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Shadow of My Shadow

Book

Pages: 184

Published: August 2024

Subjects
Gender and Sexuality > Feminism and Women’s Studies, Theory and Philosophy > Queer Theory, American Studies

Over the course of two years, Jennifer Doyle filed multiple harassment complaints with her campus’s Title IX office and one with the Department of Labor. Her experiences with these complaints and how they subsequently impacted her life have led to this book, Shadow of My Shadow. Doyle tells her personal story, sharing how she lost her sense of voice, felt exposed at work, became distrustful of students and colleagues, and was consumed by grief. Working across autobiography, literary criticism, an analysis of the Larry Nassar Title IX case, and a larger institutional critique of harassment administration, Doyle shows that harassment is at once intimate, dynamic, and intensely social, flourishing in neglected social spaces. In her own case, it profoundly reshaped her relationship to her work, her writing, and ultimately to herself. As Doyle explains, the experience drew out the distance between herself in the world and herself on the page. This book is her effort to understand and repair that breach and to consider how loss and grief can be sources of insight and compassion.

Praise

“Jennifer Doyle’s Shadow of My Shadow rigorously inhabits and analyzes places that many of us feel averse to but that structure and shape our institutions and sometimes our greater lives. The result is a probing, risk-taking, distinctive study that aids its readers in better understanding ‘complaint pathology and the paranoid character of nearly all discourse about harassment’ and helps us fathom ‘what we lose when harassment ecologies consume us’—and what we might gain by living elsewise.” - Maggie Nelson, author of Like Love: Essays and Conversations

“Shadow of My Shadow sets a new bar for autotheory. A patient, granular dismantling of the chilling relations between work, sex, and institutions—and of their systemic disavowal. With her signature generosity of thought, unflinching attention to difficult details, and riveting writing that is at turns revelatory and crushing, Jennifer Doyle has crafted a stunning, exquisite work.” - Jasbir K. Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability

"In Shadow of My Shadow, Doyle gracefully combines personal and scholarly modes of writing in order to confront the difficulties that come with a commitment to deeply transformative teaching and advising. And she shows how productive it can be to build one’s writing around that very commitment, sparking encounters that leave all participants — students, readers, and the writer’s own self — different from who they were before." - Sara Marcus, Chronicle of Higher Education

"Bringing these official documents and her own experiences into conversation with thinkers like Sedgwick underscores the futility of Title IX as an instrument for combatting sexual assault and harassment on college campuses." - Colin Lavery, Full Stop

"Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals." - V. Dawkins, Choice

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, also published by Duke University Press, and Campus Sex, Campus Security.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. On the Distances Between Us 9
2. A Pain in the Neck 26
3. The Case of Paranoia 52
4. Harassment and the Privileges of Unknowing: The Case of Larry Nassar 78
5. Alethurgy’s Shadows: Truth-Telling between Women in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels 100
Conclusion 123
Notes 137
Bibliography 153
Index 167

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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