5-6.30 pm GMT

Complaint as a Queer Method

My recent book Complaint! (2021) draws on testimonies shared with me by academics and students who have made complaints about abuses of power or unequal working conditions in universities. In my conclusion to the book, I suggested that complaint can be a queer method. This lecture will elaborate what I mean by this. The lecture will explore how complaints about hostile environments (such as transphobia and racism) are often made in hostile environments, which means that to complain is often to experience an intensification of the problems being complained about. Complaints can be a queer experience (with queer being understood in its old sense as strange or odd), they can “rock the boat,” or make things unsteady. The lecture considers complaint as non-reproductive labour, the work you have to do not to reproduce an inheritance, and reflects on complaint activism, how individuals and collective use a range of methods to leak stories or information that would otherwise remain secret, lodged in filing cabinets or institutional closets.

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHTPyTXPfDTiISDg7-KabltD3CFB1TGfPEp_8E6dA7UHzrWQ/viewform