Full Description
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.
Contents
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
