I have been reading Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! and it almost feels as though I have been working backwards. I wish I can the insights in this book before my children entered kindergarten. Perhaps, I would have been spared years of confusion, exhaustion, and grief, and perhaps my children would have been spared some of the deepest harms that came from the school system’s neglect. But since life did not unfold in that order, I want to share some of the key ideas from Ahmed’s work.
Overview of Complaint!
The project of Complaint! arose when Sara Ahmed was working inside a university and students began bringing their complaints to her directly, trusting her with their experiences of harassment, discrimination, and institutional neglect. In responding to them she saw not only the intimate weight of each story but also the recurring institutional patterns that stalled or silenced them. Ahmed eventually resigned from her post in protest at how the university failed to address sexual harassment, and after leaving she continued to hear testimonies from thousands of people who sought her out. The book was written from that archive of voices and experiences, and crucially it was produced outside the shelter of any academic institution, making the work itself a form of complaint lodged against the structures that failed to hold accountability.
At its heart, Complaint! begins from the everyday, lived experience of what it means to try and speak up about harm inside institutions. Ahmed shows how complaints are not simple mechanisms of redress but rather sites of power, blockage, and institutional reproduction.
Complaint, in her framing, is both an action and an archive. To complain is to put words, bodies, and histories into motion, and yet those words and bodies are often absorbed into filing cabinets, policies, and corridors that strip them of urgency. Institutions may encourage complaint on the surface, but they manage it in ways that protect their own reputation and authority.
The premise of the book is that when individuals raise complaints—about harassment, discrimination, neglect, or abuse—they encounter patterns of obstruction: endless delays, procedural fatalism, warnings that nothing will change, or reframing of their complaint as disloyal, negative, or even harmful to the collective. Ahmed names these patterns “institutional mechanics.”
Through interviews, testimonies, and her own reflections, she demonstrates how complaint becomes work—emotional, bodily, and archival labour that often falls back on those most harmed. The labour of complaint can leave traces in bodies as stress, exhaustion, and illness; it can leave traces in files that individuals hold onto when they no longer trust the institution to remember.
The key premise is that complaint is not simply about fixing an individual problem but about exposing how institutions organise themselves to stop complaints from moving forward. In doing so, Ahmed argues that complaint is also a form of feminist and collective knowledge-making—an opening to see how power operates and to imagine alternative ways of living together.
Complaint as dangerous and futile
On page 73, Ahmed describes how institutions often allow complaints in theory while warning that nothing will change in practice. This creates what Ahmed calls procedural fatalism: a sense that “nothing much will happen” regardless of evidence. Complainants are told they risk misery, retaliation, or even countersuits, which positions complaint as both dangerous and pointless.
On being stopped
What appears on paper as a process can be lived as a blockage, says Ahmed on page 75. Complainants describe the experience as checkmate in chess—no moves left, but consequences everywhere. Administrators often push informal resolution, or complaints become “bogged down” within departments, leaving students and staff unsupported.
Complaint framed as disloyalty
Disclosures of harassment are sometimes recast as betrayal—not only of the institution but even of feminism itself, says Ahmed on page 67. Speaking up is described as creating damaging fallout for the collective. In this framing, institutional happiness depends on silence, while those who complain disappear from institutional memory.
The positivity duty
On page 64-65, Ahmed describes how diversity work is channelled into “positive” agendas that protect institutional reputation. Naming inequality or race can be dismissed as negativity or complaint, with words themselves treated as disruptive. Women who complain are positioned as killjoys undermining harmony, while meetings often reproduce exclusionary male dominance.
The body as a complaint file
The labour of complaint leaves traces in the body. Stress and trauma manifest physically—as stopped periods, back pain, or exhaustion. On page 39, Ahmed writes that the body of the complainer is a testimony to the work of complaint. Complainants often keep their own files out of distrust, holding painful archives when institutions fail to protect them.
Why this matters
These dynamics reveal how institutions reproduce harm by turning complaint into a burden carried by individuals rather than a catalyst for change. Recognising the mechanics of stoppage, fatalism, and positivity duties can help advocates anticipate resistance and organise for accountability.
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This piece is the beginning of a series of glosses on Ahmed’s work—snapshots of concepts that sharpen what I have lived and witnessed.
