How Close Do We Want to Get to Our Students?

In 2007, Jennifer Doyle broke an appointment with a performance artist named Adrian Howells. Howells’s artworks often consisted of intense one-on-one interactions, which he called “accelerated intimacy.” Doyle had booked a time slot for his artwork Held, in which individual audience members took turns drinking tea with the artist, then holding hands with him, and finally spooning with him in a bedroom for twenty minutes. But Doyle had inadvertently double-booked her day. She was midway through a treatment at a hair salon when she realized it would be impossible to meet Howells at the designated time. Later, when she brought cookies to the artist as an apology, she found herself in tears.

This personal story anchors the first chapter of Doyle’s 2013 monograph Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Howells (who died by suicide in 2014) appears again toward the beginning of Doyle’s newest book, Shadow of My Shadow, where she recounts a public dialogue she conducted with the artist several years after their missed connection in London. Doyle’s recollection of their conversation focuses on the “collapse of work and self, of public and private selves,” that made his art practice challenging for him as well as for his audiences. His deliberate attention, care, and vulnerability gave Doyle, an English professor at the University of California at Riverside, “permission to acknowledge the limits and failures of the way I had been thinking, and to think again from those failures, to work them through.” She writes that he “made me want to translate that into my work — meaning, it made me want to create a similar experience for the reader and for my students.”

What could it mean to enact — in writing and, perhaps more daringly, in teaching and advising — such challenging and intimate encounters? What might be the risks of cultivating such interactions in one’s academic work? Doyle confronts these questions in Shadow of My Shadow, a series of linked essays whose subjects include Freud’s theory of paranoia, the disgraced gymnastics doctor and sexual abuser Larry Nassar, and the role of molestation in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. The essays all grow out of the same harrowing personal experience: Fifteen years ago, Doyle was stalked and harassed by a graduate student she was advising. The saga’s details unfold in Shadow of My Shadow’s second chapter, which serves as its narrative core. After fielding a series of unsettling emails and blog comments, all of them anonymous, Doyle begins receiving romantically tinged emails directly from this student. When confronted, the student, identified here as N, insists that Doyle is “not expressing [her] true feelings.” Then comes the mysterious bouquet of roses and the suggestive follow-up email that seems to quote private messages between Doyle and a recent ex. Doyle files complaints with the local police precinct and with the university’s Title IX office. The harassment escalates, the Title IX process deems Doyle’s complaint “supported,” and N has to leave the Riverside graduate program.

For reasons still not entirely clear, the university’s student-conduct office then decides to hold a new hearing. Faculty committee members there scrutinize Doyle’s teaching and research, her blog posts and essays, and her syllabi and scholarship for possible indications of Doyle’s own “sexual misconduct.” Even other students’ coursework becomes potential evidence that Doyle “sexualiz[ed] the classroom”: for instance, male students in a queer-studies seminar “had designed a speculative cruising map for the city … imagining who you might find where.” This second committee finds N “not responsible” for stalking or harassing Doyle. The dean of students soon overturns that decision, putting an end to the campus-procedural story. But the questions provoked by this upsetting chain of events are not as easily set to rest. Instead, they go on to shape Doyle’s research, influencing the questions she pursues but also leading her to “scrub [her] writing of the personal voice that otherwise characterized [her] work.”

This impulse is not surprising: For stalking victims, public exposure of any kind can feel unbearably perilous. But Doyle’s decision to make her work sound and feel less personal came at a cost. Her writing style — introspective, narrative, occasionally informal — had always been an important part of her work, and it linked her to a lineage of queer theorists who sought to defy norms of scholarly distance. In Shadow of My Shadow, Doyle aims at “drawing that person back onto the page” by adding autobiographical and personal elements to her own older pieces of research, linking them to the story of the harassment and the convoluted procedures that followed — all in the name of “stitch[ing] my relationship to my work back together,” like Wendy Darling reconnecting Peter Pan to his renegade shadow. The resulting book, taken as a whole, is reminiscent of those novels about scholars that incorporate large portions of the main character’s academic work, arrayed within a character-driven framework that lets the scholarship do double duty as a form of allegory.

For all the intrigue of the inciting events, Doyle refuses to cast N as an enemy or to depict herself as an aggrieved victim. The chapter after the stalking story builds on an inspired rereading of Freud to explore the ways paranoia can infect all members of a stalking scenario, even blurring some distinctions between perpetrator and victim. N was spinning a paranoid fantasy in which Doyle was sending coded messages through her own and others’ writing, but Doyle, for her part, was also being “driven to paranoia by workplace betrayals,” such as the hearing at which other faculty examined her syllabi and decided N had not harassed her. N sent her friends to secretly record Doyle; Doyle spent hours listening to a recording of N’s final hearing, which included covert recordings of Doyle’s own voice being played back as evidence. N’s actions were obviously inappropriate, yet they can also be seen as an extreme escalation of attitudes that most professors would welcome: a passionate engagement with textual analysis and a readiness to bring one’s whole self to a pedagogical enounter.

In thinking through how the boundaries between teacher and student could be so catastrophically breached, Doyle does not assume that the default boundaries of the contemporary workplace — which sees all sexed or gendered dynamics as properly external — are the right ones, either to promote scholarly inquiry or to protect anyone from harassment. Building on Marxist-feminist accounts of socially reproductive labor and off-the-clock care work, Doyle instead proposes that the problem of sexual harassment is inextricable from capitalism’s disavowal of the sexed and gendered forces present in any job. Workplace harassment, she argues, can only be fully understood once we bring to light “the sexual dimension of labor and all forms of labor relations.”

Doyle’s proposal that we understand educational institutions first and foremost as workplaces is a useful one. How do employment-related norms and regulations, and the disavowals and denials that shape them, structure relationships between professors and other parts of the academic workplace — students, yes, but also administrators, colleagues, the institution itself, and the values and desires that secure one’s attachment to the profession? This question acquires extra urgency now, amid small-college shutdowns, attacks on tenure and academic freedom, dwindling faculty governance, and expanding administrations. Here, too, Doyle depicts no predictable heroes or villains: Arguably the worst institutional decision in her stalking case came from a faculty committee, and its reversal resulted from the office staff’s appeal to a dean.

Shadow of My Shadow does not claim to be a manual for reforming Title IX, but it is driven by, among other things, a quest to understand why the operations of Title IX and related systems are so often unsatisfying and why their promises go largely unrealized. Doyle seeks ambitious and transformational models of teaching and advising, and she shows how the reality and the idea of harassment threatens such models. Harassment, she writes, “makes the idea of loving your job, loving your students, and loving, even, the school at which you work into a foolishness or, worse, an obscenity.” This book is an attempt to think and write her way back into at least some of these forms of love.

One can take Doyle’s quest seriously while noting how it might hit differently for younger scholars, who came of age being told that their workplaces will never love them back. Early in Shadow of My Shadow, Doyle discusses “Mourning and Militancy,” a 1989 essay by the late writer and curator Douglas Crimp that is now a classic text of AIDS activism. Doyle cites Crimp to help explain the way “much of queer theory’s initial momentum” in the 1980s and ’90s “was derived from the need to describe the compound forms of grief specific to the AIDS crisis.” In addition, she brings up Crimp’s assertion that AIDS killed off not just friends and lovers and neighbors, but also “a culture of sexual possibility: back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses, and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes.” Crimp writes of a younger man’s wistful yearning to know what somebody else’s cum tasted like: “For men now in their twenties,” he says, “our sexual ideal is mostly just that — an ideal, the cum never swallowed.”

Crimp and his generation feel the loss of that sexual utopia more keenly, because they lived it. Doyle does not discuss Crimp’s reflections on this generational gap, but her call for “surfacing the sexual dimension of labor” in the workplace, for all its intellectual and political promise, brings to mind a similar divide. To Doyle, who went to grad school in the queer-theory heyday of the 1990s, the idea of pointing out the sexual dynamics active in one’s academic workplace might sound like a plausible means of reimagining the university as a site of gender justice. To junior scholars in today’s precarious conditions, especially scholars working in feminist, queer, and/or racialized areas of study, the same idea might sound more like a good way to jeopardize one’s professional survival. Recognizing that distinction can help scholars of multiple generations better understand what has been lost, and how that loss feels to our colleagues.

A grievable golden age of community and communion — more intellectual than overtly sexual, but decidedly queer — haunts Shadow of My Shadow. This pays off affectingly in the book’s conclusion, where Doyle writes at length about her relationship to the pioneering queer studies scholar Eve Sedgwick and research she conducted in Sedgwick’s archives. Doyle worked with Sedgwick as a doctoral student at Duke, and the two kept in touch until Sedgwick’s death from cancer in 2009. In Doyle’s telling, Sedgwick was a warm and open adviser, and she prided herself on not patrolling too vigorously the boundary between her personal and professional selves: on having a life, as Sedgwick wrote in A Dialogue on Love, “where work and love are impossible to tell apart.”

“She had us over to her house all the time,” Doyle recalls. “Sometimes we watched TV, cooked for each other, worked at a craft table.” Sedgwick’s students seem to have benefited greatly from this hospitality and warmth. Yet Doyle wonders whether such an approach to teaching and advising is still viable, especially for faculty whose fields of inquiry turn even their syllabi and blog posts into cause for suspicion.

In “Mourning and Militancy,” Crimp suggests that acknowledging the strength of grief can make its energies more available for creative endeavors. Similarly, acknowledging that academia (or one’s life in it) has changed, in ways that could make pedagogical closeness more fraught, may give rise to other forms of connection. 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.