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A review by tiaelisabeth
Campus Sex, Campus Security by Jennifer Doyle
2.0
While this book begins with a very important intervention, it quickly devolves into something that I can only describe as… egregious? Doyles’ “Campus Sex, Campus Security” asks its readers to consider the ways in which institutional and personal anxieties around campus sexual violence have given way to/are similar to the increasing militarisation of campus security. The equation of safety and nonviolence is a false equivalence, etc. This makes sense, I can agree with this critique of violence, her calling out of the reproduction of punitive, carceral systems at the university, the horrific ways in which police-figures terrorise students of colour and student activists. Her chapters on such incidents at UC schools and ASU are particularly strong.
Doyle’s turn toward “campus sex” however, reads as alarmist, defensive, ungrounded, and incredibly insensitive. Her anxiety about the campus becoming a fortress where students are constantly chastised, disciplined, and afraid to question authority or move or speak does not sound anything like my experience of the university, though I acknowledge that my own privileges of course factor into this. That said, her writing in these passages reads as solipsistic, melodramatic, and in a few instances, enraging (for example, when she compares the violent pepper-spraying and beating of students at UC Davis with the removal of a football coach’s name from the Penn State library; the ending in which she weaves between the suspicion levied at plagiaristic students and the murder of Mike Brown — her final line of “hands up, don’t shoot the students” made me want to hurl the book across the room). It’s also illogical and contradictory; whereas she first laments the ways in which victims and women in particular are erased from their own narratives of sexual violence, she later does the same thing by centering her accounts of the Sandusky case and the UCSB incel attack on the male perpetrators, even arguing that the UCSB killer was more motivated by his death-drive than a hatred of women (right after mentioning his 100,000 misogynistic manifesto??) This portion of the ‘essay’ is riddled with fantastic excursions and flights of fancy that lead to wild assumptions and claims that she fails to ground, as well as misunderstandings of basic terminology (Doyle claims that ‘rape culture’ pulls focus from the mundanity of sexual coercion, which is in fact the actual thing it is designed to — and I think, does — indicate??) Again, throughout all of this, women figure only as shadows, always unnamed and portrayed pejoratively by Doyle as overly sensitive and fearful of violence against them, which she seems to believe is more an anticipatory figment of the hyper vigilant imagination (and perhaps sometimes is, but I wonder WHY might that be??!!!) Instead of suggesting that we treat the cause, Doyle is fixated on the symptom — their inconvenient, mushy feelings. Women, here, are again thrown under the bus, and made responsible for a whole system of other violences. Never does she interrogate the synapses between violence against women and police/carceral brutality, of course, nor do I believe that she quotes/draws on any abolitionist feminist thinkers or Black feminists.
The idea that some university administrators, faculty, and leaders have championed this book is disconcerting to me, and signals that they would rather not participate in the work of finding nonviolent solutions for sexual violence prevention/restitution and police brutality, and would instead prefer to, I don’t know, do whatever twisted and self-aggrandising exercise this is??
Doyle’s turn toward “campus sex” however, reads as alarmist, defensive, ungrounded, and incredibly insensitive. Her anxiety about the campus becoming a fortress where students are constantly chastised, disciplined, and afraid to question authority or move or speak does not sound anything like my experience of the university, though I acknowledge that my own privileges of course factor into this. That said, her writing in these passages reads as solipsistic, melodramatic, and in a few instances, enraging (for example, when she compares the violent pepper-spraying and beating of students at UC Davis with the removal of a football coach’s name from the Penn State library; the ending in which she weaves between the suspicion levied at plagiaristic students and the murder of Mike Brown — her final line of “hands up, don’t shoot the students” made me want to hurl the book across the room). It’s also illogical and contradictory; whereas she first laments the ways in which victims and women in particular are erased from their own narratives of sexual violence, she later does the same thing by centering her accounts of the Sandusky case and the UCSB incel attack on the male perpetrators, even arguing that the UCSB killer was more motivated by his death-drive than a hatred of women (right after mentioning his 100,000 misogynistic manifesto??) This portion of the ‘essay’ is riddled with fantastic excursions and flights of fancy that lead to wild assumptions and claims that she fails to ground, as well as misunderstandings of basic terminology (Doyle claims that ‘rape culture’ pulls focus from the mundanity of sexual coercion, which is in fact the actual thing it is designed to — and I think, does — indicate??) Again, throughout all of this, women figure only as shadows, always unnamed and portrayed pejoratively by Doyle as overly sensitive and fearful of violence against them, which she seems to believe is more an anticipatory figment of the hyper vigilant imagination (and perhaps sometimes is, but I wonder WHY might that be??!!!) Instead of suggesting that we treat the cause, Doyle is fixated on the symptom — their inconvenient, mushy feelings. Women, here, are again thrown under the bus, and made responsible for a whole system of other violences. Never does she interrogate the synapses between violence against women and police/carceral brutality, of course, nor do I believe that she quotes/draws on any abolitionist feminist thinkers or Black feminists.
The idea that some university administrators, faculty, and leaders have championed this book is disconcerting to me, and signals that they would rather not participate in the work of finding nonviolent solutions for sexual violence prevention/restitution and police brutality, and would instead prefer to, I don’t know, do whatever twisted and self-aggrandising exercise this is??