University of California, Riverside: Department of English

Faculty

Jennifer Doyle, Associate Professor
Ph.D. Duke University

Research Areas: American Literature, Visual Culture, Gender Studies, Critical Theory

Jennifer Doyle teaches American literature, gender studies, and visual studies. In her book Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minnesota, 2006), Doyle shows how the declaration that a work of art is “about sex” reveals surprisingly little about the work, the artist, or the spectator. Sex Objects moves readers beyond debates about pornography and censorship to show that sex in art is as diverse as sex in everyday life: exciting, ordinary, emotional, traumatic, embarrassing, funny, even profoundly boring. In chapters on the “boring parts” of Moby Dick, the scandals that dogged the painter Thomas Eakins, the role of women in Andy Warhol's Factory films, “bad sex” and Tracey Emin's crudely evocative line drawings, and L.A. artist Vaginal Davis's pornographic parodies of Vanessa Beecroft's performances, Doyle challenges simplistic readings of sexualized art and instead investigates what such works can tell us about the nature of desire. Sex Objects was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Writing on Art and Culture, and received honorable mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize.

Doyle is co-editor of a special issue of the feminist journal Signs (Spring 2006) on new feminist theories of visual culture, and is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke, 1996), the first book of its kind of consider the relationship between Warhol's sexuality and his work. Her article, "Jo March's Love Poems," on lesbian desire and reading in Little Women, appears in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature (June 2006) on lesbian aesthetics.

She is currently at work on two book projects. “Critical Difficulties” explores the relationship between the cultural politics of emotion and the limits of art criticism. “Uncoupled” explores forms of intimacy that take shape outside of, or in a critical relationship to the romantic couple and the domestic norm. Jennifer Doyle was awarded a 2007-2008 Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship in Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Doyle also writes From A Left Wing, a blog about the cultural politics of soccer.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. The University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

EDITED BOOKS & JOURNALS

Co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture, a special issue of Sign. Spring 2006.

Co-editor (with Jonathan Flatley and José Muñoz) of Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Duke University Press, 1996.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

"Jo March's Love Poems" in Nineteenth Century Literature (December 2005)

"Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic" in Representations (Fall 1999)