Katrien Schaubroeck and Leni Van Goidsenhoven
(Centre for Ethics, University of Antwerp)
Original blog: A* Antwerp Gender & Sexuality Studies Network
On February 18th, on Audre Lorde’s birthday (to whom the lecture was dedicated), feminist killjoy Sara Ahmed talked to a full Kaaitheater about doors. More precisely about closing, slamming, hitting doors. The title of her lecture was “Closing the door. Complaint as diversity work.” She did not only talk about closing doors, but also about revolving doors, about brick walls and long corridors. She talked about how doors can be slammed upon you when you try to enter as being invited but not welcomed, or how you can feel trapped in a revolving door, hit by a brick wall, and disoriented in endless corridors.
These doors, corridors and brick walls are not mere metaphors. Doors, corridors and walls are hard materials we can be hit by. And if we are hit by something, we become conscious of something. You learn that tangibility is real: the encounter reveals a quality of hardness that would otherwise stay unnoticed. Diversity work, Ahmed argues, involves such an encounter between things: “Watch what happens. Ouch.” (Ahmed, 2017: 138) Ahmed knows about the latter from her own experience: she quit her job at Goldsmiths, University London in protest over how sexual harassment cases were dealt with.
The starting point in the talk is the act of filing a complaint as non-reproductive labour, as the work you have to do not to reproduce an inheritance. Ahmed interviewed students and academic employees who issued a complaint against their university for sexual harassment, racial intimidation, unfair arrangements for ill people, unjust treatment of people with disabilities, etcetera. During her lecture she shows us many quotes at length. She detects patterns, exposes layers of meanings, ascribes symbolic and real importance to these acts of resistance. She shows how these complaints are doing diversity work as they try to change a place from inside; it is the work you have to do in order to make institutions more open and accommodating to others and ourselves. In other words: we learn about the institutional (as usual) from those who are trying to transform institutions. For Ahmed, “The personal is the institutional.”
Those who make complaints often know about organisations given what complaints do not bring about. Complaints are mostly dealt with behind closed doors. As Ahmed put it in her talk: “A complaint gets filed; to file as to file away.” Complaints are evidence that something in the system is not right, whereas, ironically, many institutions will claim that all is in order because they have complaint procedures. Ahmed referred to this with the notion of non-performativity: when naming something does not bring something into effect, or when something is named in order not to bring something into effect.
It can be excruciating to see how complaints get handled. While there might be a regulated procedure to get a complaint through the system, there is no guarantee that once the complaint is ‘swallowed’ some response will follow, let alone an adequate response (“nothing that a cup of tea could not solve” was the quintessentially British reaction by a dean to a woman that had complained about sexual harassment by a senior colleague). Very revealing was Ahmed’s additional point that it can equally be very painful to get to the decision to file a complaint in the first place. As she succinctly put it “you have to let the violence in in order to get it out”. Often it takes a colleague’s surprise or a friend’s appalled look when they find out what happened in order to realize that you have been violated.
Ahmed thus indicated a painful gap between how complaints are represented by organizations (often through flow charts, as being clear, linear procedures and progressive) and how they are experienced by those who make complaints (as being messy and circular).
Central to Ahmed’s feminist commitment is to explore the materiality of female existence, as well as the materiality of existence for people of colour, and people with disabilities. What happens if they want to enter and find themselves a place within an institution? Institutions have doors, they are meant to be entered, but the doors are more welcoming to some than to others. Some exceptions succeed to get in, but then they need to create an environment in which they can stay. And this task is upon themselves. Interestingly, in Ahmed’s writings, the quality of these experiences is often materialized in her writing style itself. She interrupts, for instance, conventional prose with poetry and bold text to exemplify the creative disruption of structures. In her books those poetic and bold phrases visualize breakages, scratches on surfaces. She used the same technique during her lecture: she interrupted her conventional academic text with call outs and onomatopoeia. Verbally she scratched the structure of an academic lecture, of a certain prose.
In addition she also made use of strong images. The experience of doors welcoming some people more than others was compared, for instance, to the situation of a bird that managed to create itself a nest within a post box. It is a wonderful image, testifying to the creativity and boldness of the animal, but it is next dependent on people not going on as usual, and refraining from throwing letters into the postbox. Near the end of her lecture, Ahmed used another picture of a fictional, too-good-to-be true postbox that expressed the lesson we learned from Audre Lorde (The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house): waiting till the masters open their institutions for people who are not like them, is like waiting till someone will put up a sign on the post box saying “birds welcome”.
At this point (and with the images of the post box and the birds) Ahmed introduced her idea of “the potential of queer use”: of using something in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. She tries to convince the audience to consider stories of how complaints “come out” as queer stories, to reflect on filing cabinets as institutional closets and to explore institutional and queer uses of doors. By reflecting on complaints in relation to queer use, as the political work of opening up spaces to enable them to be used by those for whom they were not intended, we see how it can work: a doorway becomes a meeting place. And a mail box a nest.
Ahmed ended hopeful and combative. The experience of filing complaints, she told the audience, is indeed messy, however, it is significant we keep complaining. In her words: “If to address harassments, bullying and so on is to cause damage, we might need to cause damage, we need to keep scratching on the brick wall. Speaking out as becoming a leak. A leak can be a lead. We need more explosions. A complaint can function like a switch, an alarm or an alert; that triggers a reaction. The more someone is connected, the more others are invested in that connection. We might have to use guerrilla tactics, drawing on feminist and queer histories to get information out. We do that work, because we are exhausted by procedures. We do not want to polish away the scratches. They are testimony; they are feminist testimonies.” Yes, those scratches, Ahmed stated, they might seem to indicate how little we accomplished, but those scratches can also be how we reach each other. We can reach each other through what appears to others as damage. “Feminism becomes scratching on the wall.” Keep scratching.
All images are courtesy of Sara Ahmed, see her website www.feministkilljoys.com. Quotes are from the slides that were projected during her talk, or from her book “Living a feminist life”, Duke University Press, 2017.