely Utterance and WTF Happened: companion texts!

I will then go to Scotland working with Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh and Glasgow Women’s Library who both hosted events to launch The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. It’s a killjoy joy to return to both! On October 8th, I will be in conversation with Professor of Youth Literature and Culture, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold in Edinburgh, and on the next day, in Glasgow, I will lead a discussion focusing on the creativity of complaints.

In fact, I intend to pull creativity out as a common thread throughout the tour even though it is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of complaining.

And no, it was not a word used much by participants in my research, either.

On October 20th, I am delighted to be returning to Five Leaves in Nottingham. The following day, I am collaborating for the first time with Juno Books for an event at The Victoria, Sheffield where I will be in conversation with feminist historian Erin Maglaque. I will be returning to Whitworth Gallery in Manchester on October 22nd where I will in conversation with queer scholar of colour Senthorun (Sen) Raj.

It always so freeing to share our queer work in queer spaces. It helps us to breathe a little easier.

There might be some more events: I hope to visit Common Press in London on November 6th and I will be at Broadway Books in London on December 4th. There might be others, depending on my capacity and your interest. If you would like to get in touch about any of the above, I kept my old project email, complaintstudy@gmail.com.

And if you want to share your complaints

those committed to complaining for a more just world

please do

I will remain

your feminist ear,

xx

NO to genocide.

NO to saying there are two sides to genocide.

NO to business as usual when Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine.

NO to racism.

NO to saying we need nuance to discuss racism.

NO to a Labour Party that seems to think the best way to beat Reform is to become them.

NO to sexual harassment.

NO to making light of sexual harassment as if it is just some microaggression.

NO to transphobia.

NO to how transphobia is thinly disguised as debate, so the “no platformed” are over platformed, turning petty prejudices into policies.

NO to homophobia.

NO to how some of us are seen as having lifestyles not lives, as being pretend or less real.

NO to ableism.

NO to treating reasonable adjustments as the cause of inconvenience rather than a chance to build better institutions.

NO to how those who need access to benefits are treated as burdens.

NO to positioning some people as undeserving.

NO to treating poverty as a crime.

NO to the consequences of saying NO, as if those who protest violence cause it.

NO to the system that stops us from saying NO to the system.

I could go on because of what goes on.

I wrote No is not a Lonely Utterance, because even though NO is clarifying, even when it is clear what is wrong, a NO can take a long time to come out.

We learn from the time it takes. From that labour.

I think of Andrea. She ended up saying NO to a professor who had harassed and bullied her (only to be warned he was an “important man”). Andrea did not start out by saying NO. It took her a long time to say it because of how she doubted herself. But then she said, ‘I was like, NO, NO, NO, NO, things are wrong not just in terms of gender, things are desperately wrong with the way he is teaching full stop.’

Once one NO came out, others followed, NO, NO, NO, NO, an army of NO’s. Maybe that is why complaint is an activist affect. We feel that release, when what has been held in or held back comes out.

A NO as a snap. Snap to it, get through it.

Get a NO out so that others can follow!

Others can be a reference to other NO’s.

Others can be a reference to other people who in hearing your NO might be encouraged to express their own.

The new book comes out in just a couple of weeks. It is not supported by any endorsements because of the time it took to get it out. We were slowed down by concerns about defamation.

When NO is slowed down, a book of NOs will be slowed down, too.

We had to remove some NOs to get that legal clearance, so the book could come out.

Hopefully the missing NOs will come out another time, in another way.

Some NOs are hard to hear.

You likely won’t hear about the book through mainstream media (although given the difficulty of getting the work out, I will not rule it out).

Some of the NOs in this book mean it will most likely be passed around by word of mouth. I am thinking specifically of:

NOs to genocide.

NOs to transphobia.

NOs to the apologetic, smiling stance of being accommodating to those with POWER.

As if they would listen if we just said it nicely.

Complained well.

Let the words come out as they need to come out.

Tone can be telling.

I will not be sharing the work to tell you what it is about.

The work is about sharing the work.

I will be sharing it in feminist, queer and independent bookstores and libraries. Where I share the work is also what it is about: creating spaces to communicate our complaints without them being too easily or too quickly coopted by the very institutions we are complaining about.

I will have the full details of the tour in due course (as each event is made public, I will pop the links on my website).

Let me say something just about the two events scheduled for the week the NO book comes out. They are both small, intimate events.

The first is at RoundTable books on launch day: Thursday September 18th. Tickets are available here.

I learnt about Roundtable books by reading this article on Diva magazine. Let me share this quote from Meera,

Round Table Books is a political space, and we do not have a choice about it being anything else. The intersection of our racial backgrounds and LGBTQIA+ experience makes it impossible to fit within present traditional conventions, and we cannot conform to the norms of society as they currently exist.

Intersectionality for us at the bookshop is where we evolve from. We fundamentally have always had it as part of our ethos that we are the whole Venn diagram. I have to navigate both my Asian and lesbian identity. And my colleagues have had equally complex experiences to traverse. We celebrate both the global majority and queer experience in our space, but if there is discrimination from one experience to the other, that is not welcome.

We have successfully nurtured that complexity of experiences for both our local community and visitors. Lambeth has both the largest LGBTQIA+ and Latinx populations in London, as well as one of the largest Afro-Caribbean communities. Sharing space is a fundamental aspect of our philosophy; we value partnership over allyship. As an LGBTQIA+ space, we exist because we and our community need space to meet, share experiences, talk, love, laugh, hold hands, kiss, and be safe to do so.

How we need spaces like Round Table books, crafted with care with awareness of discriminations and differences! As soon I read about Roundtable, I sent them a direct message on Instagram, asking if they would like to host an event on launch day. And they answered YES with warmth and enthusiasm.

YES to NO: oh, killjoy joy!

Our second event is at The Feminist Library on Friday September 19th (tickets are available here). I am grateful to The Feminist Library for telling us who they are.

In 2020 The Feminist Library celebrated 45 years of archiving and activism. This year we’re turning 50! Mainly volunteer run, we have created and looked after one of the most important collections of feminist material in the UK, and provided an inspiring learning and social space for thousands of people.

Alongside hosting our historic collection, we are also a hub for grassroots groups to meet, organise, and raise consciousness. This ranges from lesbian history groups and queer poetry workshops to abolitionist teaching & learning and organising meetings. We make space available for local groups organising for their liberation.

What an achievement: 50 years of feminist archiving and activism!

We need that history, every last piece, every NO, archived, too.

The library feels like a political home. I did a launch event with them for the paperback edition of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. In an earlier post, Killjoy Diary, I wrote about that experience.

These handbooks are a way to share the work somewhere else [my NO book was originally conceived as a handbook]. I loved speaking somewhere else, in independent book stores and feminist libraries, meeting people in those spaces, less weighed down by history and hierarchy than lecture theatres, moving tables and chairs to give each other room. Wiggle room, perhaps.

On that post, I also shared a picture of a wall at The Feminist Library (as well as one at the ever-inspiring Gay’s The Word: I would have organised an event with them this time but for the fact they are out of their usual premise).

I am sharing the wall again and I look forward to seeing it.

As I wrote then:

Yes: so much better to be surrounded by a history of feminist and queer activism!

Walls can be wise.

Or, we can choose our walls wisely.

The event at The Feminist Library will be with some members of my complaint collective, the students I worked with, some of whom are now academics, others are working in different sectors. It will be so special to be together in person, again. They have since shared their story of complaint, how they made it together. Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble, Chryssa Sdrolia and Heidi Hasbrouck and others who remain anonymous explain, “There is no one story of how our collective came together.”

They came together to try and stop what was happening. “We did not want future cohorts of students to be confronted with what happened to us,” they said. “We knew this couldn’t continue to be the way things were.” They also wrote, “We were articulating our nos each of us on our own, but each of us knowing that our no was not the only one.”

That’s another reason to assemble: it is how we know our no is not the only one.

To hear the wisdom of these words is to scream with Gaza.

Screaming with.

Solidarity is a scream.

A long piercing sound. For however long it takes. The sound of refusal.

Raising not just our voices. Everything.

Until: everyone.

We need all of the world to be “screaming with Gaza.”

We scream more because we are not getting through.

No evidence, enough.

Even the evidence of death.

The dead “do not require nor provide evidence.”

They are evidence. But still: not enough.

The genociders and their enablers smile. Shrug. Their indifference not just callous but calculated. Not indifference really, more glee.

See! The brutality of power for all to see.

The “shame of shame itself,” to hear the wisdom of these words is to commit to action.

To commit to using what we have, our voices, our resources, our materials; whatever is to hand, to be of use, to get behind it, everything behind it, that scream, long and loud and piercing, as long as it takes, saying no to business as usual, combining our forces, doing what has to be done to stop genocide, stop the starving of Gaza, where even “food is a weapon,” where a search for sustenance, however small, to avoid death, risks death.

There are no words for this. It is beyond evil, even.

You might feel powerless. That it is too late.

It is way too late for way too many.

But way too late is going to have to be soon enough.

And so, scream. Do not wait. Hesitate.

Everything you send out: can be that sound.

Nabil Echchaibi wrote of “the scream for Gaza.”

Writing can be screaming.

“Do not be fooled by the silence of print,” he states.

“This writing clamours to be screamed.”

Asking, “What sound should letters make when your fingers feel like stones on the keyboard?”

What sound do these words make?

Heavy fingers. Weighed down by history.

Louder, when said more or said by more.

That was my task in listening to complaints: to make them louder by bringing them together.

Many meanings of the word complaint relate to sound.

In early uses, to complain had the sense of “to cry out” a complaint as a lament, a lament as “wailing, moaning, weeping.”

To complain can be to seep as well as weep.

It is not only humans that are heard as complaining. The creak of a ship has been called complaint, in the sense of “to strain or groan from over-straining.” Complaints can be the sound of being over-stressed or under pressure.

To listen to a complaint is to hear these sounds, these moans, these groans, as speech, as saying something, or doing something.

Sound matters because of how it travels.

The sound of complaint can be sharp and piercing. Or dull and low.

Sound can be involuntary.

One woman was in the middle of a meeting, when she received yet another harassing email. She let out a sound, eehhhhh, that alerted other people to what was going on. It was a queer complaint, a guttural sound.

The sound of frustration. However involuntary, that sound was an action. The eehhhhh tells us that she could not take it anymore.

Nor would she.

Sound can be information. In coming out, how it comes out, we learn what we cannot accept. Will not.

Sound can be the transition from private to public.

It can be how others are alerted: to what happened, that this happened.

Zehay Liva Bocretsion wrote to me about how she turned her complaints about racism into songs, which she sent to cultural institutions such as museums. She explained, “I got the idea because in Danish klagesang (complaint song) carries both the meaning of elegies, the retelling of a tragedy, and a more sarcastic meaning, like someone who is just wailing on about all the things not going their way.” Zehay sings her complaints with a “monotonousness” that “becomes a point in itself,” so she can “express the matter-of-fact ways in which a lot of people try to disregard the complaints I have had.”

We find other ways to send an alert. To make some noise.

Sometimes a scream is a sound we can only make when together.

Some resistance is barely audible.

Because what you would scream about can be what stops you from screaming.

That does happen; we know that happens.

Inaudible does not mean unexpressed.

You have to open your ear to hear.

The barely said.

The strains, the stresses, the cracks, the croaks.

I hear here a poem by Jasmin Kaur, SCREAM.

Scream so that

“another sister will not have to

dry her tears wondering where

in history she lost her voice.”

The point of becoming louder is so she, another sister, the one who comes later or after, will not be left wondering how, also where, also when, she lost her voice.

We need you to know we said no. For tears to flow.

Not to lose our voices in history.

To use our voices to make history.

Banging the pots and pans, making noise, clatter, shatter, the pots emptied of food filled with sound.

So they can hear the horror of empty pans.

Sound made in another way: the snap of a slogan; the repetition of a chant on a demo.

Free Free Palestine.

So many chants, so much violence.

What can you hear?

I hear here the sharp sound of the direct-action group Sisters Uncut setting off 1000 rape alarms to mark the anniversary of the Clapham Common Virgil for Sarah Everard, murdered by a police officer in 2021. The police had beaten and arrested many women on the day.

I hear here the rallying cry of feminists in Argentina, saying Ni una menos (Not one less), a “collective scream against machista violence,” words that spread to other places, other collectives, repeated, echoed, amplified, passing between bodies, travelling across time and also space: transgenerational; transnational.

We might hear anger in that no, that refusal, but also a lament, the sound of grief.

I will always hear the words of Chicana-Palestinian feminist Sarah Ihmoud, as she writes of speaking through grief, sharing with us words shared by Mona Ameen, a young Palestinian scholar in Gaza.

She asks Mona if she has any messages for women and feminists around the world. Mona answers, “Keep posting and posting and posting about us . . . keep us in your prayers.” Ihmoud invites us to break out of “this غصة/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind.”

What makes it difficult to speak is why we need to do so.

Posts, prayers, poems, post-its, posters: we need them all.

Every little bit. To create a pile.

We need to shout no now, so we can hear each other over what Ihmoud calls “the noise of complacency.”

Time can be like the wind, a no blown about. We don’t always know when it will be heard. Or how. Flying kites of solidarity, lifting hopes, light enough to be carried.

Movement in the air.

We are louder not just when we are heard together but when we hear together.

When sound moves, sound builds.

A scream, a many; a momentum.

Until:

Free Palestine.

*With thanks to the Union of Teachers and Employees of Birzeit University for their powerful statement. To Sarah Ihmoud for many inspirations. To my sister Tanya Ahmed and friend Rumana Begum for listening.

One example: I communicated with a student who made a complaint about bullying and harassment by a lecturer who was also the convenor of her MA programme. The other students on the cohort agreed his conduct was abusive. But they positioned her as being “selfish” for complaining because “their education was now being disrupted.”

Complaints can be treated as causing disruption not only to the person who acted abusively but to everyone who accepted the abuse as a condition of access.

When those who complain are understood to be setting themselves apart, collectivity is confused with compliance. It is assumed that for more people to access education, those collective resources, you should not complain about the conduct of those who provide these resources. It is an assumption that comes from somewhere (or someone). Those who abuse the power given to them by institutions often do what they can to convince other people that the only way they can continue to access collective resources (often treating themselves as one such resource) is to accept their conduct.

Even if this point sounds extreme or overstated, what I am describing is all too common.

That a person acquires more power the more other people are invested in them is obvious. What is less obvious is that power, once so invested, ends up seeming less concentrated or more diffused. When “powerful people” are brought down, it becomes clear that power does not reside in just one person, magically, as a possession. It becomes clear that every Weinstein has an army of assistants, giving that person access to other people whose careers are made dependent on saying yes. We learn that those who said no, who refused or complained, were likely silenced by another army, this time of lawyers, through secret deals, sealed by NDAs.

But mostly they are not “brought down.”

Some people stop themselves from being “brought down” because of how many other people would go down with them.

An abuser can appear not just as charming but as being for a collective.

Held up by one.

When compliance with a collective is deemed necessary for being in it, those who are not compliant are treated as being individualistic. And yet, my research has taught me, that many people who complain about abuse do so because they do not want other people to have to go through what they went through.

If an “I” can be hidden by a “we,” a “we” can be treated as an “I,” reversing not just power but position.

It can be hard to see how the system is working because of how it is working.

And for whom.

Systems: they can take the form of bureaucracy.

An organisation has to comply with rules and regulations in order not to be issued with penalties. Compliance might be enforced by an officer.

Or compliance can be a culture, one of compliance.

“Tighten your belt!”

“Keep calm!”

“Carry on!”

These can be commands that once you are compliant you might stop hearing as commands. Just gentle nudges. Ways of being in a nation. Or for it.

Compliance can function as an imperative to all the people employed within an organisation, but especially to those who are lower down its ranks. Those who issue instructions don’t have to obey them. The more power you have, the more you can disregard the rules that other people have to follow.

It is not just those employed by an organisation who have to comply with it. I think of all the students I know who were told they must complete their dissertations within such-and-such time frame because otherwise their departments would not fulfil the targets set by funders. The students were being told that if they did not comply (despite whatever reason they might have for not complying including the precarity of their circumstances) they would deprive future students of the opportunity of receiving funding.

That can be an order or directive, to do certain things not just so you can get certain things but so that other people can also get them. Orders can be subtle and also continuous: messages that you keep receiving, which tell you that if you are not compliant other people will suffer the consequences.

Hence you might not think of yourself as complying when you comply. You might think of yourself as acting on behalf of others. And you might indeed be acting on behalf of others.

Noncompliance can be hard: you can be made to feel you are depriving other people of what they want or need. You can be doing so.

A complaint can be how you learn compliance.

In the new book (I am thinking of it now as my No! book), I wrote about the first complaint I remember making. It was after a sports class. The teacher did not think we were paying attention to her properly. She suspected some students were causing a disruption. Some of us probably were. Her punishment was to cancel the whole class. We were sent from an outdoor sports field to the library and told to write essays about sport instead. I happened to prefer the new activity to the cancelled one. I wrote an essay on horse riding; the books piling up, shiny pictures of horses. I could hear the sounds of annoyance, shuffled papers, and sensed sideways glances, directed at those of us who had deprived others of an activity they would have enjoyed. I am not sure who was being disruptive on that day. I am not sure anyone was sure. So, the sideways glances fell on those assumed to be the likely cause.

I felt them fall on me.

The annoyance of my classmates helped me to understand how discipline is achieved by encouraging people to adopt the attitude that those who disobey are in the way, stopping them from getting what they want. It was not just that the other students were not annoyed with the teacher but that they identified with her, sharing her annoyance with the students who were disruptive.

I did not identify with the teacher because I thought she was wrong. So, in a paragraph in the middle of the essay, I made a complaint. I wrote that it was unjust to punish everyone for the misdemeanours, whether real or perceived, of a few.

The teacher read the essay and found the complaint. I was sent to the headmistress’s office. I defended my action: I said that I had complied with the punishment, but that I thought it was wrong and that I had a right to say what was wrong. I learnt authority meant the right to be wrong. The headmistress said I would not be allowed to go to an art class unless I apologized to the teacher. I really wanted to go to the art class so I apologized to the teacher. I got to go to the class.

It was one of many lessons I’ve been taught about compliance: that we need to protect our relationships to those with authority or to be willing to repair any damage to those relationships to get where we want to go. If I hid my complaint in an act of compliance, I withdrew my complaint because of the consequences of not hiding it well enough.

Compliance can just be more practical, how you maximise your chances of getting where you want or need to go.

Conventions can be maintained through small acts of compliance. When not following a convention is sufficient to be judged as being noncompliant, noncompliance can be assumed to be the source of your motivation and thus a character fault: as if you don’t comply because you don’t want to comply rather than you don’t comply because of what else you want. I think of how as queer people we might assumed to be trying to destroy the family just by arranging our lives in another way. Like you are cutting up the family with scissors: snap, snap.

Noncompliance can be judged not just as selfish but as imposing your will upon others. Not going along with the collective will means being assigned willful. That was one of my arguments in Willful Subjects.

Feminist killjoys and other willful subjects: I have thought of these figures together because they are together.

Let’s say you do not want to get married and have children. You might be told you are being selfish, putting your own happiness first, depriving your parents of their grandchildren. You are also being told your duty is to put other people’s happiness first.

I developed an argument about “conditional happiness,” with reference to Emile, a book of educational philosophy by Rousseau. It is about teaching Emile, but also Sophie, who is to become his wife. Sophie “finds her chief happiness in the hope of just making [her parents] happy.” If she can only be happy if they are happy then she must do what makes them happy. But then Sophie discovers books. And so, she becomes curious. And she activates her imagination. Also, grief. For what: for what she might have given up? And then, her father speaks to her, “you are a big girl now, Sophie, you will soon be a woman. We want you to be happy, for our sakes as well as yours, for our happiness depends on yours. A good girl finds her own happiness in the happiness of a good man.”

Feminism: we might tell the girls not to be so good and to read the books even if they end up being overwhelmed with grief for what they could have given up. So they can sift through happiness, finding fragments of possibility and desire.

But this is not a feminist story.

So, Sophie gave up her books.

And also: took up the cause of parental happiness as her own.

Yes, reader, she married him.

It might seem that “conditional happiness” involves a relationship of care and reciprocity as if to say, I will not be happy unless it is shared; I will not be happy unless you are. But the terms of conditionality are unequal. When certain people come first, parents, also hosts or citizens, their happiness comes first.

For those who come after, happiness means following somebody else’s goods. And that is another way of thinking about compliance: how some people end up following other people’s goods.

What if you judge that other people’s goods are the cause of harm? What then? Those who fight to remedy harm, against injustice, become those familiar figures, the feminist killjoys, as if their aim is to deprive other people of their goods.

Remember: a complaint about an abusive professor can be judged as disrupting other people’s education. You might be told (as so many people are told) don’t complain because they will use the complaint to close the programme.

And that your education depends on it. Your happiness depends on it. Not closing the programme. Accepting the abuse.

We might have to be noncompliant and risk the consequences they threaten us with: if stopping abuse means closing the programme, then close the fucking programme.

Because there is a problem with a programme if its continuation requires accepting the abuse.

Which does not mean we do not know that what counts as abuse is contested.

It is important to remember when we critique individualism, as indeed we must, that those who say no are often called punitive, as well as individualistic, acting as one with an intent to hurt many. It is also important to remember that those who use rules to demand we say yes to their demands, what we call compliance, are often assumed to be acting on behalf of a collective, whatever they do.