One of the first workshops I attended by my college’s Women’s Development Cell, at the beginning of my undergraduate years, was about sexual harassment in campus spaces. The speakers explained clearly that sexual harassment is all about power. To me, this was also an introduction to PoSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment) law, and the legal requirement of forming an IC (Internal Complaint) committee in college campuses.  

Over the next three years, I saw the terrible condition of the IC for students, non-teaching staff, and for professors, all culminating into how the university space preserved a culture of violence and misogyny with certain powerful men at its epicentre.  While students standing together did help in ensuring that some things changed, some tangible outcomes were achieved, and some decision by the committees were binding – largely the situation remained the same over the years.  

Complaint is a key word here. Who gets to make a complaint? Who decides if the complaint is worth noting? How does the media and society at large make the complainant look? Why do we have negative connotations for the one who files a complaint? What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word “complaint”? And why is it a feminist issue, and a form of collective and social action?  

Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! dwells on many of these questions.  

The book follows the institutional life of complaints – how they start, how they are processed by the redressal system, and ultimately how they are stopped. She traces the word as a noun, as a verb, and its changing meaning in varied contexts. Ahmed’s work is based on her own experience of going through of filing a complaint, adding on her work on sexual harassment in university spaces. (In 2016, Ahmed resigned from her position from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in protest the failure to address the problem of sexual harassment.)  

She creatively builds on the meaning of doors, files in locked cabinets, and rooms where people give their testimony to detail the labour that goes in deciding to complain, to registering a complaint, to following up, and to witnessing its possible institutional death. Here, Ahmed frames ‘institutional death’ through complaining in two ways – One, the possibility that the complaint might not end anywhere or end up in a locked filing cabinet. Two, it can also mean ‘career suicide’. Ahmed gives instance of a student who filed a complaint against her supervisor knowing that she’s leaving the institution, knowing that the complaint might not go anywhere.  

“The complaint was the last resort,” we read in the student’s testimony. “And the complaint was the thing I could do because I knew I was going to withdraw. I wouldn’t have been able to do it unless I knew I was going to leave. And even then, it screwed up my references; my CV has a big gap in it.” One of Ahmed’s major arguments breaks down how complaints are not heard by the system that is designed to resolve them, or how “one is not heard when one is heard as complaining.”  

The book’s first part focusses on institutional violence which deals with the structure and policies to file a complaint and coming face with face with ‘non-performatives’ — language, policies, procedures in place which don’t do anything. Like ‘strategic inefficiencies’ which hinder our work and keep us exhausted, making the act of complaining becoming like moving around a lot without covering any distance. This echoes Toni Morrison’s famous warning about racism: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Something similar happens when you file a complaint: you have to explain again and again why it is there and why it should be taken seriously. The systems which are meant to provide redressal for complaint end up becoming riddled with institutionalised performative acts. 

The testimonies from survivors of bullying, harassment, and racism in the book are heart-breaking. Ahmed reveals a profound sense of helplessness even within ‘well-defined’ systems. This helplessness is amplified when power dynamics suggest dire consequences for challenging the hierarchy. Ahmed builds on how the idea of confidentiality (keeping the identity of the complainant safe) can be misused or lead to containment of information. Confidentiality also means that your complaint is in a file in a locked cabinet in a locked room: that is to say, it doesn’t move. Institutions keep these histories of violence contained, and their systems are designed to ensure the same. One notable instance I can recall here is that of LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia), a cautionary crowdsourced list of alleged abusers in Indian academia. Created by Raya Sarkar in 2017, the list pre-figured the gigantic #MeToo conversations that rocked India’s media and entertainment industries, and uncovered the deep history of abuse and indifference in India’s educational institutions.  

Ahmed here comes to ‘sabotage’ — people’s inventive approach to getting information out as the institutional is personal. At times, it’s riskier to follow official paths, as complaints can stir things up and open more complaints. It becomes important to become creative at such instances, say, by forming a collective and ways of community engagement, whisper networks and more to protect each other.  This is also true when we get help from people who cannot support us openly, but can help us, say, retrieve that important file which will support our case. This is opposite to how many in institutional positions pay lip service to truth and righteousness but do nothing behind closed doors. This also applies to LoSHA, which received criticism citing that due process should have been followed: however, the list exists because of the precise failure of due processes.  

In part II, ‘The Immanence of Complaint,’ the focus shifts to language, behaviour and institutional cultures where acts of violence are essentially justified in the name of criticism.  Ahmed moves to the lonely nature of filing and going through a complaint, particularly in academia where many scholars leave universities but that isn’t an end to institutional violence. This is a particularly grave issue for women, queer folx and other minorities who dream to build their life in these very places. It's horrific to leave everything behind because the institution is preserving its own culture of violence. However, consequences of complaints follow one whether they are resolved or not.  

The last part of Complaint!, grounded in feminist solidarity, is focused on collective action and its need in these times. There are two conclusions – one from Ahmed, and one from a group of students who formed a collective in their university space to complain about sexual harassment. She urges us to decode the word ‘complaint,’ because as we unravel, we discover why complaints ends in a cabinet. In other words, to become a complainer is to locate the problem.  

A lot of what Ahmed says about language and stereotypes comes up when we look at the discourse against women that they are filing fake complaints. I am writing this review in a year in which we have seen the life and death of complaints on multitude of levels – the murder-rape of a young doctor in Kolkata, Blake Lively’s lawsuit against the director of her last film, the Hema Committee in the Malayalam film industry, to name a few. The data summarising a decade of PoSH or the rise of sexual harassment complaints in corporate India by 79% in the past 5 years kept coming to mind as I read the book. Ahmed’s work offers perspectives on what data is missing, and on the fundamental errors in setting up systems of redressing harassment, bullying and discrimination in all kinds of workspaces.  

 You can check out the book here and Ahmed’s blog, feminist killjoy, here. 

Text by Rajeev Kushwah.