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No!: The Art and Activism of Complaining
An assembly of refusals portraying the radical power of “no” by the renowned scholar and author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, Sara Ahmed.
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.
Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where—Ahmed’s accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say “No!” and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.
Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where—Ahmed’s accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say “No!” and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.
312 pages, Paperback
Published April 7, 2026
About the author
Sara Ahmed
58 books1,816 followersSara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her most recent book is No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining which came out with Allen Lane in September 2025, and which is a companion text to The Feminist Killjoy Handbook which was published by Allen Lane in 2023. Previous books include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations Objects, Others all published by Duke University Press. She blogs at feministkilljoys.com and has a newsletter https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 19, 2026
good shit
April 12, 2026
3 🌟
This was fine, if a bit repetitive. Am I complaining about a book about complaints? Perhaps. I just felt I didn’t really learn anything new. I think this was another “it’s not you, it’s me” situation.
Thank you to NetGalley and Tantor Audio for the ALC.
This was fine, if a bit repetitive. Am I complaining about a book about complaints? Perhaps. I just felt I didn’t really learn anything new. I think this was another “it’s not you, it’s me” situation.
Thank you to NetGalley and Tantor Audio for the ALC.
Read
April 6, 2026Whenever Sara Ahmed writes a book, I feel some of my peace come back.
Ty to Feminist Press for sending me a copy ❤️
Ty to Feminist Press for sending me a copy ❤️
June 27, 2026
This is such an important book. "Why it’s difficult to speak is why we have to speak" sums up this book.
Ahmed's book exposes the many different aspects of being a women and being in minority groups in the larger contexts of institutions of all kinds and the struggles that are ignored, overlooked, or seen as "rocking the boat." Much of what her book centers on is that these moments of complaint are normal experiences for any one in minority groups within organizations of any size. Ahmed shares stories of complains that successfully change policies and some that were ignored causing people to leave spaces that would not listen to them. I believe this book should be a must read for any HR person, persons within majority groups, and everyone who has ever been a victim of workplace bullying, denied services, or not believed after filing sexual misconduct complaints. This is a power tale of how your voice matters.
I enjoyed the writing style of this book and the narrator was very enjoyable to listen to on audiobook. Ahmed wrote in a style that was easy to understand and many wonderful one liners were written down to remember. She ends the book with giving readers the tools to support themselves and others through complaint processes and the hope that complaining is valid and needed.
Overall, I give this book a 4.5 stars and highly recommend it to anyone who is politically active, social justice minded, and wants to learn about other's experiences.
Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced listener copy.
Ahmed's book exposes the many different aspects of being a women and being in minority groups in the larger contexts of institutions of all kinds and the struggles that are ignored, overlooked, or seen as "rocking the boat." Much of what her book centers on is that these moments of complaint are normal experiences for any one in minority groups within organizations of any size. Ahmed shares stories of complains that successfully change policies and some that were ignored causing people to leave spaces that would not listen to them. I believe this book should be a must read for any HR person, persons within majority groups, and everyone who has ever been a victim of workplace bullying, denied services, or not believed after filing sexual misconduct complaints. This is a power tale of how your voice matters.
I enjoyed the writing style of this book and the narrator was very enjoyable to listen to on audiobook. Ahmed wrote in a style that was easy to understand and many wonderful one liners were written down to remember. She ends the book with giving readers the tools to support themselves and others through complaint processes and the hope that complaining is valid and needed.
Overall, I give this book a 4.5 stars and highly recommend it to anyone who is politically active, social justice minded, and wants to learn about other's experiences.
Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced listener copy.
May 10, 2026
“No is not just what we say; no is what we do. We learn what it will take to build alternatives from our refusal to reproduce more of the same.”
Thank you to Feminist Press for the gifted ARC! This book was published in the US on April 7, 2026.
When I picked up No!, I thought it was more generally about complaining. When I realized Ahmed focused on formal complaint processes, I worried the book might not be for me. I was amazingly wrong.
This book utterly blew me open. Ahmed begins from the complaint that changed her own life, after her university’s failure to respond to sexual harassment led her to leave both her position and her profession. From there, she turns complaint into a method: a way of seeing institutions, power, compliance, and the machinery that perpetuates harm while making the people who name it seem like the problem.
Ahmed understands that complaints are not just paperwork. They are testimony, refusal, grief, survival, and sometimes the beginning of activism. She shows how institutions make complaints disappear by exhausting the people who make them, redirecting them into informal processes, warning them about impact to their reputations, branding them as disloyal, or treating their complaining as cruelty. The complaint process becomes another site of harm, another way power teaches people what they are allowed to say and what they are expected to endure.
What makes No! so powerful is Ahmed’s insistence that complaint is not failure. It is feminist, queer, abolitionist, and pro-survivor work. Complaints help us find comrades. They reveal what institutions try to hide. They teach us that saying no can be a practice of living with ourselves.
This is one of the most politically clarifying books I have ever read. I’m better for having read it. You should read it, too.
Content Note: Please note that on page 165, Ahmed critically quotes another person and the quote contains a use of the R slur.
📖 Read this if you love: Feminist and abolitionist political nonfiction; institutional critique and survivor-centered praxis; books that interrogate power, bureaucracy, and social conditioning; or politically clarifying books that put language to experiences of institutional harm and retaliation.
🔑 Key Themes: Complaint as Political Resistance, Institutional Power and Administrative Violence, Silence and Retaliation, Bureaucracy and Exhaustion, Whistleblowing and Solidarity, Power and Compliance.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Sexual Harassment (severe), Ableism (severe), Misogyny (moderate), Sexism (moderate), Fire (minor), Sexual Assault (minor), Pandemic (minor), Racism (minor), Bullying (minor), Transphobia (minor), Genocide (minor), War (minor), Suicide (minor), Police Violence (minor).
Thank you to Feminist Press for the gifted ARC! This book was published in the US on April 7, 2026.
When I picked up No!, I thought it was more generally about complaining. When I realized Ahmed focused on formal complaint processes, I worried the book might not be for me. I was amazingly wrong.
This book utterly blew me open. Ahmed begins from the complaint that changed her own life, after her university’s failure to respond to sexual harassment led her to leave both her position and her profession. From there, she turns complaint into a method: a way of seeing institutions, power, compliance, and the machinery that perpetuates harm while making the people who name it seem like the problem.
Ahmed understands that complaints are not just paperwork. They are testimony, refusal, grief, survival, and sometimes the beginning of activism. She shows how institutions make complaints disappear by exhausting the people who make them, redirecting them into informal processes, warning them about impact to their reputations, branding them as disloyal, or treating their complaining as cruelty. The complaint process becomes another site of harm, another way power teaches people what they are allowed to say and what they are expected to endure.
What makes No! so powerful is Ahmed’s insistence that complaint is not failure. It is feminist, queer, abolitionist, and pro-survivor work. Complaints help us find comrades. They reveal what institutions try to hide. They teach us that saying no can be a practice of living with ourselves.
This is one of the most politically clarifying books I have ever read. I’m better for having read it. You should read it, too.
Content Note: Please note that on page 165, Ahmed critically quotes another person and the quote contains a use of the R slur.
📖 Read this if you love: Feminist and abolitionist political nonfiction; institutional critique and survivor-centered praxis; books that interrogate power, bureaucracy, and social conditioning; or politically clarifying books that put language to experiences of institutional harm and retaliation.
🔑 Key Themes: Complaint as Political Resistance, Institutional Power and Administrative Violence, Silence and Retaliation, Bureaucracy and Exhaustion, Whistleblowing and Solidarity, Power and Compliance.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Sexual Harassment (severe), Ableism (severe), Misogyny (moderate), Sexism (moderate), Fire (minor), Sexual Assault (minor), Pandemic (minor), Racism (minor), Bullying (minor), Transphobia (minor), Genocide (minor), War (minor), Suicide (minor), Police Violence (minor).
April 11, 2026
“The doors that keep so much in the shadows are used by institutions, and some people in them, to obscure what is being done and by whom. There is a profound investment in things remaining unclear. But this lack of clarity can be superficial. When workplace abuses come out, it is common for people to say it was ‘an open secret.’ An open secret is information that people know without it ever being officially disclosed. Some people manage to protect abusers by keeping that abuse as secret from themselves as they possibly can, doing their best not to know the full extent of it. That's how people can be shocked by a Weinstein while participating in the very culture that created him. When
‘important men’ are brought down, it becomes clear that power does not reside in just one person, magically, as a possession, It becomes clear that every Weinstein has an army of assistants, giving that person access to other people whose careers are made dependent on saying yes. We learn that those who said no, who refused or complained, were likely silenced by another army, including of lawyers, through secret deals, sealed by NDAs. The more other people invest in a person, the more power that person acquires, but a power that can appear distributed or even diffused. To be important is to be protected on other people's behalf.
Some people stop themselves from going down because many other people would go down with them. Institutions might justity Protecting that person as a form of damage control. That's a term typically used in emergency situations. A ship might be at risk of sinking perhaps as a result of a rupture of a pipe or hull below the waterline. You stop the ship from going down by locking off the damaged area from the ship's other compartments. That's where the data of complaint ends up, in the locked-off area. Actor and activist Amber Heard offers an illuminating description of a powerful man as a ship, ‘like the Titanic.’ She explains, ‘That ship is a huge enterprise. When it strikes an iceberg, there are a lot of people on board desperate to patch up holes-not because they believe in or even care about the ship, but because their own fates depend on the enterprise.’ An institution can be that ship, sometimes easily confused with a person. Some people keep themselves afloat, doing what they are asked to do, patching up this hole or that, to stop themselves from sinking, the whole thing from sinking, issuing the same warnings they've received.”
‘important men’ are brought down, it becomes clear that power does not reside in just one person, magically, as a possession, It becomes clear that every Weinstein has an army of assistants, giving that person access to other people whose careers are made dependent on saying yes. We learn that those who said no, who refused or complained, were likely silenced by another army, including of lawyers, through secret deals, sealed by NDAs. The more other people invest in a person, the more power that person acquires, but a power that can appear distributed or even diffused. To be important is to be protected on other people's behalf.
Some people stop themselves from going down because many other people would go down with them. Institutions might justity Protecting that person as a form of damage control. That's a term typically used in emergency situations. A ship might be at risk of sinking perhaps as a result of a rupture of a pipe or hull below the waterline. You stop the ship from going down by locking off the damaged area from the ship's other compartments. That's where the data of complaint ends up, in the locked-off area. Actor and activist Amber Heard offers an illuminating description of a powerful man as a ship, ‘like the Titanic.’ She explains, ‘That ship is a huge enterprise. When it strikes an iceberg, there are a lot of people on board desperate to patch up holes-not because they believe in or even care about the ship, but because their own fates depend on the enterprise.’ An institution can be that ship, sometimes easily confused with a person. Some people keep themselves afloat, doing what they are asked to do, patching up this hole or that, to stop themselves from sinking, the whole thing from sinking, issuing the same warnings they've received.”
August 14, 2026
This is a great book about how institutional complaint/grievance policies and procedures can result in actual, legitimate complaints being stifled, shut down, and stopped. Sara Ahmed focuses on complaints about racism, sexual harassment and assault, bullying, and anti-LGBTQ discrimination here, especially in (but not limited to) academic institutions. She suggests that in many cases, if not all, DEI committees and complaint procedures are there to protect the institution from accusations that they aren't doing anything about harassment, assault, and bullying, and that they also provide a way to avoid *actually doing something.* Having a policy is different from actually following it, but even following policy can stifle change if it retraumatizes the victim, isolates the victim from other people who may be sympathetic or who may have also experienced the same thing, and if the policy prevents other people from knowing about the kinds of complaints people are bringing against an institution. Her observations are detailed and precise, and she has a wonderful way of using metaphor to express what she sees happening. Very readable if you're interested in reading institutional criticism. Includes endnotes and "A Complainer's Survival Kit," and "A Complaint Curriculum" at the end.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
“Behind many disasters are unheard complaints”
Complaining tends to have a negative connotation, but without complaints, how do we enact change? Sara Ahmed’s new book No! The Art and Activism of Complaining (out April 7, 2026) compiles personal experience, research, and anecdotes of complaints, who hears those complaints, what happens or doesn’t happen afterwards, and how we can use complaints as resistance.
I especially loved the discussion of who is “allowed” to make complaints. You can probably guess what kind of person is listened to and taken seriously by institutions, and which demographic of person is labeled a “troublemaker” and is punished for making complaints. Ahmed explores this in detail and how institutions routinely try to silence these voices and how we can collectively rise against this.
I’m so excited to keep exploring Ahmed’s work. The way she’s able to approach a single topic from so many different intersectional angles took what could have been a short essay, into a really complex and nuanced exploration. Everyone should read this. We need to keep complaining.
Thank you to Feminist Press for my e-arc!
Complaining tends to have a negative connotation, but without complaints, how do we enact change? Sara Ahmed’s new book No! The Art and Activism of Complaining (out April 7, 2026) compiles personal experience, research, and anecdotes of complaints, who hears those complaints, what happens or doesn’t happen afterwards, and how we can use complaints as resistance.
I especially loved the discussion of who is “allowed” to make complaints. You can probably guess what kind of person is listened to and taken seriously by institutions, and which demographic of person is labeled a “troublemaker” and is punished for making complaints. Ahmed explores this in detail and how institutions routinely try to silence these voices and how we can collectively rise against this.
I’m so excited to keep exploring Ahmed’s work. The way she’s able to approach a single topic from so many different intersectional angles took what could have been a short essay, into a really complex and nuanced exploration. Everyone should read this. We need to keep complaining.
Thank you to Feminist Press for my e-arc!
Read
April 2, 2026Thank you to Feminist Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review 💕 Does a book about complaining need to be almost 300 pgs? yes. yes it does 😌. Sara Ahmed is a Pakistani feminist from the UK who wrote this book after finding herself to be the "feminist ear" to women around her in work place and academia who found themselves fighting to say no 🤬
From out right harassment to micro aggression of every kind, Ahmed leaves almost no stone unturned. What I loved was the extensive illustrations of how intersectionality determines how No can be exploited. While [white] women are in many cases whistleblowers of institutional abuses, women of color always face extra repercussions to standing up in the face of adversity. Ahmed gives examples of institutions of all kinds that use complaints by the victim to spin a facade of inclusiveness, DEI, EDI or whatever word they deem hot (until they drop it ala Target 2025)
Complaining is the initiation of a chain of events that lead to change in only a fraction of the instances. Most complaints never make it out of the room where the complaint was made, instead being filed, erased or ✌️forgotten✌️ (finger air quotes) at the behest of the new "victim " because 🤧 Boohoo how will the white person ever move on from racist accusations after commiting themselves to the company for so long? can't anyone take a joke anymore? 😒 (excuse me while I scream and pull my hair out)
My one thing I wanted more of was Art. While a few small mentions of Art as complaint and activism was mentioned, we could have easily had another 50 pages of leteral ART to explore all these concepts in visual format. Still a slay. 💅
From out right harassment to micro aggression of every kind, Ahmed leaves almost no stone unturned. What I loved was the extensive illustrations of how intersectionality determines how No can be exploited. While [white] women are in many cases whistleblowers of institutional abuses, women of color always face extra repercussions to standing up in the face of adversity. Ahmed gives examples of institutions of all kinds that use complaints by the victim to spin a facade of inclusiveness, DEI, EDI or whatever word they deem hot (until they drop it ala Target 2025)
Complaining is the initiation of a chain of events that lead to change in only a fraction of the instances. Most complaints never make it out of the room where the complaint was made, instead being filed, erased or ✌️forgotten✌️ (finger air quotes) at the behest of the new "victim " because 🤧 Boohoo how will the white person ever move on from racist accusations after commiting themselves to the company for so long? can't anyone take a joke anymore? 😒 (excuse me while I scream and pull my hair out)
My one thing I wanted more of was Art. While a few small mentions of Art as complaint and activism was mentioned, we could have easily had another 50 pages of leteral ART to explore all these concepts in visual format. Still a slay. 💅
July 9, 2026
I fear this book is just not for me, I think I was just expecting more like meta analysis/deeper discourse analysis, not just like we should complain more(yes I agree 100%) with every so often getting spoon fed the main point shes getting at centered in bold and spaced out. I feel like the latter just confuses me as an artistic choice because I'm like nono I got that, I understand what your saying because I just read this, I'm following.
Feels a little like some editors note from a zoomer who needs to be reminded every 5 seconds the point of the text. Like a tiktok movie summary.
I've read peer reviewed journals she's written in the past and I think I was just expecting more of that.
Feels a little like some editors note from a zoomer who needs to be reminded every 5 seconds the point of the text. Like a tiktok movie summary.
I've read peer reviewed journals she's written in the past and I think I was just expecting more of that.
May 13, 2026
3.5 rounded up. This book is an important one. It brought perspective to a lot of moments in my life. My main complaint (based on my own needs as a reader) is the format. I know lots of others won't care: it felt a bit all over the place and repetitive at times. Which made it hard for me to follow. I would still read it again because I do think the content is important and well-researched.
Thank you, Netgalley and Tantor Media for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review
Thank you, Netgalley and Tantor Media for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review
Did Not Finish
April 19, 2026I would have preferred this as a long-form article instead of a book. Important concepts, but all over the place. DNF.
May 13, 2026
Read the first five chapters. Brilliant. triggered some trauma of me. But also gets repetitive in some chapters...
May 20, 2026
Sara Ahmed. Nothing more needs said.
June 8, 2026
Sara is always a guiding light
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews