(bright music)
- I always think it's good to think about
how you arrive at the work that you do.
There's always a story to the combinations
that we bring to our
work and to the world.
I'm somebody who was
basically improperly trained.
I wasn't given a discipline,
I began in an English department
but I was really interested in philosophy
but where I was, philosophy
was analytical philosophy,
so that wasn't a place I could go,
so I was in English literature department
sort of doing a bit of theory,
really interested in feminist ideas
and that meant that I never
had a very straight path
from an academic point of view
I was always working in
a slightly deviant way.
For me, I really was interested
in philosophical questions
about the nature of meaning
and reality and identity
but I also wanted to explore power,
power relations as they manifest not only
in institutional contexts
but in everyday life.
The combination of philosophical modes
of inquiry with feminist
and queer color of critique
really comes from the
questions I'm asking.
The questions lead me along
these different paths,
so if I'm interested in the
question of happiness, say,
that does require looking
at the history of ideas,
philosophical histories
about ways in which
happiness has been thought or understood
as being a good thing and appreciating
some of the differences in that history,
but also is about thinking
about how happiness
gets used in every day situations,
in speech acts and ways of understanding
our relationships to each other or
how happiness gets used
in institutional settings
as a way of describing the commitments of
a university, say,
diversity as happiness, say.
So the combination really
comes from the questions
that for me what's
really interesting about
a word like happiness
or a word like the will
or a word like complaint all
of these individual words
is that they do have
philosophical histories,
but they also get used in every day life
and in institutional cultures,
so for me, I'm following
the words and the concepts,
and the words and the concepts take me
to these different places and philosophy
is a place I'm taken to,
it is not the point of my
work and it never has been.
I'm not a philosopher by training or
by interest or orientation, and yet
because I'm interested in
the world making nature
of words and concepts, philosophy becomes
one of the places I go
along with other places.
Yeah, I think it was
very important in a way
that having a blog has allowed me
to have a much more direct relation
to readers than you would
have through a book.
You write a book and you send it out
and every now and then you find out that
someone has read it and you're like,
oh, someone's read it.
I'm not just writing these books
and nothing happens to them.
With a blog there's much
more of an immediacy,
there's much more of a sense of
there's a community or
readers and other writers
who are writing blogs, too, and
that you're participating and creating
something that's common and shared.
The timing of it, the
fact that you write it
and it's out there and it goes out
onto your twitter feed and
you get people commenting,
that kind of sense of the liveliness
of the writing is
something that has really
come about for me through the blog itself.
I think my writing has changed
gradually over the course
of my academic career.
I became very interested
in the word diversity
and what it was doing and I
was following that word around
this time not just by
talking to a tape recorder
or reading philosophical texts,
but by talking to people, to practitioners
who were involved in
trying to institutionalize
commitments to diversity and that sense
of being interested in
the words themselves
and where they go really helped me
to hear what people were saying to me.
One of the things that
happened not straightaway
but after I finished the
research for that book
when I began to really notice
that diversity practitioners
in their writing
talk often about walls, brick walls,
as the things they came up against.
I think it was partly because I had
become so aware of the words themselves
that I began to actually think about
what these words were telling us
in terms of evoking a particular
kind of relationship to the institution,
and Living a Feminist Life
was the book I was writing
alongside the blog and I thought
of that book and that blog
as being written together
so blogs became chapters,
and chapters became blogs,
so there was a real dialogue.
Living a Feminist Life
really brings together
the early work on being
included on diversity work
with my morphological approach.
I think both of those
pieces of writing were
being done at the same
time as I was involved
in these inquiries into sexual harassment
and sexual misconduct, they
both came out of a sense
of urgency about what are
we gonna do here and now
with this problem that is here and now,
it's not over there, it's
not an object somewhere else.
It's right here in the
institution that I'm in.
I have to write my way
around it and through it
to make sense of what's going on.
So both of those, book and blog,
were hugely important to me,
and the writing really changed.
It's funny because when I first said
I was gonna write a book on happiness
my mom said to me, "What
are you gonna do next?"
I said, "I'm gonna write
a book on happiness,"
and she was like, "Hooray!
At last, something positive."
I'm like, "Hmm, I don't think so."
For me, I wanted to write about happiness,
every project has come
from the project before,
and there were a couple of
things that led me to happiness.
Certainly it was from doing
the diversity research
it was overwhelming to me how often
the diversity practitioners
would talk about
the use of diversity in the
way that evoked directly
some of the second wave feminist critiques
of how images of the happy housewife
were being used to make things appear
beautiful or venerable or desirable
in a way that obscured the labor and
the problem that has no name.
I wanted to write about that,
the way in which happiness
can be used to conceal
all that doesn't meet it's demand.
The other thing was seeing the film
Bend it Like Beckham,
which, that got me so cross
because it was an interesting film,
and I really, really liked this film,
but the happiness of that ending
when all of their pain and the pathos
of past memories of racism experienced
by the father of Jess in the film
is overcome by playing the game and by
proximity to the white man in the ending.
It's like the use of happiness to imply
that our task is just
to "get over" racism,
to put it behind you, happiness
has a forward orientation
that then becomes an injunction
to put those memories of racism,
of whatever forms of power stopped you
from doing or being as
you wish to do or be
to put those things behind you.
The sense that happiness
was doing something,
that it was actually rendering
those who were not happy
responsible for their own misfortune,
that it was obscuring ongoing relations
of inequality and violence and injustice,
and that it was narrowing our idea
of what a life can be, all
of that led me to happiness.
When I first began the
research for the book
I think I was actually
myself quite overwhelmed
by how consistently
feminists had been involved
in direct critiques of
that happiness injunction
so when I'm making a critique
of the happiness duty,
I'm not being original,
very rarely are we,
as feminists, being original,
I was drawing upon a much earlier
established feminist critique
including something like
Simone De Beauvoir's Second Sex
where she said, "It's always
easy to describe as happy
the situation in which one
wishes to place others."
Like, how perfectly wise is that?
I was actually part of a much longer
genealogy of feminists
who were quite clearly
showing that happiness
is being used to make
a social norm, a social convention,
into a good thing because that's how
you can make something appear to be good,
by making it appear to be
the cause of happiness,
because what was unquestionable throughout
the very varied histories of philosophy
or western philosophy on happiness
was the idea that
happiness is what you want
and happiness is a good thing.
It was very important to begin to think
about that freedom to be
happy is actually really about
not only an injunction
but a duty to be happy
and a duty to be happy is
a duty to live your life
in a way that would make others happy
because certain people come first,
and that might mean parents,
but it might also mean
citizens or hosts, then
their happiness comes first,
so the happiness duty really means
a duty to follow other people's goods.
Doing a critique of
happiness doesn't mean,
I'm not saying we should
thus all be unhappy,
as if that's some sort of duty,
and killing joy isn't
necessarily about being unhappy,
and if pointing out unhappiness or power
makes other people unhappy, then I'm
willing to make other people unhappy.
I think I have been
writing about complaint
for quite a long time
and I think it's easy
to think about the ways in which complaint
is heard as being negative
and it's very important to me
as a starting point to say
what counts as complaint
is always a political question.
Sometimes you could be saying,
for example, you might say,
"Excuse me, this room is not accessible
"to people who have a wheelchair or
"have difficulty with mobility,"
and you'll be making a point about
who can and cannot enter that room.
That point will be heard as a complaint.
In being heard as a complaint
you have two consequences.
Firstly, it is understood
as a negative speech,
as negative insofar as it requires
modifying an existing arrangement.
The fact that that tends to be heard
as a complaint is telling
us something about
the way in which many
existing arrangements
get justified as being
about the preservation
of the accessibility or
the well being of those
who have made those arrangements.
Also, what I've learned
is you can be trying
to make a complaint in your own terms.
I make a complaint about racism
and it just won't trigger
the set of formal processes that allow
that intervention to be
registered as a complaint.
Some forms of politics
are heard as complaint
even if they're not intended as such,
and some are not heard as complaint
even when they are intended as such.
The question of what gets
counted as a complaint
is part of the politics of this research.
I'm certainly interested in the exhaustion
and the wear and tear.
One of the themes of
Living a Feminist Life
was wear and tear, how
exhausting it can be
to be in a world that doesn't recognize
who it is that you are or
doesn't enable your existence,
that doesn't give you the room,
that doesn't allow you into the room or
allow you to be in that
room because of who is there
and what they're doing
and what they're saying,
those forms can make it actually
unbeable, if that's a word.
It is now.
A lot of the work around complaint
is sort of trying to think
through the exhaustion
that leads you to say, "I
need to make a complaint
"about the situation that I'm in,"
but also then the exhaustion of
having to make that complaint.
It can be the exhaustion
that leads you there,
but what you have to do in order to take
the complaint forward
is even more exhausting.
The work on complaint
has been very much about
trying to think through
the politics of exhaustion,
and how spaces end up
being occupied because
trying to challenge how they are occupied,
trying to challenge sexism and racism
in ordinary, every day
institutional spaces, for instance,
is just made too much and it became
really a question about,
think about negativity.
Who gets assigned as being negative,
but it also became a
really, a project that was
just trying to listen
to peoples ordinary ways
of handling a situation where they know
what they find in an
institution is unacceptable,
it shouldn't be that way,
it's something that
they have to challenge,
and it's trying to think through
what's it like to do that work,
what do we learn, actually, about power
from the efforts to challenge power
and just really it is very much
focused on the actual experience
of making a complaint.
Or, the experiences that
lead you to be understood
as making a complaint by both of them.
I've found that really the experiences
that lead to complaint and
the experiences of complaint
are really hard to untangle.
Complaints can actually
begin before you even
think about yourself
as making a complaint.
In the lecture tonight I'll talk about
a couple of examples where the complaint
actually began in the killjoy moment,
in the moment where somebody was showing,
by virtue of not laughing
along at a sexist joke
that they have a problem
with what was going on,
and because they weren't
laughing at a sexist joke,
or they weren't laughing at a racist joke,
they become the objects of
the violence in the room,
they become the targets.
Because if you aren't
saying yes this is okay,
you stand out and that
violence gets directed at you
and that mere small tiny
fact tells us so much
about the way in which
the person tries to say no
to something actually often
what they're saying no to
gets intensified and directed
at them all the more.
The more you identify harassment,
the more you are harassed.
Often when there are moments of public
awareness of how serious and
intractable these problems are
around specifically sexual
misconduct and sexual harassment,
there is a lot of activity,
there's a lot of attempt
to show people's commitments
to challenging that situation
and those commitments
might be well meaning,
I'm not making any comment
about how people intend
their commitments but all
these activities can also be
the problem given new form
because in the UK at least,
a lot of attention has
been given to creating
new complaints procedures as
if the procedures themselves
will mean we've addressed the problem.
But you can change how
you address the problem
without actually addressing the problem.
I also sort of see it as creating evidence
of doing something is not the
same thing as doing something.
One of my concepts of the non performative
has become quite useful
for my complaint project
because it's been about
think about all the ways
in which activities that are undertaken
are undertaken at a surface level
without really fundamentally having
the difficult conversations
about why these problems
keep coming up in the first place.
What is it about academic
norms and conventions
that makes it so hard to address
the institutionalizing
of sexual harassment
and sexual misconduct.
If I'm going to say what
should the new direction
should be we need to start
talking about the problems
without saying, without
the assumption that
the most helpful approach is to talk
positively about the solutions.
We need to actually say and
have a conversation about
what the problems are
without making the people who
talk about the problems into the problem.
Which is what happens so often
in so many university contexts.
Those who really try
to give problems names
become the problems and
then it's assumed that
if those people go away
the problems go with them.
I'm immersed in complaint
and I'm not really--
I'm thinking maybe that
I will want to do a book
that's a bit like I'm Being Included,
a very, quite systematic
presentation of my findings
from talking to formally 40 people,
informally up to 200 people about their
complaint experiences at universities.
Very, very detailed
analysis of what goes on,
because I think the detail really matters.
Then, also perhaps doing something
a little bit more creative
around how else to
share the findings with
the people who have
shared their stories
with me, because the work
is a very collective work,
I'm there because of my own
complaint experiences and my own history
of feminist sort that
brings me to the project,
but the people I'm talking to are there
because of their complaint experiences
and their own history of feminist sort
that brings them to the project.
I want to think about maybe being involved
in some more creative
forms of co-publishing,
podcasts perhaps, complaint dialogues,
complaint collectives,
I was thinking maybe
a complaint handbook or a killjoy handbook
that would allow me to make the project,
or the writing less about
the university as a site,
and more about what do we
learn from the ways people try
and challenge abuses of power
across a range of different settings.
(ebullient music)
