Author: Antonia Didier

The time of complaint is not the time of world …

While I am complaining, the life is going on.
“We ended up meeting in a large cafe. Although we found a relatively private corner, you could hear the hustle and bustle around us, the clattering of plates, sounds of laughter; clattering, and clattering. Being there together made a difference; hearing life go on can be a reminder that life goes on.”

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Una denuncia es un testimonio
Testimony was thus in the accounts as well as being how they took form. And what has been so important to the process of receiving these statements as testimony is receiving them together. To hear these accounts as testimony is to hear how they combine to allow us to bear witness to an experience, to show what they reveal, to bring out what is usually hidden, given how complaints are made confidential.

Esto es un testimonio sobre un fenómeno social y collective.
It was clear to me the limits of what I could do.

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Words carry a charge; you can end up being made to feel that you are the problem, that the problem is YOU
words getting under our skin!!!

IMPRUDENTE

and I don’t trust the space to sound like that person.
No quiero sonar quejumbrosa
—
Complaint can be sick speech. HABLA ENFERMIZA
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NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE SO WHY?

What she calls “the same narrative” is skepticism that there is any point in following a complaint procedure to complain would be to hurtle toward a miserable fate, complaint as fatalism, to leave the right path, the institutional path, to bring misery upon yourself.

a complaint can also be framed as pointless,

Warnings can operate in the realm of the would rather than the could.

A warning becomes about what you would not do if you wanted to protect yourself, your career, and your own happiness.

2. warning can be offered in the style of a report.—- qualified support, warnings -to be more concerned with consequences than anything else

A warning is a technique of redirection: the past is used like an arrow that points to what will happen heads can do what they like.

WARNINGS – “rocking the boat” and “making waves”

A complaint is heard as making waves, as stopping things from being steady

Warnings can be used to remind people of the precarity of their situation.

who is bigger and who is smaller (they are bigger; you are smaller)

upset the status quo.

2. Warnings as threats,

whistle-blower
scatter gun
loose cannon
as if the damage caused by making a complaint was a result of a failure of precision.

YES  WARNING

Nodes: We learn from our surroundings. A nod is when you move your head up and down, often several times, to show agreement, approval, or a greeting.

It is striking to me how a limbo is described as a space: you make a complaint and that is where you end up; a limbo is what is opened up. To be in limbo is to be left waiting.

nodding is encouraging.

Nodding can be nonperformative. In chapter 1 I used nonperformative to refer to institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name.

To placate is to calm or to soothe. Placate derives from the word please, to be agreeable When hearing about a problem is offered as a solution, hearing becomes another kind of dissolution.

how complaints involve communicative

labor:!!
———-

I am calling the response of no response blanking.

To be blanked is to be ignored

(I think of blanking as like an eraser used to remove marks from the page.)

Blanking can be how you erase the data. Or blanking can be how you fail to record the data.

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Nonending, like this book, as complaints, as fear, as tears, as nonsense world.

“It’s like you put glasses on, and now you can see it.” She emphasized that having seen the world through the lens of complaint, you cannot unsee that world,” cited Sarah Ahmed in her book.

Some years ago, I had thought of something similar. Once you become aware of something, you can’t turn a blind eye.

I became a feminist. I will never be able not to be it.
I became vegetarian because I realized how is the meat industry contaminating the world. Even if I eat meat again, I will always know.
Even if I truly loved it, I stopped buying fast fashion because I will always be aware of the tons of water wasted to produce a single pair of jeans.

I thought once. I cannot stop thinking
I knew once. I cannot stop knowing
I realized, and I cannot stop being aware
I have seen, heard, and experienced how bullying and intimidation can hurt you, and now I can’t help but distrust others.
I cannot stop …………..
I cannot stop …………..
I cannot stop …………..
I cannot stop …………..
I CANNOT STOP FEARING

Why would anyone compare a person to the character King Kong? 

Why has racism been so present in Colombian elections in the last months? 

What is the problem with the color of our skin?

“Francia Márquez is an Afro-Colombian human-rights and environmental activist in Colombia. In August 2020, Márquez announced her candidacy in the 2022 Colombian Presidential Elections. She is the first Colombian woman of African descent to run for the presidency. Márquez’s coalition is Pacto Histórico. In her campaign, she has advocated for women, Afro-Colombians, and indigenous communities, who have been largely excluded from Colombian politics. After a great run in the primaries, Francia became the Vice Presidential candidate for Gustavo Petro’s presidential campaign.”1

And yes, she has been compared to King Kong. 

Marbelle, a famous Colombian singer and actress, used her Twitter to launch this racist media attack a couple of days ago. And I cannot understand why this is still happening. Statements like Marbelle’s only want to spread hate and intolerance through the internet. And make me also reflect in why are usually women who attack women. Where does so much hatred and envy for destroying each other come from? Without any answer, I only wanted to use this platform to complain about this nonsense attack and to share my personal opinion about Francia Marquez (even if I am not going to be able to vote from Germany this year):

She is probably the best option Colombia has to see a fundamental change in the politics of violence and corruption we are used to living in. 

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1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francia_M%C3%A1rquez

I am a woman.
I was a girl.
And yes, I have been abused too.

He convinced me to take off the top of my dress.
He was an Art student, and I hadn’t finished high school.
He told me he wanted to do a portrait of me.
He saw me; he caressed me.

At that time, I didn’t understand what it was like to even give my consent.
I felt guilty for a while.
BUT HE WAS WRONG, NOT ME.

Fatphobia is defined as a pathological fear of fatness. “A hatred of big bodies.” Pointing them “as lazy, and unintelligent, or disgusting,” says Mary Himmelstein, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Kent State University who studies how weight stigma affects people’s health.¹

Why do we believe we have the right to judge the bodies of others?
“What makes us attractive, successful, and healthy?”²
Why do I need a gap between my legs or a flat belly to feel enough?

Like many other ways of discrimination, Fatphobia goes unnoticed because it is structural and systemic. Comments such as or are as violent as or and can be heard in different contexts, from children’s schools, to work and academic environments. And each day most common in Social media.

Mesa Mixta is a project created by the Colombian Artist YourDough (Edison Jimenez) in 2020. The project arises from the artist’s interest in the psychosocial implications of fatphobia, namely in Latinamerica. It was born to promote dialogues about fatness and build support networks for people who have suffered this kind of discrimination. Each version of the project has a Latin American women illustrator to promote their work and reaffirm a queer position, which I will discuss later.

I witnessed how Edison conducted the whole conversation by listening to people’s experiences during a couple of meetings I had the opportunity to attend. Now I cannot stop thinking about him as the Feminist Ear proposed by Sarah Ahmed in her book Complaint! He created a safe space for people to complain about being harassed and bullied because of their weight. At those sessions, I heard many difficult and painful stories. They used to be related to sexual violence in childhood or adolescence. Others came from toxic family relationships. My account was more related to trying to fit in those beauty ideas imposed for other girls in the school. These stories gave rise to physical and mental health problems connected to understanding one’s body and feeding, reaching in many cases to social anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

Sarah Ahmed said, “Words carry a charge; you can end up being made to feel that you are the problem, that the problem is you.”3 and people who attended Mesa Mixta sessions agreed with that. They were aware that most of the problems related to their bodies started when someone called them pejorative expressions associated with the size of their bodies.

The real problem with Fatphobia is that it is deeply rooted in the collective unconscious. I would say this has not always been like this. Being fat was considered healthy and prosperous in the past. Now is the opposite because the market mediates bodies. Capitalism has changed human consumption habits. Nowadays, rich people can consume “fit” and “healthy” food meanwhile “the most accessible and affordable options [which] are calorie-dense and processed”4 are relegated to the lower classes.

In that way, fatphobia is connected with the Intersectional feminism concept coined by “Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American law professor who explained it as “a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”5 Consequently, people of color, as well as women and other marginalized individuals with large bodies “face dual stigmatization“6 (Virgie Tovar) and become more accessible and vulnerable targets of discrimination.

Defined by himself as fat and queer Latin American, Edi proposes Mesa Mixta within the context of intersectional feminism as a place to attack fatphobia and another kind of bias.

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1. Stephanie Dolgoff. The Harmful and Insidious Effects of Fatphobia. in: Good House Keeping, Mar 8, 2021, https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/a35422452/fat-phobia/ (accessed Jan 28, 2022).
2. Ibid.
3. Sarah Ahmed. Complaint!  Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021, p.19. 
4. Dolgoff 2021.
5. UN Women. Intersectional feminism: what it means and why it matters right now. Jul 1, 2020, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/6/explainer-intersectional-feminism-what-it-means-and-why-it-matters#:~:text=Kimberl%C3%A9%20Crenshaw%2C%20an%20American%20law,created%20equal%2C%E2%80%9D%20she%20says (accessed Feb 3, 2022).
6. Dolgoff 2021.

“Thank you for calling Expedia lodging support; my name is Lucía. May I have your property ID please?”

The sentence above accompanied my early mornings through the last 11 months before coming to Weimar. I worked as a call center agent for the known French company Teleperformance. I answered the phone and replied to emails in a campaign called Expedia.

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Thought 1. Working as a call center agent is nobody's dream. 
Thought 2. I am feeling ashamed of being a call center agent. 
Thought 3. I did a 5-years bachelor's in Fine Arts in the best university in Colombia; a call Center should not be my place. ( I felt terrible of thinking about this after) 
Thought 4. Whatever...I need money to do my MFA in Germany. 
Thought 5. This is an experience I have to live. I should be grateful for having a job during a world pandemic. 

STOP LUCY... This complaint of not having job opportunities as an artist in a country like Colombia should be a future post because this post, as I already said, is about talking to a wall.
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Expedia is another vast “American”* company that provides services to find the “best prices” in the market to book flights and hotels (same as Booking.com). I was backstage since I only attended property owners, front desks, and other hotel employees. So, the complaints I received, I heard, were more “polite,” less “aggressive,”…

Less complaint.

It is called “customer service.” However, it is never truly about them.

The kind of complaints that came to me was usually about money. Let me explain to you how payments work for this company: the giant offers two ways to pay hotels the funds collected from travelers. On the one hand, the Expedia Virtual Cards. EVCs could be processed as soon as the guest had left the hotel; the hotelier already has the number Expedia assigned to the card. They only need to charge it.
On the other hand, there are the Invoices. Invoices were always a problem because people, I mean, the hoteliers, couldn’t understand why they needed to ask for payment instead of being paid as soon as they provided the service. I heard voices comparing “our” services (Expedia’s services) with Airbnb more than once. This platform pays property owners what is owed to them as soon as travelers check out. To me, this should be the right way to act. However, big corporations never work like that; they ask for money or work in advance, but they pay in terms of 90-180 days. Thus, small entrepreneurs wear out and die.

That is what an Argentine man precisely told me once. He was distraught because Expedia had not paid the last three months to him. He tried several times to contact Customer Service to understand what was happening, but no one answered. He had the right to be upset; he had been fighting for weeks, always against a vast wall. After working a couple of weeks in his case, I realized the whole problem was absurd and easy to solve. However, internal teams passed the ball from one to the other, and anyone did anything to help this man. Almost three weeks later, I could release the money (by his right) even if it was to the detriment of my “quantitative performance,” or usually called metrics.

I felt proud of myself for having been able to solve the problem. And it was not the only case actually. After all, I was a great call center agent.

Nevertheless, during the 11 months, I always felt frustrated working for a company like this one. The trouble with capitalism and these giant money-producing monsters is that they do not have a face, they have hundreds of people spread around the world…

wait … they are not really from all over the world, they are people who, like me, live in developing countries where labor is cheaper. I cost less money than an American.*

I cost less money than an American.*

I cost less than an American.*

So, Expedia, as well as Teleperformance, are no human beings.

And, it was not me on the phone. It was Expedia.

It was nobody.

It was an entity that cannot be spoken to.

It was a wall. It is a wall.

Thought 5. Is this frustration the same felt by Winston Smith trying to fight against Big Brother? 
Thought 6. However, Big Brother was no more than a vast machine fueled by fear and worship of the ignorant.

* Being Colombian, I shouldn’t say American to refer to the USA. I am American too. But, this is another story, another complaint.