A disabled academic has to keep pointing out that rooms are inaccessible because they keep booking rooms that are inaccessible. In Living a Feminist Life, her latest work, Ahmed considers how her own understanding of feminism has developed as a way of “making sense of what doesn’t make sense.” At a time when public scholarship seems to be a thing of the past, … I am now writing a book on complaint. You know that if you did complain they could use that power to do what they can to stop not just the complaint but you, to stop you from getting somewhere. That is not to say that there is one sex, but that there are many. A complaint leaves a trail, however faint. We can share a change in circumstances without sharing circumstances. Or we might bury a complaint because it is exhausting to keep making it. I think of this “more to more” as the strange temporalities of use, how use, in pointing back, to where we have been, the tread of past journeys, points forward. Posting about my resignation did something else, something far more important: it helped other people to find me; those who had experiences of making complaints that led them to confront institutions head on and, in some instances, also led them to leave. It is all being logged. BME students and staff are pictured not even as going through the door but as on the door. already copied and passed them to friends, colleagues, and students, and I suspect I am not the only one. In transitioning, he enters a different zone of discrimination: “I started transitioning and he fired me.” Indeed he describes how discrimination against, and harassment of, trans people is given a “green light.” I think of traffic lights, not amber, not red, but green: a traffic light is saying, yes, go, you can say that, yes, you can do that; fired; fire away. We can talk about physical and fragile bodies, aging bodies; and yes, we can still talk about women’s bodies without presuming in advance who is “women.”[11] We can talk in this way because we do not assume that others will have the same experiences; to inhabit a body is to be thrown into a world with others. I realised very quickly, in the first minutes of that first interview to be exact, that the questions I had prepared were not going to work. The girl and the jug both “fly off the handle.” So really it was willful girls who led me to fragility. In killjoy solidarity with those protesting this violence, Use is a Life Question, Comments for Launch of What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use, Cambridge University, February 13, 2020. A mess can be what does not appear. Sara Ahmed In "Feminist Killjoys," Sara Ahmed critiques the role of happiness in women's culture and the depiction of feminists as unhappy, bitter, or "killjoys" because they disrupt our ability to simply enjoy the things that are meant to make us happy. She has had to fight really hard to get here. I want instead to use my time to share some research I have done since leaving, research that leaving helped me to do. Doors can be our teachers: they teach us the significance of a complaint about harassment being lodged in the same place the harassment happened. You are already not one of them. Sometimes we do laugh; we need each other so we can laugh. [9] For a discussion of how the “sex-gender” distinction was imported into Gender Studies (via the work of John Money on intersex communities) see Jennifer Gorman (2007). When complaints are filed, they are buried. This expression might be used to refer to actual doors: you might tell the story once the doors of the office have been shut. I was a clumsy, as well as willful, child—I think they go together!—always in trouble for breaking things. Another early career lecturer was told: “you look like somebody who is causing a fuss.”. A viewpoint can be expressed in the act of calling for a viewpoint to be made debatable. A complaint can thus queer your relation to the institution, and I mean queer in the older sense of the word, queer as strange or wonky. She describes receiving the results of an independent investigation: The conclusion of their report was that I participated actively in the conflict and that I monopolised the work. We need reminders. Theories can also be used as if they are exemptions, as if they exempt someone from the requirement not to act in a hostile way toward a group that is protected because they are discriminated against. And that is probably because making a complaint can feel like becoming a chorus, all those conversations take up time and space in your head, more and more voices, they become loud; louder still. Sara Ahmed er selv et godt eksempel: I 2016 opsagde hun sin stilling som professor i race- og kulturstudier på Goldsmiths College i London i protest over ledelsens forbigåelse af studerendes anklager om sexchikane mod ansatte på universitetet. Conclusion 2 is a killjoy manifesto. The story of reproduction is a much less smooth story when told from the point of view of those who express their complaints obliquely, passing as not complaining, in order to trouble what they receive; that inheritance we call history. To live a feminist life is to be a feminist at work. A new year, an old reality, being where we are, in a global pandemic, a time of immense loss and hardship for so many. I am exploring in this post today how and why “biology” and “biological sex” are the main terms in use. 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