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Abstract

In this article, I describe and reflect on my experience developing and implementing a “complaint jar activity”, in a writing-intensive, literature general-education class titled, “Women and Literature” themed on Feminist Futures: Place, Theory and Method. My article follows Sara Ahmed’s invitation to make space for the messy and complex nature of “complaint activism” as a form of feminist work in the academy while at the same time being attentive to the small transformations that the classroom can bring, at a time of increasing anti-intellectualism. Through a focus on the complaint-jar activity, I grapple with the tension between complaints as a material form of care to imagine another future for the academy and complaints as caught in a bureaucratic imagination, resulting in an indifference about complaining. In short, my article proposes a practice of feminist pedagogy that is attentive to the infrastructure and labor of making a complaint in the academy.

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