On Receiving Accounts from Others

Who is giving an account to whom? This is a question I hear when I read Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself. Despite the use of the preposition “of” in the title, which seems to make oneself the object not only of an address but of the book, Butler emphasizes how accounts are given to someone else, whether “conjured or existing” (21). This shift of attention from an “account of” to an “account to” is crucial to Butler’s argument about ethics. They call for us to think of this “scene of address” as a more “primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of one-self.” If we are shaped by others before we become ourselves, or to become ourselves, there is much we cannot and will not know about ourselves, as well as about others. Butler explains, “The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge” (20). Opacity, Butler shows, is not only a shared situation but is crucial to how ethical bonds are formed: “[I]t may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.”

If Butler turns from “an account of” to “an account to,” I turn from an “account to” to an “account from,” considering how we are called upon to receive accounts from others. I offer my own “scene of address,” engaging not with the body of the work that is sometimes called “critical theory,” but with the people I interviewed for an empirical study of complaints made in universities.¹ These people—let’s call them the complainers—are my critical theorists. It was by listening to their accounts that I have come to think differently about questions of subjectivity, agency, responsibility, and ethics that animate Butler’s text. In this essay, I show how we can draw on Butler’s reflections on accounts as “scenes of address” to explore complaints both as accounts given to institutions and as efforts to bring institutions to account.

Of course, not all accounts are complaints. Butler suggests that we might be called to account for ourselves or our actions by “a query or attribution” made by another that takes the form of a question, “Was it you?” (Giving 11). This emphasis on how some accounts become necessary in response to accusatory questions comes via Butler’s reading of Nietzsche. Butler suggests Nietzsche “did well to understand that I begin my story of myself only in the face of a ‘you’ who asks me to give an account.” Butler, however, wants us to be open to the possibility that we might be called upon by others to account for ourselves in a different way: “let us consider that being addressed by another carries other valences besides fear.”

While not all accounts are complaints, neither are all complaints accounts. For an account to take the form of a complaint, we might assume the report or description given is part of a formal allegation (perhaps the one who complains is the one who asks the question “was it you?” or turns a question into an accusation, “it was you!”). A complaint can also be an expression of grief, pain, or dissatisfaction, something that is the cause of a protest or outcry, a bodily ailment, as well as a formal allegation. We might have a complaint. That complaint might then be turned into an account, perhaps given to a physician or a friend. A complaint can be expressed through gestures, such as turning away or rolling eyes, or through involuntary sounds, such as gasps or moans. In whatever way complaints are made, they carry a negative valence. That negativity is not necessarily in the expression but can be about how it is received. You just have to say the word racism, for example, to be heard as complaining, as saying something negative, as being negative. For some of us, turning up is enough to bring racism up. If words can carry complaints, so too can bodies. Negation is quite the sensation. In complaint, I hear an affinity with the word queer, which has been sharpened by its use as insult or slur. When we use the word queer to describe the work we do, we repurpose its sharpness as a tool. We turn queer from insult to complaint, redirecting the no that has been flung at us back to the institutions that do not accommodate us.

When we make complaints about institutions, we mostly do so when we are in them. When you make a formal complaint, you are not simply expressing yourself in your own terms. You have to fill in the right forms, fit your story or even yourself into a shape that is not your own. You have to speak to the right people at the right time in the right place in accordance with existing procedures. To make a complaint within an institution still requires somebody to receive it on behalf of the institution. Butler suggests that a person who appears to be receiving an account is not necessarily doing so: “[T]he one who is positioned as the receiver may not be receiving at all, may be engaging in something that cannot under any circumstances be called ‘receiving,’ doing nothing more for me than establishing a certain site, a position, a structural place where the relation to a possible reception is articulated” (Giving 67). To say an institution receives the complaint is to point to how a reception can be “a certain site, a position, a structural place” as much as a person.

Sometimes we are called upon to receive a complaint because we share a site, a position, or a structural place with the one who gives it. For example, I was called upon to receive complaints about sexual harassment made by students where I used to work. I was asked by the students to attend a meeting. They came to me in part because of my position as the director of the Centre for Feminist Research. The meeting was held in my own department’s own meeting room. I mention the room because it mattered. It was the same room where I had attended many other departmental meetings about new courses, new programs; it is a place where papers and persons are shuffled around. Sometimes what you hear in the usual place changes your relation to that place. The students told me what had been happening in their department, how sexual harassment had become part of the culture.

Once you are known as someone who is willing to listen to complaints, more people will come to you. In the weeks following that first meeting, more and more students came to my office to talk to me. Much later, one student sent me a message: “We’re all concerned that your office has become something of an emergency drop-in centre for women in various states of crisis. I hope you’re alright.”² The students were concerned because they knew that to give a complaint is to ask someone not only to receive it but to hold it. They were aware of how complaints can fill the rooms in which they are expressed, the same rooms in which we are doing our work. I am still touched by their concern. The students did not come to me because I had any special training or skills. I didn’t and I don’t. They came to me because they had nowhere else to go. And, they came to me because I said I was willing to listen. I call being willing to receive complaints becoming a feminist ear.

The students also came to me because the institution had failed to hear them. In listening to their complaints, I became part of their collective; we began to work together to find a way to get their complaints heard. I am grateful that Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble, with support from Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia, and others, wrote about the work they began as students in one of the conclusions of my book Complaint! It is important to stress that the students had already tried to hold the institution to account before we began to work together. They had combined their knowledge and experience to give the institution an account of itself, an account of what had been going on and why it was wrong. The institution did not recognize their account as a complaint, claiming that it needed to come from named individuals and be about named individuals before they could take action. It was because of how harassment had been institutionalized that students did not want to give complaints in that form. To name themselves would be to make themselves vulnerable to retaliation; to name an individual as perpetrator would make the problem individual not institutional. Note that an institution can press a complaint into an allegation, “it was you,” which can work to limit the scope of the complaint.

The violence that complaints are intended to address can be repeated in the requirement to give them a certain form. You have to fill in the actual forms, depositing your words in the right boxes, and also tell the story in a way they can recognize. Together we pushed for a change of form so that students could make complaints individually but anonymously. When the requirements for the form of complaint were loosened, more students came forward to testify in the inquiries. It still took a conscious and collective effort by students to make complaints that would be, in their terms, “legible to the university.” They describe: “These complaints often did not sound like us: we had such a narrow channel in which to describe what happened to us, what it meant, and what it did” (Whitley et al. 268). To make the complaints, to hold the institution to account, meant being channelled in a certain direction by the institution. You can end up feeling estranged from yourself, sounding like someone else.

Even if you fit your story into the forms provided by the institution, even if your complaints have to sound less like you to get anywhere, the institution can still make it all about you. In meetings with colleagues and administrators, we began to hear the term “vicarious trauma” floated around. It began to pop into documents and minutes of meetings. I think that term was used because it implied students had infected each other with misery rather than formed a collective to protest the failures of the institution. Complaints about institutionalized harassment can be turned by institutions into stories of oversensitive and traumatized subjects. If not all accounts are complaints, not all accounts are accounts of oneself. But some complaints about institutions are heard as accounts of oneself. Maybe what I am describing here is an institutional “scene of address,” to use Butler’s terms. When institutions hear complaints as self-accounts, they clear themselves of responsibility. That scene of address felt more like a structure, the repetition of a pattern: harder, heavier, in time.

From working with the students, I came to realize how much those who complain within institutions know about them. And so, I decided to conduct research on complaint, to turn my feminist ear out to others working in other universities. I shared information about the research project on my website and invited people who had made complaints about abuses of power within universities to get in touch. I was overwhelmed by how many people wanted to share their stories. One academic wrote to me, “I want the complaint to go somewhere, rather than round and round in my head.” When a complaint goes round and round in your head, it can feel like a lot of movement not to get very far. To lend a feminist ear is to give complaints somewhere else to go.

Many of those who shared their stories of complaint did so because the complaints they had made did not get very far. An early career academic describes her experience of the complaints process thus: “There are like four channels of complaint going on at the same time. But interestingly none of these people seem to be crossing over. You duplicate the complaint at different times: emails, phone calls, occupational health, the union. It is all being logged. It is generating all this material and all this paperwork but actually nothing seems to shift. It’s just a file, actually.” She ended up duplicating the same points to multiple parties because there were no clear lines of communication between them. And where does a complaint end up? All of those documents, many of which replicate other documents, end up in the same file (“it’s just a file, actually”). A file or a filing cabinet can be how your complaint is buried. One student described how her complaint ended up in the “complaint graveyard.”

I was aware that by listening to people’s stories of complaints I was opening up yet another channel of communication. It was not enough to hear someone give yet another account of giving yet another account. I did not want to become a filing cabinet. We have too many already. So, I needed to find a way to send stories back out while protecting the confidentiality of all my participants. I decided to share fragments from individual stories. A complaint can be shattering; we can be left in pieces. I approached each fragment as a sharp piece of a shared story.

A fragment of a story, a fragment as a story. How do we tell such stories? Many of those I spoke to talked about hard it was to know where to start. It can be hard to know where to begin a story of complaint because it is hard to know when a complaint begins. Here are the opening words from a testimony offered by a senior researcher who made a complaint about bullying and harassment:

Emotion comes out in telling the story; emotion makes it hard to tell the story. You make an effort to present something because it has become part of you, because it matters to you, to what you can do, who you can be, but how it matters makes it hard to present. From this one fragment, we hear how to tell the story of a complaint is to reflect on what it means and how it feels to tell that story. You have to make something present that you experienced in the past as shattering. How do you begin a story of breaking apart without breaking apart? You talk about why you need to pull yourself together; you talk about how you pull yourself together.

What we are giving an account of can be what makes it hard to give that account. It can be hard to keep hold of all the threads. In the shattering, the loosening, is a queer potential. In Giving an Account of Oneself, queer moments do happen. Butler writes, “There are clearly times when I cannot tell the story in a straight line, and I lose my thread, and I start again, and I forgot something crucial, and it is too hard to think about how to weave it in” (68). If we can’t tell the story in a straight line, what are we giving to another? On paper, the complaints process is often pictured as a flow chart, with straight lines and arrows that give you a clear route through.

Each of these lines represents where you are supposed to go with the complaint or the conversation you are supposed to have with people based in different offices: these are lines of communication. In my book Complaint! I offered this alternative picture of what making a complaint feels like. It’s a mess. There are so many threads, they all seem to unravel, you go this way, then that. Perhaps this picture conveys something about Butler’s story of not keeping their story straight, of losing their thread.

This picture can also offer a queer map of the organization. If the straight lines lead to burial, that file or that filing cabinet, we might need to make a mess to get the complaint out. To receive complaints, we have to find a way out, to keep them moving, or to keep them alive. In other words, we have to get complaints out not only of ourselves but of institutions. So much of the work of complaint is hidden because of where complaints happen: behind closed doors. The expression “behind closed doors” can refer to the actual doors that are closed so someone can tell their story in confidence. It can also refer to the process of keeping something secret from a wider public. To become a feminist ear is to put your ear to the door; we listen to it as well as through it.

We might need to open the door to get to a point when we can make a complaint. You might need to open a door to give an account to yourself before you can give it to others. I talked to a PhD student based in the u.s. who had been sexually harassed by her supervisor. She tells me why it was so hard to see what was going on:

When what you experience “at the time” is part of the culture, you don’t identify it at the time you experience it. The harassment, the misconduct, which was institutionalized, expressed in the idea that senior men would need a big wooden table in order to remember not to touch women students, is happening at the same time that all the critical work is happening or where the rhetoric of critical work is being used as if to describe what is happening: critical race studies, pedagogy of the oppressed. To put your ear to the door is to listen back, going back over something, hearing what you did not hear when it was said, when it was done. Clarity can sometimes be jarring, you become conscious of what you did not see before, which is not to say that you see everything.

It can take time to reach a complaint, to get to it not just through it. She knew she had a lot to give up. She is a queer woman of color: she is from a working-class background; she is the first in her family to go to university. She has had to fight so hard to get where she is. But her supervisor is making her feel more and more uncomfortable, he is “pushing boundaries,” wanting to meet off campus, in coffee shops, then at his home. She uses a door to handle the situation. “I tried very hard to keep all of the meetings on campus, and to keep the door open.” At the same time as she keeps that door open, she shut out from her mind what he was doing: “I thought I would take myself down by admitting to the kind of violence he was enacting.” Take myself down: to admit to violence can feel like becoming your own killjoy, getting in the way of your own progression. To admit can mean to confess a truth as well as to let something in. If she keeps the door to his office open, she closes another door, the door of consciousness, by not admitting what he was doing.³

Note how doors can hold a contradiction. Keeping the office door open is an admission of a truth that she handles by not letting it in. Handles can stop working:

A handle can be used to stop violence directed at us from seeping or leaking into us. When the handle stops working, the violence seeps not only into her but also into her colleague, into a conversation, into the space in which they were having a conversation. When violence gets in, a complaint comes out. However, there is no switch, one in, one out. For a complaint to come out, she has to make the complaint, to keeping making it. “I think I started to believe that if I came out with this in a public way, that my own career would suffer.” Her use of the language of coming out, her reference to “in a public way,” teaches how when complaints travel, going further away from us, they take something of ourselves with them. And so, she fears, the further the complaint goes, the less far she will go.

To come out with a complaint has consequences. I am reminded of Butler’s essay “Imitation and Gender Subordination.” If Giving an Account of Oneself turns an “of” into a “to,” this essay turns an “out of” into an “into.” Butler explains, “[C]onventionally one comes out of the closet […]; so we are out of the closet, but into what? what new unbounded spatiality? the room, the den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university?” (“Imitation” 16). Butler then evokes another enclosure with a door, Kafka’s door, a door that seems to promise something, an opening, “fresh air,” the “light of illumination that never arrives.” Butler asks the question, “Is the ‘subject’ who is ‘out’ free of subjection and finally in the clear?” They show the answer is no. To come into is not to come into the clear: “In this sense, outness can only produce a new opacity.” If we are not in the clear, this is not simply because of what we keep hidden from ourselves. We are not in the clear because of where we end up.

To come into is still to come to. So, in coming out with a complaint, this student has to bring it to someone, a person, an office. She goes to the office responsible for handling complaints: “They were like, ‘you can file a complaint. But he’s really well loved by the university, he has a strong publication record, you are going to go through all of this emotional torment.’ It was even proposed that he could counter sue me for defamation of character. The line was essentially, you can do this, but why would you.” A warning that a complaint will have dire consequences can take the form of institutional fatalism: statements about what institutions are like, what they are, what they will be, whom they will love, whom they will protect. In the end, she did not file a formal complaint because she knew what she was being told: that she wouldn’t get anywhere, it wouldn’t get anywhere, because he was going somewhere.

You might open the door of consciousness only to have that same door be shut by the institution. You can be stopped from making a complaint by those who receive it. You can also be stopped by making a complaint because of where you express it. When complaints are made behind closed doors, that too is where they are heard. As one academic describes, “I had a hearing […] but I think it was just to placate me.” To placate is to calm or to soothe. Hearings can be used to draw a line as if to have heard a complaint is to have dealt with it. We should be suspicious if organizations (or individuals for that matter) utter the words “I hear you” before we say anything. When hearing happens behind a door, complaints are expressed without going anywhere, disappearing rather like steam, puff, puff.

The containment of complaint is not only a matter of how complaints are received (those warnings), or where they end up (those filing cabinets), but where they are expressed. I noticed how nods seem to surround complaints. One student made an informal complaint about harassment to her head of department: “He seemed to take it on board; he was listening; he was nodding. Ten days later I still had not heard anything. A space of limbo opened up.” Nodding can be a way of appearing to hear somebody. Butler refers to nods: “Of course, one might simply ‘nod’ or make use of another expressive gesture to acknowledge that one is indeed the one who authored the deed in question. The ‘nod’ functions as an expressive precondition of acknowledgment” (Giving 12). Perhaps a nod becomes an expressive gesture because it does not commit the one who nods to any further action. A nod might even encourage someone to express a complaint where it won’t be overheard.

If nothing follows a nod, you have to give an account again. The more you don’t get through, the more you have to do. You have to keep making the same complaint because it is not getting anywhere. The need to repeat ourselves derives not only from not being heard but from the same things coming up. A trans student of color made a complaint about sexual harassment and transphobic harassment by their supervisor, who kept asking them deeply intrusive questions about their gender and genitals. Questions can be hammering; for some, to be is to be in question. Some more than others are required to give accounts of themselves, to explain themselves, who they are, where they are from, what they are doing. The supervisor’s questions were laced in the language of concern for the welfare of the student, predicated on judgments that they would be endangered if they conducted research in their home country.

Racist judgments are often about the location of danger “over there” in a black or brown elsewhere. Transphobic judgments are often about the location of danger “in here,” in the body of a trans person: as if to be trans is to incite the violence against you. When they complain, what happens? They said, “People were just trying to evaluate whether he was right to believe there would be some sort of physical danger to me because of my gender identity […] as if to say he was right to be concerned.” The right to be concerned becomes a right to be concerned. So much harassment today is enacted as a right to be concerned. We have a right to be concerned about immigration (as “citizens”); we have a right to be concerned about sex-based rights (as “adult human females”). A right to be concerned is how violence is enacted, a violence premised on suspicion that some are not who they say they are, that some have no right to be where they are, that some have no right to be.

The same intrusive questions that lead you to complain are asked because you complain. It is important to note that to make complaints within institutions is to receive more scrutiny. The gaze falls, as it always falls, as the questions fall, on those who are deemed strangers, not really from here, who don’t belong here. A woman of color academic describes: “Whenever you raise something, the response is that you are not one of them.” It is not that “raising something” makes you not one of them. You are already not one of them. When you raise something, you reconfirm a judgment that has already been made.

A reconfirmation can be an amplification. A complaint seems to amplify what makes you not fit, picking up what you are not, becoming more evidence—not that they need more evidence—that no matter what you do or how far you go, you will not be “one of them.” She explains further: “To retain your post you have to be whiter than white. You are not afforded any goodwill. You have no scope for error. You don’t have any scope for being a bit foggy. The level of scrutiny is so high.” The expression whiter than white is telling us something: how whiteness becomes clean, good, and pure, yes, but also how people of color have already failed to be those things, or how easily you come to fail, because when you are under scrutiny, anything can be used as evidence of failure, any mistake you make, or anything quirky, irregular, queer even, can be confirmation that you are not meant to be here. To be under scrutiny can feel like those around you, who surround you, are waiting for you to trip up. It feels like that because it is that. She described her department as a “revolving door,” women and minorities enter only to head right out again, whoosh, whoosh. You can be shut out by what you find out when you get in.

Doors are shut by appearing to be open. Consider how diversity is often represented as an open door, minorities welcome, come in, come in! Just because they welcome you, it doesn’t mean they expect you to turn up. Complaint policies, rather like diversity, are often represented as an open door: complaints welcome, come in, come in! Just because they have a policy, it does not mean you are welcome to use it. As another woman of color academic based in Canada describes, “That was my experience of the complaint process. As an employee of the university, the minute you try to enact policy […] it is a trip wire.” You are stopped from using the policy, rather like a trespasser is stopped from entering the building. She describes further, “I was told it was now a formal process. I had to look at all the policies. I found there was this fog. It was constant. Every time I found clarity— isn’t it supposed to happen in accordance with policy blah blah blah—this has been around ten years, isn’t this supposed to happen, and they would be like no.” To be told “no” is to be told that however long a policy has been around it is not going to determine what happens. It becomes clear (“every time I found clarity”) that the policies, in her terms, “are not meant.”

Even if the policies are not meant, they still exist on paper, creating a paper trail. She called policies that don’t exist on paper “shadow policies.” She used that term to account for why white academics in her department ended up with more research time than academics of color, despite official commitments to equality. It was because of backdoor deals they made that appeared to be about securing one thing but ended up giving them another more valued thing. A shadow is the dark area where light from a source is blocked due to an opaque object. The term “shadow policies” is telling us something about where decisions are made, the unlit areas of a room, as well as how they are made. To complain is to find a gap between the university as it appears, policies that exist but are not followed, a paper university, and the university as it is, policies that do not exist but are followed.

You find a gap, mind a gap, you fall right into it. I think back to those messy lines. What seemed like a clear route through the institution turns out to be a state of confusion. There is pedagogy in confusion. One lecturer describes her experience thus: “It is like being trapped in some kind of weird dream where you know you jump from one section to another because you never know the narrative.” The implication here is that a narrative is not only held by someone else but that it is withheld. Butler uses the expression “narrative withheld” to describe a person who refuses to narrate, which is still a relation to narrative (12). Participating in a complaint process can feel like a different kind of withholding of narrative: you are in it, it is not “not” your experience that is being told, but you are not telling it. A complaint can queer your relation to the institution (and I mean here queer in the old sense of odd). Words that are everywhere in my data are odd, weird, strange, surreal, bizarre, disorientating. You know what is happening is not what is supposed to be happening, but you still don’t know what is happening.

This lack of clarity becomes the world you inhabit. And this lack of clarity can be purposeful. Earlier I gave an example of a student who was warned not to complain about a professor who was “well loved” by the institution. In her case, the warning came from the office that had the responsibility for handling complaints. Warnings do not only come from administration. Another student was warned by an academic who was the convenor of her ma program. She had told the convenor that she was planning on making a complaint about a professor, the most senior professor in the department. The academic said, “Be careful, he is an important man.” A warning can be a judgment about who is important as well as a directive. She did not heed the warning: she went ahead with the complaint. In her words, she “sacrificed the references.” In reference to the prospect of starting a PhD, she said, “that door is closed.”

That door is closed: references can be doors, how some are stopped from progressing. If the door is closed on her, she will not be in the institution, bringing to it what she might have brought to it. The door is kept open for him, so he can keep doing what he has been doing where he has been doing it. Doors have so much to teach us about power, how some acquire power by holding the door, by which I mean, the power to close or open that door to others. It is not just the professor who holds the door, which is shut on the student as penalty for complaint (although that is what happened). Others are implicated. Consider the lecturer who warned the student. She was a relatively new and junior member of her department, far junior to the professor. The door she closes on the student could be understood as the same door that she, as a junior lecturer, will need to go through. The warning she gives to the student could thus be a warning she has herself received from or about “an important man.” In other words, progression is tied to protection: in order to progress you have to be willing to protect some people from scrutiny.

I think again about Butler’s emphasis on opacity and how it can be an ethical bond. That bond can also be a bind. There are some things we cannot or do not or will not see because we are trying to protect ourselves or our relations. When the doors are shut, some of us are protected from knowing anything at all. One student told me that a feminist academic said she couldn’t support her in making a complaint about harassment by another academic because “she did not know enough.” If you don’t know enough to support a complaint, that lack of knowledge is doing something. A partial glimpse of a problem is how it keeps being unaddressed. But if not knowing enough leads to inaction, inaction is action: it is how things stay the same. From my study, I became aware of what I would call the instrumentalization of opacity, how the doors that contain complaints, keeping so much in the shadows, are used by institutions, and some people in them, to obscure what is being done and by whom. There is a profound investment in some things remaining unclear.

The same institutions that do not want to know what some people are up to do want to know what other people are up to. This is why the instrumentalization of opacity is probably not unrelated to why some of us hold onto its ethical value. When those who hold the door are protected from scrutiny, some of us end up even more exposed. The shadows might become a refuge, an escape from the relentless demand to give an account of ourselves. To say that the shadows can sometimes be places of refuge from institutions (or in them) is precisely not to say that we are in the clear. And by “institutions,” I am thinking not just of the state, or the university, but of the family, with its skeletons rattling around.⁴ Doors can have queer uses. In Undoing Gender, Butler talks about being in the basement of their house “having locked the door,” and in the “smoke filled” airless room, finding books that once belonged to their parents, or at least passed through their hands, philosophy books that ignited their desire (237). Spaces that might seem like closets or containers, airless, suffocating, can be where queer things happen, where we pick somebody or something up that gives us somewhere else to go.

We might shut the door to create room for ourselves. I am listening to an Indigenous academic based in Canada. She tells me how she could hardly manage to get to campus after a sustained campaign of bullying and harassment from white faculty, including a concerted effort by a senior manager, another “important man,” no doubt, to sabotage her tenure case as well as the tenure cases of other Indigenous academics. When doors are closed, nay, slammed in your face, it can be history you are up against. Her complaint goes nowhere. So, she found another way of taking them on:

Closing the door is how she says no to the institution that demands access to her while taking so much from her. She closes the door to the institution by withdrawing herself, her commitments, from it. She still does her work; she still teaches her students. She uses the door to shut out what she can, who she can. She takes herself off the door; she depersonalizes it. She pulls down the blinds. She pulls on a mask, the mask of her people, connecting her fight to the battles that came before because, quite frankly, for her, this is a war.

If doors are shut on complaints, a shut door can be a complaint. A shut door can be how we say no to the institution, how we withdraw ourselves as well as our labor from it. Withdrawal becomes a political action, given the demand for access and upon whom that demands falls. Angela Mae Kupenda reflects on how, as a Black woman, she is expected to keep her door open. A white administrator emails her in frustration that she was not revealing more about herself. He says, “You must trust us more if you want to succeed here; there are no spooks behind the door!” (20). An open door can be used as a warning and thus also a threat: she is being told that if she does not open the door, to open the door as to trust them more, she will not succeed.

Sometimes we refuse to be warned away because we know what’s behind the damn door. We might have to insist on not opening the door as a way of not opening ourselves up to more scrutiny. I think of how Édouard Glissant’s emphasizes “the right to opacity.” For colonized peoples, opacity can be a refusal to be fully transparent, visible, knowable, accessible. For Glissant, the opaque is “not the obscure” but “that which cannot be reduced” and that resists the aim “to grasp” or to hold (191). Quoting from Glissant, Nicole Simek titled a paper “Stubborn Shadows.” “Banging away incessantly at the main ideas will perhaps lead to exposing the space they occupy in us. Repetition of these ideas does not clarify their expression; on the contrary, it perhaps leads to obscurity. We need those stubborn shadows where repetition leads to perpetual concealment, which is our form of resistance” (Simek 363). Sometimes, we need those stubborn shadows, or we need to be those stubborn shadows, concealing ourselves from institutions because of what they keep repeating, the demands they keep making, keeping something back of ourselves. But if we do what we can to survive institutional violence, we still need that violence to come out of the shadows. We give accounts of it, not accounts of ourselves to it. Of course, they will keep hearing our accounts as accounts of ourselves because that is their structure of address. But we persist because, in truth, we are not addressing the institution as much as we are each other.

Let me return to the complaint testimony shared by an Indigenous academic. Early on in her testimony, she evokes another door, a door she says she has yet to open too wide: “There is a genealogy of experience, a genealogy of consciousness in my body that is now at this stage traumatized beyond the capacity to go to the university. There’s a legacy, a genealogy, and I haven’t really opened that door too widely as I have been so focused on my experience in the last seven years.” To be traumatized is to hold a history in a body; you can be easily shattered. There is only so much you can take on because there is only so much you can take in. We can inherit closed doors. In other words, a trauma can be inherited by being made inaccessible: all that happened that was too hard, too painful, to share or reveal. Decolonial feminist work, Black feminist work, and feminist of color work is often about opening these doors, the door to what came before, colonial as well as patriarchal histories. Harassment is the hardening of that history, a history of who gets to do what, who gets to be what, who is deemed entitled to whom. It takes a political movement to open these doors.

Behind closed doors: that is where complaints are often found, so that is where you might find us too, those of us for whom the institution is not built and what we bring with us, who we bring with us, the worlds that would not be here if some of us were not here—our bodies, our memories. The more we have to spill, the tighter the hold. The more we have to spill. Many complaints end up in containers otherwise known as filing cabinets. That filing cabinet can be thought of as an institutional closet. What is buried here is what the institution does not want revealed.

When complaints end up in the institutional closet, we have to work to get them out. A disabled student was not getting anywhere with her complaint about the failure of the university to make reasonable accommodations. And then a file suddenly appeared, “a load of documents turned up on the student’s union fax machine and we don’t know where they came from, they were historical documents about students who had to leave.” Those documents were past complaints made by past students. They told her she had company, that she was not the first; she was not alone. How they did they get there? She speculates that a secretary was doing “their own little bit of direct action,” releasing those documents as a way of giving support to her complaint that she was not supposed to give. It is not surprising that a secretary can become a saboteur; secretary derives from secrets, the secretary is a keeper of secrets. She knows that there are files, knows how to get them out. If the student I spoke to hadn’t made her complaint, the file would have stayed put: dusty, buried. So many are involved in pulling something out, pulling something off. We can meet in an action without meeting in person.

Complaints can open the door to those who came before. Complaints can open the door to those who come after. I think of a conversation I had with an Indigenous student based in Canada. She had made an informal complaint about white supremacy in her classroom. Using that kind of term for the university can get you in serious trouble: she knew that, but she was still willing to do that. She became, in her own terms, “a monster,” an “Indigenous feminist monster,” and is now completing her PhD off campus. She said that “an unexpected little gift” was how other students could come to her: “They know you are out there and they can reach out to you.”

By making a complaint you give someone else a place to go with theirs. When they reach “out to you,” the “to” refers not only to the one who receives an account but also to the one who gives it. The “to” by pointing back also points forward to those who are to come, who can receive something from you because of what you tried to do whether or not you got through. The “to” is how they reach you.

I think again of giving an account “to,” of Butler’s emphasis on the loving potential (my words for their attention) of “to,” of what we too can receive from their text. Is there room, queer room, wiggle room, between “to” and “from”? I think of to-and-fro, back and forth, how we slip and slide from one to the other, receiving to, giving from. We queer the “to,” finding each other by deviating from the paths we are told to follow, the straight paths, the official paths that lead to so much and so many being buried. That we find each other through complaint is a finding. And that, too, is what I can hear in Butler’s text: we find each other in the gift of an account. And I think also of what a gift it has been to know you are out there.

Notes

Works Cited