What pedagogies arise from institutional betrayal? How can we do the work we love in contexts where harassment is endemic and administrative responses to it escalate the problem? What assumptions have normalized the expectation that our institutions cannot be spaces of love?

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Jennifer Doyle to discuss all of these issues as they arise in her most recent book, Shadow of My Shadow (Duke University Press, 2024). This remarkable work develops from Doyle's own experience of being stalked by a student and unfurls into a bracing critique of the institutional administration of harassment cases--as well as the attachments that arise in their aftermath. This line of inquiry builds on Doyle's Campus Sex / Campus Security (Semiotexte, 2015), on how the bureaucratic management of sex on college campuses coincides with the militarization of campus police.

Jennifer Doyle is a writer, arts and performance curator, sports analyst, and professor of English. She serves on the Board of Directors of Human Resources Los Angeles; her most recent co/curated exhibition is Sciencia Sexualis at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, LA (2024-2025).

In addition to the books named above, Jennifer is the author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2013) and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is also the voice behind the beloved soccer blog From a Left Wing (2007-2013) and, now, The Sport Spectacle.

Links to recommended stuff!

Esme Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf, 2019)

Barbara Johnson, "Muteness Envy" in The Barbara Johnson Reader (Duke UP, 2014)

Francois Tosquelles, Psychotherapy and Materialism, English translation (ICI Berlin Press, 2024)

Camille Robcis, Disalienation (University of Chicago Press 2021)

Colm Toibin, The Magician (Scribner, 2022)

Alexandra Horowitz, On Looking (Scribner, 2014)

Becky Hammon's Crucifix on BlueSky

Caster Semenya, Race to Be Myself (WW Norton, 2025)

Episode Credits:

Co-hosts and co-producers: Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin

Editing and Production Manager: Aliyah Harris

Intro Music: Lance Haugen and the Flying Penguins

Outro Music: Akrasis

2026.9 - Doyle - lucia's edited audio

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Lucia: Welcome to Nothing Never Happens, A Radical Pedagogy podcast. My name is Lucia Holser, here with my co-host Tina Pippin. We are so happy to welcome to the podcast, someone who, in our opinion is among the sharpest and most thoughtful critics on matters of que queer and feminist theory, institutional power, and critical university studies.

That person is Dr. Jennifer Doyle, currently a professor of English and cooperating faculty in art at the University of California Riverside. We could take the whole hour telling you about how cool Jennifer is. She's published widely on the intersections of sex, emotion, and art. She is a longtime curator of exhibitions, installations, and festivals.

Escalate. Increasingly, it seems with the cooperation of many a university administration against this backdrop of crisis and betrayal, Jennifer challenges us to reject the cliche that our institutions won't love us back, shouldn't We want institutions that can love us and that will love us back, and that we can love.

Tina: Thank you Jennifer Doyle for being on Nothing Never Happens. If we could begin with you telling us about your path into feminist and queer critique of institutions harassment culture and how all that intersects with how you think about pedagogy.

Jennifer Doyle: Um, it's a, it is a really good question, and you gave it to me in advance. I hashed out an approach and of course as I'm talking, I'm gonna go in a completely different direction. When I was writing Shadow of My Shadow, I occasionally tried to write this story down and usually took it out just because it was a little derailing in the context of the book.

And it was probably my first love in relationship to work. But I hated the harassment that was endemic to doing the work in mainly from customers in the area that I was working, which was a kind of weekend space for very wealthy people from New York and Philly. And, uh, these folks would put their hands on you. They would do more than flirt. There was an expectation of a certain. A certain kind of sexual attention, if not actual sex. And and then also in the kitchen, uh, one of my favorite jobs, the day-to-day harassment from the chefs and the men who worked in the kitchen. It was annoying and I wanted a better day-to-day work experience.

And um, my, I wrote an essay on Thomas Aikens, uh, the 19th Century American painter who was dogged by Scandal. Uh, he was accused of molesting a niece who committed suicide. With a gun that he gave her, and hard historians operated as apologists for this, for him, for generations. Uh, so my essay kind of confronts the topic of gender and sexuality and power in his work, and that was published in 98 or 99.

What should we know as listeners and as interlocutors with you about the relationship between Sex on campus as you talk about it, and structures of policing within these institutions?

Jennifer Doyle: It's a good time to be thinking back to campus six, campus Security, which I can't believe is 10 years old now.

This book is written in a kind of an episodic way. It's moves between it's very short essays about different kinds of cases and and especially cases of police violence. When I wrote it, I was going through the experience of being a stalking victim and pushed towards engaging Title IX processes to address that.

And at that time, the administration of harassment complaints was really not coherent, uh, across the country, I'll say and in the University of California system at that time. So it was a very bizarre, that whole thing was a very bizarre experience. And when I was writing Campus X campus security, I was still so close to it.

That any direct writing about the case was haunted by the fear that I would be contributing to my own harassment. I write about that in shadow of my shadow and I write about the case there, but I don't, in campus X campus security, while I was going through this, there was so much happening around police violence on our campuses.

And these students stood up one by one in a very effective, disruptive action, right? And shouted. And they had to be escorted out one by one, and they were arrested and they were charged with very obscure criminal charges about disrupting a political meeting. The, student Justice for Palestine organization, if I remember right, was banned at the time.

So I was lucky enough to be a part of those kind conversations. And it was very, you know, it was a lot to be in an environment in which the university was mobilizing a language of protection and security around me personally as a victim while watching the university , stigmatized and harass these undergraduate activists.

So Campus X campus security was a way of like working that through. And it began with an essay that was about the pepper spray cop incident at uc Davis. And in my readings around that, you could see how directly the relate the language of sexual security of safety protecting, quote unquote young girls, meaning the adults who are undergraduate students on our campuses.

So, campus six campus security emerged out of, , this kind of a real sense of urgent need on a personal level, and then also just say as like a critical theorist to find a way to write out these contradictions. That's where the book comes from. And if I had the stomach for it, I would do another addition of it that would take up what happened at UCLA last year, you know, this absolute frenzy of violence directed at the, um, student encampment and the psychotic language used by the university since then to characterize the protestors in which they were doing throughout as the real threat, right?

When these groups from, of mainly extremists from off campus, that's the real threat locally and nationally. And, yeah, shame on our institutions, right? For enfranchising, that level of violence. I mean, you can see hints of it in little things that in the small cases that campus sex, campus security describes.

Right. Going off that talking some more about shadow of my Shadow. How did you make the choices to tell your story and what effect has that had the telling of it in both books?

Jennifer Doyle: Shadow of my shadow collects writing i've produced about harassment, paranoia, and the impact of my own case as material, as written after campus sex campus security was published. So some of that was like, I mean, campus sex, campus security was like this too. I, I felt compelled to write it on a level that's really different from any other kind of writing I've done.

This isn't to say there's not an urgency around my writing about pleasure and I'll insist on that. It's just I couldn't figure out how to write about anything else. This whole subject really took me over. And so the, there's a chapter about a complaint that was filed against Larry Nassar, the physiotherapist who abused generations of athletes through his privilege relationship to the USA gymnastics program, and also as a faculty member at Michigan State University.

And given what I was going through in terms of my own experience of harassment, the sense of the need to think as a queer theorist about harassment and power and policing. It's like almost like my interest in sports, which I was a little bit of a relief from the stalking thing became. It just, it's like I couldn't escape it because systemic abuse like that is really an issue in sports.

There's horrific stories from Afghanistan and national team players from Afghanistan all over the world. The men who are in charge of women's sports have been just as they exploit the men's game, right? They exploit the women's game, but they exploit the women's game differently. That's partly what's behind my interest in the Nassar case.

But I was also really going mad over just like how people in queer theory were responding to harassment stories like the Al Ronnell case.

And this is not to defend Ronnell or NYU or any of that, right? But it's just that when looking at our lives and our experiences in institutions, this kind of entrenched abuse and the kind of culture which renders people who file complaints into hysterics and minimizes and pathologizes, even those victims I just wanted to, I was like, well, I need to do the thing I wanna see other people doing, right?

Because I'd written campus, ex campus Security, security, sometimes people who are the objects of complaints, imagine that I'm going to be their Laura Kni, that I'm gonna take up their case and, you know, write a big article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about how they're being persecuted, et cetera, you know?

I think there was a moment I'm quite sure there was a moment where he and maybe his friends imagined that I would be that person. I was asked to talk to him pretty early on, and I just said that from what I knew of the case I would not speak to him and I recommended it to anyone to keep, just keep away from it.

I have to say the real drive in that narrative was to write something that was exposing his victims, right? That he was going to pursue the harassment of his victims in this other kind of domain, but folded into this was a story about me. And it was kind of horrifying.

I felt pretty isolated on my campus and in my department. The administration never published a statement on the website when he was fired, supporting the firing. Even though they had asked for that, that only happens when the chancellor and Provost asked for that kind of action. So there was, and this is before I think people had a real script in terms of how to support the victim and victim impacted community in harassment cases.

And you can actually see these talks online if anybody said they were gonna record it could, and would I be okay with that? I said absolutely 'cause I just wanted to get the story. On the record and then writing, it surfaced all these things that I needed to work out. , 'Cause you can already hear like, the main preoccupation for me is not the person who was stalking me, right?

It was the stalking behavior. The harassment, but it was like things that were happening at school. It was this guy in my department, it was the way that people around me talk about harassment. So when I was writing it, the, what became the second chapter in the book, I realized I needed to resolve my relationship to the person who stalk me.

That was a real breakthrough for me. On a personal level, and I think it's what made writing the, like turning the whole thing project into a book, right. These different essays and what might even have been symptomatic writing in a certain way, like getting it to another level. It was kind of a happy accident you know, in that I was forced to put the story of what happened on the record. And it meant that I had to work it through so that I wasn't um, just prosecuting a grievance you know, in public. That's the thing I really wanted to not be doing.

So as not to sensationalize it, to make this sort of writing click bait that centers that, because as you just said, there are all these other dynamics that are coming to the surface of being exposed in the contradictions of how you had to navigate that. I'm aware that in this interview we've done a similar kind of thing, which is we haven't actually spoken directly about what happened, although maybe the picture is starting to emerge for people who aren't listening.

So I want to I wanna give you space if there are details or anything you wanna fill in as context. Yeah. But holding that lightly. The other piece that I will just add is that as, as you talk about your writing process itself, there's this sense of both, the word that's coming to mind is responsibility.

They certainly do. In my mind. A question about. How writing and pedagogy are entwined for you? Yeah, in terms of thinking about responsibility and relation.

Jennifer Doyle: Yeah. Okay. There's a couple things there. I'll start with just giving listeners a context of the story. It is one of these things too, I I'm trained as a literary critic, so I feel very aware too that you can lead with the story as clickbait or you could say, hang in there and then I'll give you the story, which is an another form of manipulating interest.

And every communication, every form of communication was an encoding of that relationship. So for of a significant period of time when the stalking behavior happened, I didn't understand what this person was experiencing. So it was more that I was getting messages that I didn't understand.

Often with that comes an inability to have insight into your own condition, right? So things that are very real to you like that may be coming out of disordered thinking, but the absolute worst thing that you can do when somebody's in that kind of a state is just dismiss their reality.

Right? So it took me a long time of looking back and learning and education about what I've gone through to see that a lot of what was harmful in the interaction between the school and this person as a student was that this person was having a mental health crisis. That part of that crisis is not having insight into their own condition.

Lucia: I think it was Yale or Esme. The collective is,

Again, we really don't have a playbook, that's very effective because so many of the kinds of interventions or punitive and escalatory and so intensify crisis and intensify that person's sense of being persecuted and threatened. And so it can actually make things more dangerous for everyone. I've forgotten where we started, but maybe we have gotten into the, I think we started with my story and then the teaching

Lucia: I feel like one of the things that is so striking about your book is, so you say early on in the, in the first chapter that you were trying to have a kind of writing and teaching that works on people which it's a sort of writing or teaching that demands something of people at the same time as it is, as you say it's forgiving. And one of the things that I'm thinking about as you talk about plagiarism and as we talk about the delusion, psychotic break, whatever we wanna call it, that you were experiencing from this graduate student is how there are these different narratives that weave together that are all a perception.

And I guess I, I think there, there's something going on for me in thinking about pedagogy vis-a-vis book. Yeah. That, that makes me wanna. It makes me wanna kind of drill down on this question of Yeah, who is the narrator and how does the narrator emerge and how does she change over the course of the book? And what can, following her path teach us about the vulnerabilities of entering into a classroom, an advising meeting, an organizing session, et cetera. Yeah.

Right. So, Adrian and I were supposed to be in conversation at a conference called Trashing Performance in England.

How we felt in the work, right? So that, when a person felt like I was addressing them, or I was sharing something that was really personal, that's not necessarily the same thing as what feels very exposing to me in my writing. I think I say in the introduction to the book, the most personal chapters and shadow of my shadow are actually, it's actually the Nassar chapter.

And a work of high literary criticism, which is a reading of Elena friendship and Elena's Neapolitan novels like the, those are most me. And like my heart is in that, the, in, in there in a way that is very different from those other chapters especially the second chapter in which I'm actually telling the story of what happened to me. Like, writing that requires a level of disassociation that allows me to craft that story and to make editorial decisions about it. There's a place where I really go in these other chapters that are, it's harder for me to do that in my own, in telling my own story.

So, who is the narrator? I've definitely write for undergrads. So while I want my book to be useful to scholars and to graduate students, I want my writing to be legible to an undergraduate student who wants to read the book. So when I learned that as an undergrad, when I was assigned writers like Julia Christava, Roland Bart, and I just remember a teacher saying something like, that like the the kind of perfect zone, right?

And I just remember thinking, that's me. That's the writer, that's the reader. I am right? I wanna know all these things, but I also wanna be the writer that is the, it's like the the gateway drug, like that somebody reads me and then they read Adorno, right? Like, that's the role I wanna play.

And that's been true in my writing all along. I very rarely write something that you can't teach in an an upper division undergrad class. And one piece of mind is in anthologized in an art history textbook. And it's meant to be taught. It's meant to be like the first thing a student reads about queer stuff and art history, right?

And the transformations in your relationship to work or your understanding of what a person means when they say institution and the context in which that word gets invoked. I think it's hard to get there without just life experience, the narrator of shadow of My Shadow is a teacher, basically.

And a teacher who has a whole career of teaching behind her, that's yeah, that's who that, that's who she is. So I

And stories that many colleagues and friends in higher education and other institutional settings have talked about, which is betrayal trauma. Oh, yeah. And, and your relationship to the institution and to the practice of, of teaching, which you've talked some about, but how has that shifted with this experience?

Yeah,

What do we mean by institution in that sentence? 'cause what is an institution, if not a set of actions, right? Executed by people around us. What broad set of assumptions normalize this expectation that we shouldn't love our coworkers, right? That we're foolish for that.

And then what does love mean in that? And so, you know, this is like a big contradiction that swirls around the critical theory spaces we move through. And I'm thinking about, for example, like Fred Moten has a poem where he quotes Jose Munoz saying, I love my students. Which is such a lovely moment.

So, you know, I'm just trying, you can hear me kind of loosening up just around like sitting with and thinking about that sentence. So, you know, when it's like this, these the place of betrayal in my own story, that experience of betrayal is a kind of a layered thing because there is, on the one hand I'm gonna say the betrayal was much deeper around how my department, some of my colleagues in my department behaved around the sexual harassment case involving my colleagues, my own colleagues in my department were absolutely amazing around what happened with the graduate student. And that included, I'd say, caring for the graduate student in that. And if the campus had done what the department wanted to do, which was just to end, it's basically like a graduate student a graduate student can lose their status as a student on the basis of not doing their work.

I felt betrayed by my students, which is a separate kind of injury. And then I felt that kind of institutional betrayal when the panel that was convened to hear that misconduct hearing, cleared her of harassment and stalking. She came to the hearing with like a transcript of a recorded conversation video that had been secretly recorded of between me and a student. And a huge kind of like three ring binder apparently of, kind of like the Bible of that she had created of that was like the communications the coded communications, right. That um, or the kind of basically like her source text and, you know, they, it was a member of the committee.

The contempt he had for the administrators who were there representing the Title IX office. And and then he basically told the student that he wanted to hear about me, right? And then he basically pushed that in the hearing. And and then this committee founder, not responsible for harassment and stalking.

So, sounds super cynical about it. But to have it on the record. In a way I thought that was a gift. I was like, let's take this up. Let's have some form of remediation where we talk about this guy's qualifications to sit in any kind of capacity evaluating the work of his women colleagues.

That's a field to which I contribute as a scholar, but it's a field at Riverside, to which I have zero relation, right? And that's, there's so many of us who work in feminist and queer studies, or in black studies, Latinx studies, indigenous studies. There, so many of us who have a relationship to the production of minoritarian knowledge that live in exile from disciplines.

And this is why . I really did think that this case could turn, this is like Melanie Kleinian kind of reparative thing, like that we could turn this into something productive and use it to fix things. And that's where the institutional betrayal happened.

And it pops up in like a discussion of Ursula Ore's case where she was she's a rhetorician who was abused by campus police who were asking her for her id. And there's a moment when she says, but I'm faculty or I'm a professor. And in videos of arrest of faculty, this comes up and it's like this reflex we have where we're in the moment of your humiliation and in the moment when they're really violating you.

And they'd cultivate the term the language around and the study of institutional betrayal. And, that reading that material was very helpful for me as somebody going through it. And her lectures and lectures from people, from her research group you can see them on YouTube. And when you're having trouble detaching, when you keep returning to the scene of the crime and the same thing keeps happening over and over again, like that work is really useful for understanding what's happening to you.

Yeah.

And I see that in the way that that guy who you heard the recording of and the hearing used n as a platform to say, I'm under attack by Title ix. And also the way that your former colleague tried to come to you as the protector from harassment allegations. I just wanted to observe that because it feels latent within a lot of what you're saying.

Yeah. And within this conversation about betrayal. These are figures that also feel betrayed by the institution, but are making very different demands on it. Yeah. So I don't know where that goes, but yeah, I want to reflect it back.

Jennifer Doyle: This is like an old preoccupation amongst feminist theorists.

It was a very helpful essay for me when I was writing this book, and in particular for the Nassar case really. But yeah, there's a lot of contradiction and incoherence. I think when you get down to the root of anything around institution, anything, you're going to get to pretty profound contradictions that the ideological kind of space of the institution itself.

Becomes it's a kind of capital. It's hard to sit with. Because it's so violent. So, and it's not rash, it's cer, it's like I can't, there's not like a rational explanation for it. It's more like this is a place where the contradiction itself can be used in as a weapon and as a tool for disenfranchising people and as a rationalization of abuse dynamics.

Stepping a little bit away from say, the intensely fascistic kind of culture of the moment where this is in overproduction and we're living in an environment that's where this has been mainstreamed, right? On, on an interpersonal level or in a small group or a workplace, you can have somebody who feels so persecuted by a member of the group that they bully and harass that person.

I find it hard to talk about because it's, for me, it's like this experience of living with people whose lives are being organized around this these kinds of disavows and projections and, and contradictions and I'm being on the other end of it.

Anyway, sorry.

I realize we have been going for a minute now.

I want to ask you one thing about another way that institutional contradictions get managed in the university as a workplace and but not only in the university as workplace and other kinds of workplaces, which is in the partitioning out of sex and work as different domains

This is a really important critique in your book, um, and relates to some of the failures and contradictions that we're talking about right now. Can you walk our listeners through that claim and talk about what you think the implications are for how we address harassment in our workplaces?

Jennifer Doyle: Yeah, I in my head, I like to think about two different kinds of workplaces. There's a workplace which has a nor a narrative about itself, which is the school, which is, this is not a sexual space. And then there's a workplace which is defined by, this is a sexual space. And so for workplaces that would represent the latter might include a porn set, sex , a strip club, right?

Taking a college, the college campus, as our, case study and this is actually something that a numbers of people who work on the subject of sexual abuse within campus settings have, you know, addressed but the blanket prohibition on sexual relationships between any employee and any student on a campus.

When you issue blanket prohibitions on sexual relationships between students and faculty and staff you create the, that situation, right? That's a big difference from setting up a bunch of guidelines for people who are in romantic relationships within a campus environment to prevent conflict of interest.

So whereby if you were a faculty member having a relationship with a graduate student, you couldn't participate in any evaluation of that student's work. And you shouldn't be teaching them in a seminar. These kinds of things.

Um, and so how good your workplace is at protecting you against those risks, that becomes an explicit part of the deduction about whether or not this is a good work environment? So yeah. I hope that makes some sense.

Jennifer Doyle: There are a couple, so there's a lot to say about this. Nothing like being stalked to reboot your relationship to the whole subject. 'cause there is a part of me that's become more, much more fearless because in a sense the worst happened and I'm fine, I'm here. I can feel a sense of grief around what my work might look like had this not happened the kinds of books I might have written that, you know but, the thing that I, every queer theorist is most afraid of, short of me being fired, kind of happened to me. And I don't know. I'm not the I'm not afraid of, for example, being stalked by a student. I'm not afraid of a student who is trying to figure out like who they are and connecting over, cathecting onto me.

So, it hasn't made me more afraid. It's made me less afraid. What it has done is, and again, this is not about the stalking, it's about what happened afterwards and my feelings about my work, is that I realized that I was having control issues on a psychological level in my teaching.

And it was an event that Evol involved bleeding and piercing and nudity when he was the risk management officer, had to cut a contract with this space we were renting. And as we were doing that, I wanted to make sure we had all the right paperwork for the performers and everything. And I wanted to make sure that risk management at Riverside knew exactly what was gonna happen.

Right. Like, he didn't, that's what he said. And I just made me laugh. Because, oh, you know, I was carrying with me this idea about the institution's narrative of risk. Which is actually not the discourse of the risk management officer. But it is rather the discourse of the people who've internalized their sense of the institution.

You know, that that was a very good lesson, that I learned is totally separate from this case. I do know that the university does feel a sense of risk around all cases of harassment and disciplinary cases that look like they may be marching towards a faculty member's dismissal because these kinds of cases lead to litigation.

That's an effect of the tort system of the, of civil, lawsuits, right? That's about the way in which injury gets converted into award. This is a big kind of frontier in thinking about accountability processes. I say from the county of Los Angeles, whose city, whose budget has been decimated by billion dollar payment to a whole generations of foster people who had been in foster care and had been abused by the foster care system.

And then in a political climate, right? Like there's a world competing discourses about risk, that a whole, army of administrators are charged with administrating. So going through my case and doing the research that I've done that's made me appreciate the complexity of that environment, especially for a very large public institution.

No, no easy answers on it though. I would say that broad assault on student demonstrators is probably not in the interest of the university in terms of its exposure to liability. So.

Jennifer Doyle: I feel like we've covered a lot of ground. I'm really curious to get to that and I have shown myself to be capable of dis for quite a while about, any questions. So

Lucia: we appreciate it. The last question that we always ask all of our guests is what are you reading, watching, listening to, et cetera that you would like to recommend to our listeners?

And it can be anything under the sun. Okay.

And, he's part of a movement of analysts, intellectuals, clinicians who were re-imagining what their practice might be in relationship to an anti-fascist, an anti-colonial project. Fanon, did a sta at Alba. And, Camille Robe C has a book called Dis Alienation, which is about ques and his, the circles of people around the radical psychiatry movement.

I keep thinking with this, and then I started reading in this area while doing the work around campus sex, campus security, and then shadow of my shadow when the harassment case of my own department surfaced. I spent a year reading like Guari and the work of also other offbeat psychoanalytic theorists whose work emerged around in the wake of the disaster of World War ii and the treatment of veterans.

And the words are slightly different in French, but it helps you to start to see the way in which the institution is a screen, like the discourse of the institution is a screen. And Tosca, as part of a group, it's a group of people who also are thinking about working with people who are normally or had been traditionally categorized as untreatable and would be like, locked away in an asylum for their whole life.

There's another kind of transference that can happen, which is that the transference is onto the institution right onto the group. And and that there's a kind of working through that happens as a collective of people commit to working through their relationships to their own in the institution that holds them in relation to each other.

I'm always looking for more writing um, that unfolds around this. And there's a small collection of writing that Semitech produced in honor of the filmmaker, Francois Pa, PAIN. There's that. And then. I just re I just read in a totally different zone column Tobin's novel, the Magician about the life of Thomas Mann.

I think many of us are asking ourselves, what are we going to do? It's kind of escapist and not at the same time. I'm also, I've been on a ton of French kick thanks to a graduate student, Miranda Stege, who's an amazing writer, and part of a generation of students who were really important to shadow of my shadow.

Lucia: Tina, what are you consuming right now?

Tina: Two things. I'll start with this whole movement to slow looking. There's a book by Sarah Tishman on how to look at art and how to look at world literature which I've incorporated into my teaching. And then another book related to that by Alexander Horowitz called Own Looking: a Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation.

So take it away. Lucia.

Lucia: I am watching a lot of the WNBA and I'm gonna take this moment to come out about my WNBA alter- Ego project because I know that Jennifer is a soccer fan with an online presence about this. So on WNBA social media there is a culture of commenting on games as the accessory of a player.

And nobody if anybody, if there's an overlap between WNBA Twitter and this podcast, I'm not sure what it is , but now they will know who the person behind the crucifix is. So if you're part of the, like gay women's basketball religious studies scholarship, or just like ex organized religion world, this is your niche.

Jennifer Doyle: I am so excited to learn about this and to share this little gem with my many friends who are in WNBA fans as people who know me will know my true love is women's soccer.

Lucia: the best DJ in the league too.

Jennifer Doyle: I agree. I mean, I've only ever been to a Sparks game, so I'm

Lucia: so jealous. Wow. Well this has been wonderful.

Tina: One more thing, the Atlanta Dream just got a famous player.

Lucia: Which one? They're all famous. Brittany Griner?

Tina: Yes. That's my offering to this conversation. Amazing. And her memoir is

Jennifer Doyle: worth reading.

It's

Lucia: really great. It's so good.

That's the next thing on my horizon, is to return to writing about castor Sonia. Probably the person I would most love to meet in the world, right? But it's a great read and really also like this is talk about institutional betrayal, right? This is, uh, a story that. In which we're seeing that happen on a level that is so massive, the term institutional betrayal isn't even the right, it's on the right.

She's particularly great on the relationship between what happened to her and the intensification of the harassment of trans athletes. That's probably one of the most important things out there, in my view.

Lucia: Wow. Okay. We've generated an amazing list.

Jennifer Doyle: All over the place.

Lucia: All right. All over the place.

We'll put it in our show notes. Thank you Jennifer Doyle for coming onto Nothing. Never Happens.

Tina: Yes. Thank you so much for giving this time to us.

Jennifer Doyle: Thank you. I've actually had a lot of other kinds of work happening in the art world and I actually haven't had a chance to really sit down and talk about this book, and I really appreciate you that you gave me this space to reflect on it.

Tina: Good. Thanks.