Sara Ahmed’s Complaint: Institutions, Resistance, and the Politics of Being Heard

In Complaint, Sara Ahmed investigates what happens when individuals attempt to lodge formal complaints within institutions such as universities. Drawing on interviews with students and staff, as well as her own experience leaving academia, Ahmed demonstrates that the complaint process is rarely a neutral mechanism for resolving harm. Instead, it is a system structured to protect the institution itself.

A central theme in the book is how institutions treat complaints as problems to be contained rather than injustices to be addressed. Bureaucratic “walls” impede progress, making complainants feel that their concerns are redirected, delayed, or erased. Through this process, the individual who makes a complaint often becomes stigmatized as “the complainer,” a figure associated with troublemaking rather than accountability. In this way, institutions shift attention from systemic failures to the supposed shortcomings of the individual who dares to speak.

Ahmed also critiques how institutions publicly commit to “diversity” and “inclusion” while their complaint systems reveal the shallowness of such commitments. When faced with issues of racism, sexism, or harassment, the institution often prioritizes maintaining its reputation over supporting those who experience harm.

The Problem of Non-Performative Speech

Sara Ahmed’s work on institutional life often circles back to a central paradox: the gap between what institutions say and what they do. Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in her concept of non-performative speech. Borrowing from J. L. Austin’s notion of performatives—utterances that do things in the world, such as making a promise or giving a command—Ahmed flips the frame to highlight speech acts that, despite claiming to enact change, function precisely by not doing what they say. A diversity statement, for instance, often announces commitment to inclusion while serving as a shield against the need for further action.

For Ahmed, the non-performative is not merely a failure of speech to perform. It is an active mechanism of deferral and containment. When a university proclaims its dedication to equality, the announcement itself can be treated as sufficient evidence of progress. The statement becomes a substitute for material transformation, an accomplishment rather than the beginning of accountability. In this way, speech that names injustice can actually reproduce it by absorbing critique back into institutional self-congratulation.

This framing allows Ahmed to expose how power sustains itself not only through silence but also through endlessly circulating declarations. The language of commitment, recognition, or awareness is detached from follow-through and used to neutralize dissent. She shows that to complain within such environments is to be redirected into the machinery of non-performative speech—where acknowledgments, policies, and procedures appear to move forward but in fact preserve the status quo.

Ahmed’s critique is unsettling because it resists the comforting assumption that speech aligned with justice is inherently progressive. Instead, she suggests that speech can enact blockage: a kind of institutional magic trick that makes action disappear. In highlighting this paradox, Ahmed equips us with a sharper critical lens for reading the gap between words and worlds, between the promises made in official documents and the lived realities of those who must endure them.

Concluding Remarks

Yet Ahmed does not frame complaint as futile. She emphasizes that even unsuccessful complaints create archives of resistance. They connect people through shared experiences and foster collective survival strategies. In this sense, complaint is not only about seeking remedy but also about exposing how power operates.

Ultimately, Complaint is both an account of institutional resistance to change and a recognition of the courage required to speak up. Ahmed shows that to complain is to insist on the possibility of another way of living and working together, even when institutions do everything they can to stop that possibility from emerging.