Shadow of My Shadow

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.

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.