The Bureau of Thalassic Complaints
FAQs
What is a complaint?
A complaint is the surfacing of what is deeply wrong underneath. It emerges from the abyssal depths after a long series of violences have been suffered, for example, by beaked whales who cannot bear the throb and boom of naval military sonar any longer. A pod of beaked whales beaching themselves is a complaint that is also a lament.
What does a complaint do?
A complaint resists the grinding reification that the world must be always a steady thrum of violences. Enacting resistance is not limited to mammals. “If a complaint is a little bird scratching away at something,” Sara Ahmed writes in “Complaint as a Queer Method,” then “a complaint is trying to create an almost/nest in a hostile environment.” Underwater, an almost/nest may be where a seahorse shelters, or tries to, amid the anchors of superyachts harrowing a posidonia meadow.
Who can make a complaint?
Complaints are not only made by individual little seabirds scratching away at institutional injustice. Exasperated oysters and aggrieved anchovies, corals against the climate crisis, and any macroalgae wishing to protest microplastics may submit a complaint.* Pods, flotillas, schools, shoals, shivers, swarms, tangles, troupes, and algal assemblages may propose collective complaints.
*Although the Bureau focuses mainly on marine organisms, when certain humans are treated as if they were an invasive species while traversing the sea, the Bureau will register—and amplify—their complaints.
What is a Bureau?
“A government agency for a government that does not yet exist,” as the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division explains, may be counter-imagined as a bureau. Bureaucracy, in this rare instance, becomes an eco-transfeminist dream. At last, short-snouted seahorses set the agenda for gender policies. Finally, the rayed Mediterranean limpet has a say in coastal development planning processes. As the organigram of the Bureau shows, there are no executive positions within thalassic interdependency.
What is thalassic?
From the Greek word θάλασσα [sea], this adjective adjoins the pelagic but is closer, cozier, touched by us on all sides. Thalassic waters are subject to everything washed away from designated shores. Both the concentration of marine pollutants and the regime of pushbacks, therefore, pertain to the thalassic.
Where is the thalassic located?
Although any inland or smaller sea may be considered thalassic, the Bureau is located in the Mediterranean due to the intensity of complaints in this area.
When is the Bureau open?
The working hours of the Bureau reflect the schedule of its stakeholders, including nocturnal Mediterranean slipper lobsters. The Bureau is therefore always open, spans three time zones, and conducts outreach programs at benthic depths.
How can a complaint be submitted to the Bureau?
Complaints may be clicked, waved, sung, radiated, drifted, inked, finned, cried, or washed ashore. In intertidal zones, complaints may also be left for review by ebb.
What happens once a complaint is registered by the Bureau?
Once the complaint has dried, it is packed in salt and sent to a panel of diverse marine organisms that decides upon a course of action.
What have been past outcomes of complaints registered by the Bureau?
Recently, swarms of jellyfish blockaded nuclear plants on the coast of France. By barricading shallow waters suffering from eutrophication, various algal blooms have deterred overtourism. Increasingly, corals have been halting the production of their colors: bleached reefs indicate a general strike. As Jenny Marketou records, the waters around the Greek industrial city of Elefsina issued their own manifesto to declare their rights. And perhaps most famously, orcas around the Iberian Peninsula have undertaken a campaign to protest overfishing, unsafe living conditions, and incursions of vessels; through creative direct action, blocs of orcas attacked sailboats with large rudders. (No humans were killed during this global publicity campaign.) “What can we learn from the orca,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “about the sad farce of human domination?”
Why was the Bureau created?
A little bird scratching away at injustices is one of Sara Ahmed’s more hopeful figures for complaint as a queer feminist practice. The Bureau of Thalassic Complaints is based on the idea that what Ahmed calls “complaint collectives” could migrate from intersectional transfeminism to interspecies ecofeminism. If this form of resistance can emerge in a human landscape of offices and universities, why not in a seascape, where bivalves are hard at work cleaning polluted bays and schools of fish navigate ever-warming waters? The Bureau of Thalassic Complaints is a counter-imagining of what might happen if we actually had to listen to voices from the sea.
INSPIRATIONS
Ahmed S., Complaint!, Duke University Press, 2021.
–. “Complaint as a Queer Method.” Feminist Killjoys, 24 March 2022.
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.
Gumbs A.P., Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, AK Press, 2020.
Marketou J., Mystery 42 Futuring Waters: A Speculative Manifesto For and From the Water of Elefsina, Eleusis 2023 European Capital of Culture, 2023.
Riga, E., ed. Office of Hydrocommons, ATOPOS, 2024.
Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of After Sappho, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in Political Fiction, the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction, and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction In 2025, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.