This lecture explores why the project of redressing violence including institutional violence (the violence of how institutions respond to violence) requires new ways of listening to complaint or of acquiring feminist ears. In Living a Feminist Life (2017), I described feminist ears as how we hear “the sounds of no, the complaints about violence, the refusal to laugh at sexist jokes” as speech. More recently in Complaint! (2021), I describe feminist ears as a research method, a way of gathering as well as listening to complaints, and as an institutional tactic, a way of pressing against the very institutions in which complaints are made. In this lecture, I will reflect back on what I have learnt from listening to complaints, exploring how the institutional barriers that stop complaints from being heard are the same barriers that enable harassment and bullying. To acquire a feminist ear is thus to come to a better understanding of what it will take to challenge institutional cultures of harassment.

The times given here are British Summer Time.

Further Information about the conference is here: https://linktr.ee/agesexunr

Link to lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LOs8mnprgo&list=PLa868TvXg4RiTxew1aDSUtw5mYHF7iD5d