The Cancellers

On complaints and other stories about cancel culture

The first time I heard about cheese rolling races was when I read they’d been cancelled. Here’s a headline, “Cheese Rolling race axed after 200 years: thanks to Health and Safety Killjoys.” The story is framed as the cancellation of an age-old tradition. Read the fine print and you will learn that the event was cancelled by the organisers because the previous year attendance was three times more than expected and they wanted to avoid another logistical nightmare.

The story becomes about cancel culture by changing the object from event to tradition.

When cancel culture creates an object, a subject quickly follows.

In this instance, the cancellers are “health and safety killjoys.” Cancellers are often called killjoys, shadowy or not-so-shadowy figures lurking behind other people’s misfortune. As I noted in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, with reference to cheese rolling races amongst other examples, the figure of the killjoy often functions as a character diagnosis: as if they are trying to stop us from enjoying ourselves, because they are miserable. The “kill” in “killjoy” is negative but also extreme. So too is the “cancel” in “cancel culture,” as if the motivation behind a critique of something is to bring an end to something because it is held dear by someone else. It creates quite a picture.

The point can be in the picture; cancel culture as crossing out so much, crossing out other people, their speech; crossing out our culture, our history.

Once “cancel culture” has acquired its form so much that happens is folded into it. And so, it expands. He lost his job after an enquiry was held about professional or sexual misconduct: cancel culture! That event was postponed due to security concerns: cancel culture! Give a history of British empire not as a happy story of railways, language and law: cancel culture! Talk about how racism is deflected by, or reduced to, hurt feelings: cancel culture! Talk about pregnant people in recognition that not everyone who gets pregnant identifies as a woman: cancel culture!

Who can forget Rishi Sunak’s comments, “We want to confront this left-handed culture that seems to want to cancel our history, our values, our women.” That the argument that women are being cancelled is expressed with an old sexist possessive (“our women”) tells us something we need to know. What is cancelled (or what is claimed to have been cancelled) is given the status of property. All you have to do is use gender inclusive language to address some people sometimes to be understood as trying to take away something. And then, as we have learnt, they will use the law or policy to force you back into the same old M or F boxes of hetero-cis-patriarchy. Even when you are forced back into those boxes, that you dared use different words to catch more of our complexity will still be used as evidence of cancel culture.

Cancel culture is not just a story told from a certain point of view, it is how we don’t hear about other stories. As I observed in an earlier post, “Hounded” an story off-told by the media is that “gender critical” academics have been “hounded out of their jobs” by “vexatious complaints” or protests about transphobia. You probably will not read about how “gender critical”* feminists have organised collectively to take out formal grievances against colleagues who speak out in support of trans rights. This has led to so much silencing that is not spoken of. One lecturer who had a complaint made against her by a “gender critical” colleague, backed by a network of “gender critical” academics explains, “In many ways, they have silenced me. The stress placed on me during the grievance process and the fears I felt for my job security have meant that I have since kept quiet. I have stopped speaking out in support of trans rights in my workplace. I have also retreated within the workplace in general.” Another academic wrote to me about what happened after her “gender critical colleague” resigned. A right-wing paper made a claim that “was not substantiated except through tips from ‘anonymous sources’” that she had forced her colleague out. And so, she received “another barrage of abuse.” She ended up leaving her job. Where was the article saying she was cancelled? There wasn’t one.

When those who are publicly represented as cancelled have their voices amplified (and not just on their cancellation tours), those who are publicly represented as cancellers often have to struggle to be represented at all. A struggle for representation is then treated as cancel culture, derided as “woke,” a term that functions rather like the killjoy to dismiss change as imposed from the outside. You will be called woke if you wear a rainbow flag, have pronouns in your bio, use colour-blind casting on a miniseries, entertain the possibility of a fictional character such as James Bond being played by a Black actor or not being portrayed as a “womaniser” or include disabled people and same-sex partnerships on a ballroom dancing show on the BBC.

Just let Bond be Bond: you can hear that plea in the panic of headlines such as “If James Bond has gone woke, he might as well be cancelled.”

Woke is not simply used wherever or whenever there is a change to, or widening of, a social convention, but because it pathologizes the sources of change. Hostility is redirected not only to changes themselves, whether it is new policies on sexual harassment, new words or ways of speaking about our identities, new fields of study (such as Gender Studies and critical race theory) or new formats to programmes, but to those judged to be the cause of them. One Conservative politician described “wokeism” as how activists are given power over institutions by forcing their leaders to “fight endless fires of grievance, stifling freedom, embittering the workplace and sowing division.” The anti-woke use woke as a counter-complaint, a complaint about complaints, those mischievous minorities with their minor grievances.

In my previous post, I explored how complaints are increasingly weaponised, made against those who are saying no to institutions, pointing to their complicity in violence including genocide. But there are further complications. Many counter-complaints treat complaints within the workplace as already weaponised (“stifling freedom”). All you have to do to be told you are trying to cancel someone is to describe their conduct as harassment or bullying. Hence many complaints are folded right back into the thing called cancel culture.

When cancel culture becomes the story, you will hear much nostalgia, some of it anticipatory, for what has been lost or will be lost. Take the recent piece, “I miss the great philosophers” by Kathleen Stock. Writing about the death of the philosopher John Searle, Stock remarks, “he would be presented with a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment at Berkeley, where he had taught for most of his life. A petition, signed by thousands of alumnae, would see him stripped of his emeritus professor status. He died last month in a care home. According to a former colleague, Searle ‘never recovered’ from the reputational loss.” It is a curious use of tense, to frame what did happen, which is, of course, Searle’s frame as well as that of his associates and colleagues, as what would happen. What would happen if instead of holding onto that frame we listened to the women who complained? It just takes a small amount of actual research to learn there were multiple complaints made by women students about sexual harassment by Searle over his long career. Maybe if Stock was not so busy missing great philosophers, anticipating the loss of so much brilliance, big brains, what a big theory he had, she might not have missed that many women are likely no longer at the university, doing the work they would have done but for what he kept doing.

We do not know how many said no. We do not know how many are missing.

This is an old patriarchal idea: that there are some great intellectuals who in order to reach their greatness must be given the time and space to express themselves however they so wish.

And by however they mean however.

Complaints about harassment or bullying are often treated as stifling freedom of expression. And even physical and sexual assaults are treated as styles or manners of expression. An example from my research: a head of department physically assaulted Mia, a senior lecturer; she had been trying to leave a meeting after he began shouting at her. Mia complained. He was described in the report that followed as having “a direct style of management.” A vice can be turned into virtue by mere description, being physically violent treated as blunt speech, a rather efficient form of communication. Hence there is nothing mere about description. The head of department kept his post and position. Mia was called uncollegial and was told to leave.

The cancellers can be told to leave or made to leave and still be called cancellers.

Some people’s complaints are already framed as cancel culture, as if made with the intent to restrict or narrow other people’s freedom of expression. That’s why it’s not uncommon to hear of serial abusers described as “quirky” or “eccentric.” Sexual harassment can even be turned into a kind of social rebellion, a refusal to comply with policies and mandates. I observed in some of my early blog posts that many feminist campaigns against sexual harassment are framed as “moralism.”

Take one article, which lists a number of people who had been disciplined for being “unwanted or uncooperative critics” of institutions because of “after-hours recreations or of political convictions.” In this list, a person who kept her job despite having a complaint about sexual harassment upheld against her is casually positioned next to a Palestinian academic left unemployed after a university used complaints about his criticisms of Israel to justify a withdrawal of a job offer.

Sexual harassers are positioned (or position themselves) as if they are critics of institutions rather than abusers of the power given to them by institutions.

Many who have complaints against them frame those complaints as “they’re out to get me.” An example: multiple complaints were made against a lecturer for sexual assault, domestic violence and sexual harassment. Despite the number and severity of the allegations, he was able to convince many of his colleagues that he was being unfairly targeted. I spoke informally to some of the women who made these complaints. A professor, Jules, said, “His narrative was apparently that he was being accused of making sexist comments and the ‘feminazis’ were out to get him.” Terms such as ‘feminazis’ will be familiar to feminists. We only need to consider how quickly #MeToo was framed in this way, as a persecution of innocent men by a feminist mob wielding power through accusation.

What was striking about this case was how his colleagues, including feminist colleagues, were convinced by his claim. Jules, a woman professor, said that many of those colleagues wrote reference letters to support him although “they had no idea of what he was being accused of other than what he offered up to them as his own narrative.” We might assume feminists wrote letters on his behalf because that is what good colleagues do. So many complaints are stopped not because people are obeying an external order from hostile management but because of what they have internalised under the guise of institutional virtue. Simply put, you learn that being a good colleague means not complaining about colleagues. We heard in Mia’s story how complaining about a colleague, even after being assaulted by a colleague, can warrant being called uncollegial.

Even if some colleagues wrote him letters of support because that’s what good colleagues do, I think there was more going on. The lecturer’s own explanation that complaints were used to discipline him for minor transgressions (such as how was speaking) could easily be turned into a story of being disciplined by the institution itself (and not just the “feminazis”). Feminist colleagues who had “no idea of what he was accused of” might have found that story of an institution “out to get him” rather more convincing because of their own experience of being targeted for speaking out or because they know institutions can and do target people for speaking out.

That complaints are weaponised can be used to mask institutional complicity with violence. We could call this masking, the weaponisation of the weaponisation of complaints.

It can be hard to tell the difference between those who are disciplined by institutions for dissidence and those who pass themselves off as being so. It is not hard to understand how this can happen given complaints are mostly made behind closed doors, kept secret, hush, hush. When the complaint apparatus comes alive, that technical and communication network, with so many calling in, old favours, old debts, phone calls, letters, buzz, buzz, that too mostly happens in secret.

Buzz, buzz; hush; hush.

Hence it is hard to see complicity.

It is not hard to see who has power within institutions, who can open and close the doors, controlling access to resources. But when those who abuse the power given to them by institutions pass themselves off as being disciplined by them, power itself is obscured.

Power works by making it unclear who has it.

That sentence is a killjoy truth from No is Not a Lonely Utterance.

Another function of cancel culture is to obscure how power works. There is a reversal not just of power but position. Those called cancellers by that or some other name are stopped from speaking mostly because of who or what their speech implicates. And so, so many are stopped from speaking about institutional complicity in Israeli genocide; stopped from challenging how the state enforces the sex binary as a condition for accessing services or for membership in a civil society, stopped from addressing abuses of power by those given power by institutions, to mention just some examples.