Hold It Against Me

Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire and co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol, also published by Duke University Press.

“Jennifer Doyle’s Hold It Against Me offers us a powerful and challenging new voice. The difficulty she describes emerges in work that turns to face us. . . .Doyle has opened up a critical and much needed space for this work and these experiences. She demands that we consider the political and historical stakes in ourselves, to embrace what is intimate and fraught - and that is no easy feat.” - Laura Fried (Los Angeles Review of Books) “Doyle blends scholarly critique with personal experience, producing a deep and broad analysis which is as much a critique of contemporary art criticism as contemporary art.” (Publishers Weekly) “This treatise argues that emotion makes artworks harder, more interesting, more difficult, and yet ultimately more rewarding for their complexity. Though aimed at scholars of performance and visual culture, this densely complex book will reward tenacious readers interested in understanding some of the most moving (and difficult) contemporary art of our time." - Toro Castaño (Library Journal) “In this rich, thought-provoking, and very readable work of scholarship, Doyle poses questions about works of art that cannot be easily described, that bring complicated personal and political subject matter to the fore, and that often evoke strong emotional reactions in the audiences that view them.” - Alexis Clements (Hyperallergic) "Doyle’s book is both an endorsement for and an example of what might happen once we venture away from the assurance of that cool scholarly detachment and into the less transparent but perhaps more revealing terrain of affective response. What Doyle discovers in that realm of feelings is not only personal sentiment, but also a complex site where ideology, aesthetics, social convention, and political possibility intersect."  - Catherine Zuromskis (Postmodern Culture) “Doyle captures unnerving moments of unease, anxiety, even extreme pain. These images and Doyle’s compelling discussion of their difficulty stay with the reader long after closing the book’s covers. Perhaps that is what is so successful about Doyle’s study. While the actual works explored are many of them fleeting performances, or done by artists who have by now succumbed to the AIDS virus, or are representations of the dead, they persist. They fight. They move us.” - Sarah E. Cornish (Rocky Mountain Review)

• Preface ixAcknowledgments xxiI. Introducing Difficulty 1Hard Feelings 5Patrolling the Border between Art and Politics 9Vocabulary Shift: From Controversy to Difficulty 15Difficulty's Audience 212. Three Case Studies in Difficulty and the Problem of Affect 28A Blank: Aliza Shvarts, Untitled (2008) 28Theater of Cruelty: Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875) 39Touchy Subjects: Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006) 493. Thinking Feeling: Criticism and Emotion 69What Happened to Feeling? 69The Difficulty of Sentimentality: Franko B's I Miss You! (2003) 73The Strange Theatricality of Tears: Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan (2009) 83Relational Aesthetics and Affective Labor 894. Feeling Overdetermined: Identity, Emotion, and History 94The Difficulty of Identity 94James Luna's The History of the Luiseño People (Christmas, La Jolla Reservation 1990) (1990–1996, 2009) 98Difficulty and Ideologies of Emotion 106Carrie Mae Weems's From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) 112Conclusion 126David Wojnarowicz's Untitled (Hujar Dead) (1988–1989) 126Notes 147Bibliography 183Index 193