Shadow of My Shadow – Jennifer Doyle

[Duke University Press; 2024]

Opening the pages of Jennifer Doyle’s Shadow of My Shadow, I was incredibly nervous—unsure if I was ready to confront a vivid, raw account of sexual harassment on a college campus. Like Doyle, I had been stalked on a college campus and had come face-to-face with the inadequacies of the Title IX process. I had moved past it, maybe without moving on from it, and was afraid to see what might come from extended academic and personal reflection on my own experience. 

This is not Doyle’s first time writing about sexual harassment and how it impacts campus politics. Campus Sex, Campus Security, a slim pamphlet in MIT’s Semiotext(e) series, was released in 2015, but it’s much broader in scope and less personal than Shadow of My Shadow. While Campus Sex considers the now topical issue of campus protest and police suppression in relation to sexual harassment jurisprudence, Shadow of My Shadow focuses solely on sexual harassment, and the mechanisms—psychological, institutional, and linguistic—that we use to confront it. 

Structurally, Shadow of My Shadow is not dissimilar to the clunky logic that can be found in academic books. The essays that comprise the book’s five chapters don’t flow together like a memoir, and the personal reflections are not presented chronologically, perhaps because that’s how Doyle is still trying to process what happened to her. For instance, we know from the introduction that the case had been officially “resolved” for years by the time Doyle could bring herself to write explicitly about her own experience. Then chapter two—the most memoiristic entry—takes us back to 2009, when she first met the student that would turn into her harasser. 

The decision not to lead with the harassment case was not an easy one, Doyle tells us, but an important one: “I want you to feel, however, that this is not where the story starts for me. It starts with the attempt to express how I was changed.” For Doyle, whose mentor was the late great affect theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, expressing these changes takes the form of extended inquiries into the nature of grief and paranoia in chapters one and three, respectively. In the portions that are theory-heavy, the autobiographical comes through in the fact that these are workplace issues for Doyle. As an affect theorist, Doyle’s work took up themes of attachment, subjectivity, and sexuality long before she was stalked in 2009. Unfortunately, this work became the “scene of a compound form of violation” that she only fully unpacks in the second chapter. 

The institutional failure that Doyle describes is total. She does not feel protected, nor is she confident that the procedures in place can protect her stalker from herself. As in my own experience, Doyle’s stalker was moved to these dangerous patterns of behavior by delusions of intimacy between her and Doyle, as well as a sense of persecution from the outside world. She interpreted lectures and mass emails as veiled love letters from Doyle to her. Doyle’s attempts to be proactive and set boundaries are interpreted as job responsibilities that conceal her true affection for her stalker. Perhaps most disturbing, from Doyle’s perspective, is that “it seemed possible to me that the things she was describing were real to her.”

It’s in the context of what could most generously be described as an interpretive crisis (but was more likely a mental health crisis of some kind) that the failures of the Title IX process and modern policing become clearest. Like Doyle, I was concerned for the wellbeing of my stalker. Meanwhile, the institutions that were there to protect the two of us did little to reassure me. School administrators encouraged me to involve the Chicago Police Department, then offered to “turn the heat up” on their investigation of my stalker when I balked at the idea of working with law enforcement. As I was, Doyle is eventually referred to a specialized LAPD unit, whom she works with reluctantly only when “they left me feeling that they wanted to make sure things didn’t get worse for N.” 

Despite the potential interest of this specialized detective unit, Title IX is ultimately the main character in Doyle’s story. Title IX, known primarily as the federal regulatory mechanism that advanced women’s college athletics, “requires that schools address the problem of sex-based forms of discrimination, harassment, and abuse involving students.” This overly broad mandate has resulted in the creation of Title IX offices on virtually every college campus nationwide, whose main function is to arbitrate sexual harassment cases like mine and Doyle’s. Even the police were up front with her about how stalking in an academic environment could be something of a different beast:

From a policing perspective, they said, self-identified smart people can be scary. They are not inhibited either by the law (because they believe they can work around it) or by the problem of not knowing how to do something (because they are good at teaching themselves what they don’t know). This sounded familiar: The academy is filled with people who think they are the smartest in the room.

The devastating wit and institutional cynicism that come through in the above passage are, however, not the hallmarks of the second chapter, when Doyle is still coming to terms with writing about what happened. The sentences tend to be shorter, single clause descriptions of events or emotions. “I changed my password. I googled. First ‘definition of stalking’; and then ‘what to do if you are being stalked.’ . . . She showed up outside my living room window.” As opposed to the chapters where she spends paragraphs devoted to the characteristics of paranoia or grief, descriptions of her own emotional state while she was being stalked are kept to a bare minimum: “I was appalled and angry.”

The fourth chapter marks a stylistic departure, shifting to a case study on Larry Nassar, team doctor for USA gymnastics from 1996 to 2014. Nassar, who was sentenced to 40-125 years imprisonment in 2018, following his conviction for sex crimes against more than 150 women and girls, resurfaced in the summer 2024 news cycle after the Michigan attorney general released over six thousand new documents relating to his nineteen years at Michigan State University. While the state attorney general found that there was nothing incriminating about MSU’s handling of the case, Doyle’s case study suggests otherwise. 

The main object of focus in chapter four is a 2014 complaint against Nassar filed by Amanda Thomashow, a former patient, and the subsequent memo that cleared Nassar of wrongdoing, filed by Assistant Director for Institutional Equity, Kristine Moore. Thomashow, then twenty-four, sought treatment from Nassar for hip pain after years of competitive cheerleading. Thomashow’s complaint described an alleged assault that’s basically indistinguishable from the pattern of violence Nassar was convicted of just four years later, yet she spent years trying to get MSU to open the case as more complaints rolled in. “I am interested in what made the truth of Thomashow’s complaint so difficult to accept. So is Thomashow,” Doyle writes, preparing us for a moment of resolution that the investigation does not deliver, strictly speaking. In what feels like the bombshell moment of this book, Doyle reveals that there is a second version of MSU’s response to Thomashow’s complaint, intended to be used only for internal legal purposes, that acknowledges Nassar’s conduct as “dangerous for the institution” from a liability standpoint.

The strength of this case study is the strength of this book and perhaps autotheory as a genre. Moore’s dismissal of Thomashow’s complaint against Nassar may have passed muster legally speaking, but it crumbles under the weight of critical theory devoted to exposing the foundational myths that allow institutions to survive. At the heart of the Title IX investigation, for example, is a disavowal of any sexual community that may exist on a college campus. This disavowal may seem plainly absurd if you consider that tenured faculty at elite institutions are being written up in high profile magazines for the sexual relationships they begin at work, yet Doyle is able to draw from her own experience to show how her stalker weaponized the assumption of a sex-free campus to make “accuser and accused become reversible; the truth of an individual case feels unknowable.”

As opposed to the distance and objectivity with which she describes her own experience, the Nassar case study feels like the real target for her critical and academic faculties. “In giving this selective overview of discourse on campus sexual harassment, I have deliberately staged an ugly irony,” she tells us, evoking her background in performance, affect, and language studies. Yet the attention to detail, compassion for victims, and critical edge towards institutions in this section are the clear result of Doyle’s attempts to recover “some sense of myself by adopting a forensic curiosity about my situation.”

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. Sedgwick supplies Doyle with the phrase “the privilege of unknowing,” to describe how institutional authority both depends on and supplies the conditions for the disavowal of sexual activity on college campuses. The Title IX complaint, as Doyle demonstrates, is just the occasion for the institutional creation/reification of its sustaining mythology: “An investigation and disciplinary process has the capacity to ritualize something quite different: it may stage the articulation of an institution’s mythology. It will produce the truth that the institution needs.”

Sensing the limitations of knowledge production against an institutional culture committed to unknowing, Doyle turns to literature to imagine an idyllic world where complaints are taken seriously. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of parrhesia, “the ritual production of a fearless, noble form of truth-telling,” Doyle examines Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and the critical reception of Ferrante’s work “to reflect on how we receive stories about suffering as a sexual object.” For Foucault, parrhesia demands not just the bravery of the complainant, “but it is also the interlocutor’s courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truths he hears.”

The turn to fiction may feel like a turn from “truth” as commonly defined, until Doyle describes how Ferrante’s work has been weaponized by critics of women’s rights. Laura Kipnis, one of the main intellectual antagonists in Shadow of My Shadow, is quoted at length defending a sexual relationship in the books that begins with a non-consensual encounter between an adult man and teen girl. Noting that Kipnis’s reading of the novel excludes any mention of that inceptive sexual assault sets Doyle up for the most straightforward articulation of the project that is Shadow of my Shadow: “My reading of Ferrante is meant to spotlight the importance of failures of reception—this is a long echo, an extension of my reading of the failed reception of Thomashow’s complaint, and, truth be told, my own.” Doyle’s reading addresses both Kipnis’s failure of reception as well as the institutional commitment to unknowing that she documents in the case study and her recollection of her Title IX experience.

Having laid bare the institutional commitment to unknowing from the Title IX process through the actual scholarship being produced at these institutions of higher education finally allows Doyle to express something that feels cathartic. In the conclusion, she admits that she, in the throes of the paranoia one feels while being stalked, probably misread a fairly benign episode involving her stalker. Though we have no way of knowing the true motivation behind her stalker’s actions, Doyle makes peace with this fact and invites the reader to as well. She also reveals that her stalker was right about one key piece of investigation: that the institution was preventing Doyle from expressing her true feelings. “Looking back much of what I imagined as unsayable was, actually, perfectly sayable. It should be OK to tell a student that you do not love them! What if I’d laughed, and said, Honestly, you really aren’t my type!?”

Colin Lavery is a writer based in Chicago. Recent awards include a Master’s Thesis prize from the Karla Scherer Center for American Studies and the Chicago Kent Justice Foundation Fellowship. His writing focuses on contemporary American literature, historical materialism, and speculative fiction.