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Jennifer Doyle

Jennifer Doyle is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside. She 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.