Laura Kipnis
Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and essayist whose work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays.[1] She is a professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, where she teaches filmmaking.
Kipnis earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Studio Program. She has received fellowships for her work from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows,[2] and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In her 2003 book Against Love: A Polemic, a "ragingly witty yet contemplative look at the discontents of domestic and erotic relationships, Kipnis combines portions of the slashing sexual contrarianism of Mailer, the scathing antidomestic wit of early Roseanne Barr and the coolly analytical aesthetics of early Sontag."[3]
In 2010 she published How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, which focused on scandal, including those of Eliot Spitzer, Linda Tripp, James Frey, Sol Wachtler, and Lisa Nowak; the book examined "the elaborate ways those transgressors reassure themselves that they are not bringing colossal ruin upon themselves, that their dalliances will never see the light of day".[4] "What allows for scandal in Kipnis's schema is every individual's blind spot, "a little existential joke on humankind (or in some cases, a ticking time bomb) nestled at the core of every lonely consciousness...Ostensibly about scandal, her book is most memorable as a convincing case for the ultimate unknowability of the self".[5]
Her critical essays and reviews have appeared in Slate, Harper's, Playboy, The New York Times, and Bookforum.
Controversy
In March 2015 Kipnis wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she decried a prevailing "sexual paranoia" on campuses and discussed professor-student sexual relationships and trigger warnings.[6] A group of students at Northwestern protested, demanding that the administration reaffirm its commitment to the policies that Kipnis criticized.[7] Protesters carried a mattress in reference to Emma Sulkowicz's earlier protest at Columbia University.[8] In an opinion column for The Wall Street Journal, Northwestern University president Morton O. Schapiro referred to the protest and argued for maximum speech in such conflicted situations.[9] Invoking Title IX, two graduate students filed complaints with Northwestern's Title IX office against Kipnis, arguing that her essay had had a "chilling effect" on students' ability to report sexual misconduct. Kipnis revealed the charges and details of the investigation in an essay titled "My Title IX Inquisition," including the fact that her faculty support person had himself been brought up on Title IX complaints over public statements about her case. Northwestern eventually exonerated her, after a 72-day investigation[10] Title IX complaints were also filed against Northwestern's President Schapiro over his Wall Street Journal column.,[11] but eventually dropped.
Select bibliography
Books
- Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (Minneapolis, Minn.: University Of Minnesota Press, 1993)
- Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996)
- Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003)
- The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006)
- How To Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010)
- Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014)
Essays
- Kipnis, Laura (1986). "'Refunctioning' Reconsidered: Toward a Left Popular Culture". In MacCabe, Colin (ed.). High Theory/Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 11–36.
- "Aesthetics and Foreign Policy". Social Text (15). Duke University Press: 89–98. Autumn 1986. doi:10.2307/466494. JSTOR 466494.
- "Feminism: The Political Conscience of Postmodernism?". Social Text (21). Duke University Press: 149–166. 1989. doi:10.2307/827813. JSTOR 827813.
- "It's a Wonderful Life: Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt's Long, Strange Journey from Hillbilly Entrepreneur to First Amendment Hero". Village Voice: 37–39. 31 December 1996.
- Kipnis, Laura (2001). "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler". In Harrington, Lee; Bielby, Denise (eds.). Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Malden, Mass.: Backwell. pp. 133–153.
- "Meet Playboy Sr.: Has the Once-Groundbreaking Magazine become Culturally Irrelevant?". Slate. 30 October 2003.
- "The Anxiety of (Sexual) Influence: Are Onetime "Unwanted Advances" Really a Feminist Issue?". Slate. 19 March 2004.
- "Condi's Inner Life: What Freudian Slips Do—Or Don't—Tell Us about Politicians". Slate. 26 April 2004.
- "Can Marriage Be Saved?". The Nation. 279 (1): 19. 5 July 2004.
- "Navel Gazing: Why Even Feminists are Obsessed with Fat". Slate. 5 January 2005.
- "Ladies First: The Utopian Fantasy of Deep Throat". Slate. 11 February 2005.
- "Is Porn Really Transforming Our Sex Lives?". Slate. 20 September 2005.
- "Why Aren't More Women "Opting Out"?". Slate. 21 September 2005.
- "America's Waistline: The Politics of Fat". Slate. 28 October 2005.
- "Why We Can't Live Without Them". Slate. 25 August 2010.
- "They Produce Very Useful Scapegoats. Like Dr. Laura, For Example". Slate. 1 September 2010.
- "What Tiger Woods Didn't Understand About His Mistresses". Slate. 1 September 2010.
- "Roger Clemens, James Frey, and the Thrill of Watching the Overly Ambitious Fall". Slate. 8 September 2010.
- "We're All Scandal Addicts Now; And That's a Good Thing". Slate. 15 September 2010.
- "Why is Eliot Spitzer on TV? Because Disgrace Doesn't Stick Like It Used To". The Washington Post. 3 October 2010.
- "Why Did Weiner Do It?". Slate. 9 June 2011.
- "Execs Like Emil Michael Don't Hate Women—They're Terrified of Them". Time Magazine. 20 November 2014.
- "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 27 February 2015.
- "My Title IX Inquisition". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 29 May 2015.
Reviews
- "Girl, Interrupted". Village Voice. 16 March 1999.
- "Lust and Disgust: A Short History of Prudery, Feminist and Otherwise". Harper's Magazine. 315 (1, 888): 87–91. September 2007.
- "School for Scandal: The Larger Meaning of the Sordid Little Tale". Harper's Magazine. 318 (1, 906): 73–77. March 2009.
- "Pushing The Limits: Why Is Contemporary Art Addicted to Violence?". New York Times Book Review. 14 July 2011. p. 1.
- "Amazing Disgrace". Bookforum. September–November 2011.
- "I Mean It". New York Times Book Review. 12 August 2012. p. 17.
- "Death by Self-Parody". Bookforum. December 2011 – January 2012.
- "Crazy in Love". Bookforum. April–May 2013.
- "Me, Myself, and Id: The Invention of the Narcissist". Harper's Magazine. 329 (1, 971): 76–81. August 2014.
- "Marry by 30". Slate. 9 April 2015.
References
- ^ http://www.vdb.org/artists/laura-kipnis
- ^ http://societyoffellows.umich.edu/alumni-fellows/
- ^ Publisher's Weekly (30 June 2003).
- ^ McCarthy, Ellen (26 September 2010). "Laura Kipnis's "How to Become a Scandal"". Washington Post.
- ^ Susan Dominus (September 24, 2010). "They Did What?". New York Times.
- ^ Kipnis, 27 February 2015
- ^ Goldberg, 16 March 2015
- ^ Mead, 6 April 2015
- ^ Morton, 18 March 2015
- ^ Read, Brock (31 May 2015). "Laura Kipnis Is Cleared of Wrongdoing in Title IX Complaints". Chronicle of Higher Education.
- ^ Wilson, Robin (4 June 2015). "For Northwestern, the Kipnis Case Is Painful and Personal". Chronicle of Higher Education.
Bibliography
- Goldberg, Michelle (16 March 2015). "The Laura Kipnis Melodrama". The Nation.
- Juffer, Jane (1998). At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 0814742378.
- Mead, Rebecca (6 April 2015). "Two Beds and the Burdens of Feminism". The New Yorker.
- Schapiro, Morton (18 March 2015). "The New Face of Campus Unrest". The Wall Street Journal.
External links
- "Laura Kipnis" Laura Kipnis's Website, www.LauraKipnis.com.
- "Laura Kipnis" (faculty page), School of Communication at Northwestern University.
- Laura Kipnis on twitter
- Laura Kipnis on the 7th Avenue Project radio show discussing masculinity and her book "Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation"
- "Laura Kipnis", Randomhouse.com – author page, includes brief biography.
- Laura Kipnis in the Video Data Bank
- "Laura Kipnis Biography", Electronic Arts Intermix (website). – Biographical info circa 1988.
- Laura Kipnis articles at Slate.
- "An Interview with Laura Kipnis" by Jeffrey J. Williams, Minnesota Review.
- Template:Worldcat id
- Living people
- American essayists
- American feminist writers
- Feminist studies scholars
- Feminist criticism
- Media theorists
- San Francisco Art Institute alumni
- Northwestern University faculty
- University of Michigan fellows
- NSCAD University alumni
- Sex-positive feminists
- Guggenheim Fellows
- 20th-century American writers
- 21st-century American writers
- 20th-century women writers
- 21st-century women writers
- Women essayists