Laura Kipnis

Laura Kipnis is an American cultural critic, academic and essayist. A prominent feminist intellectual, her 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 professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, where she teaches filmmaking. She is unmarried and has no children.

Career

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.

Work

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

Essays

Reviews

References

  1. ↑ http://www.vdb.org/artists/laura-kipnis
  2. ↑ http://societyoffellows.umich.edu/alumni-fellows/
  3. ↑ Publisher's Weekly (30 June 2003).
  4. ↑ McCarthy, Ellen (26 September 2010). "Laura Kipnis's "How to Become a Scandal"". Washington Post.
  5. ↑ Susan Dominus (September 24, 2010). "They Did What?". New York Times.
  6. ↑ Kipnis, 27 February 2015
  7. ↑ Goldberg, 16 March 2015
  8. ↑ Mead, 6 April 2015
  9. ↑ Morton, 18 March 2015
  10. ↑ Read, Brock (31 May 2015). "Laura Kipnis Is Cleared of Wrongdoing in Title IX Complaints". Chronicle of Higher Education.
  11. ↑ Wilson, Robin (4 June 2015). "For Northwestern, the Kipnis Case Is Painful and Personal". Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bibliography

External links

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