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Reading: The Complainer as Carceral Feminist by Sara Ahmed
🕑 Added 2024-04-17 15:34:29 +0000 UTCJust finally read this amazing essay by Sara Ahmed (it’s been in my to-read pile for much too long) and y’all can read it here: https://feministkilljoys.com/2022/06/08/the-complainer-as-carceral-feminist/?amp
In this essay Ahmed explores the dynamic in which those who complain about sexual assault and harassment are cast as “carceral feminists” and positions “complaint” as a necessary form of feminist pedagogy.
“When you are told you should have used transformative justice in cases where those who have abused power have refused and still refuse to recognize the harm they caused, transformative justice is used as a way of avoiding accountability, the opposite way to how it is used by our community as a demand for accountability.”
Comments
Lee Shevek
While this essay is focused on how complaints are treated in academia, it is 100% relevant to radical circles and the dynamics are eerily similar. One quote that really struck me: “They were told by academics in the department that any complaint would be repurposed by senior management as a tool to be used against ‘radical academics’ that the complaint would become a carceral tool in the sense of being used punitively to close them down. This was a very successful method: for the students to express what they felt, a political allegiance to the academics, being on the same side, against the same things, required then not to complain about the conduct of those academics even though they objected to that conduct.”
Lee Shevek
After reading this essay I am excited to learn that an audiobook of Complaint! exists, so gonna be working through that next. I’ll share a pdf of the book on here later if I can dig one up!
