De klacht van de spelbrekers: Studentenverzet en business as usual

Sara Ahmed was among the first academics to openly support students’ Palestine solidarity encampments. She asserts that such encampments function similarly to complaints, targeting mechanisms that perpetuate and normalise violence. Ahmed’s work conceptualises complaints as forms of resistance that expose institutional power structures, often maintained through ‘straightening devices’; mechanisms that align behaviors with institutional norms, encouraging certain practices while discouraging others.

The solidarity encampments exemplify Ahmed’s phenomenological approach and embodied feminist politics, highlighting how affect shapes social dynamics within institutions and can reconfigure them. This essay examines these protests as embodied complaints that disrupt the status quo and challenge established institutional orientations to effect policy change. Ahmed’s concepts of the ‘feminist killjoy’ and ‘straightening devices’ provide a framework to explore the impact of these encampments on academic institutions and the protesters themselves.

By analyzing situated moments from a roundtable discussion with activists involved in these movements, this essay reveals how institutional responses often aim to neutralise dissent and maintain existing power relations. The essay underscores the challenges and potential of embodied resistance in confronting institutional complicity in systemic violence.