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.
Contents
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
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Reviews
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References
- ↑ http://www.vdb.org/artists/laura-kipnis
- ↑ http://societyoffellows.umich.edu/alumni-fellows/
- ↑ Publisher's Weekly (30 June 2003).
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- ↑ Kipnis, 27 February 2015
- ↑ Goldberg, 16 March 2015
- ↑ Mead, 6 April 2015
- ↑ Morton, 18 March 2015
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Bibliography
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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"[dead link], Electronic Arts Intermix (website). – Biographical info circa 1988.
- Laura Kipnis articles at Slate.
- "An Interview with Laura Kipnis" by Jeffrey J. Williams, Minnesota Review.
- Works by or about Laura Kipnis in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Articles with dead external links from March 2010
- 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