(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)
