Sara Ahmed urges us to free ourselves from institutional closets
BY SARA AHMED, PHOTO BY SARAH FRANKLIN
I spent three years working with students on their sexual harassment complaints. There were many enquires and meetings. It was all done in secret. It was only when I left my job that I was able to share information publicly about what had been going on. Due to the exposure, more people started bringing their complaints to me, and ever since, I’ve been listening. Not Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, more Queer Ears For My Queer Peers.
Many meanings of “complaint” relate to sound. When Stephanie, a white lesbian, shared her complaints with me, she said, “I can feel that whining in my voice.” She expanded, “If you have a situation and you make a complaint, then you are the woman who complains, the lesbian who complains. And you don’t like to hear yourself talking like that, but you end up being in that situation, again.”
We have to keep making the same complaints when the same things keep happening. We keep coming out with them. As LGBTQIA+ people, we typically use the language of coming out to describe disclosing a truth about our sexuality or gender identity that we kept hidden because of stigma and shame. As Umang Kochhar notes, coming out is not a “one-time event but usually happens in circles.”
When Darcy, a queer woman of colour, was sexually harassed by her supervisor, she worried she “must have made it happen somehow.” It took her time to “admit to the violence he was enacting.” When she took her complaint to human resources, she was told her harasser was “well-loved.” In the end, Darcy dropped her complaint, fearing that if she “came out with this in a public way,” her “own career would suffer.”
Many complaints are dropped because of who receives them. Or they end up going round and round institutions. Zenab, a trans person of colour, had to administer their own complaint, “I am the one who has to arrange all this information and send it to different people because they are just not talking to each other.” Zenab had complained about sexual and transphobic harassment from their supervisor, who had kept asking them deeply intrusive questions about their gender and genitals. When Zenab complained, they were asked the same questions, “as if to say [the supervisor] was right to be concerned.”
You might come out with a complaint, only for it to end up in a closet. An institutional closet. One person said her complaint was “shoved in the box.” Another said hers went to the “complaint graveyard.”
We have to find ways to get complaints not just out of ourselves but also out of institutions. My new book No Is Not A Lonely Utterance explores how complaints made within institutions are buried by them. But it is also an ode to the inventiveness of complainers. I share examples of complaints that are performed in meetings or on stage, made into songs, turned into postcards, posters and prayers, pasted on placards and marched onto the streets. To get our complaints out of institutions, we might have to be sneaky as well as leaky. How perfectly queer.
- Please note that some names of research participants have been altered
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