Laura Kipnis

Laura Kipnis (born 1956) is an American cultural critic and essayist. 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. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, where she teaches filmmaking. In recent years she has become known for debating sexual harassment policies.

Career

Kipnis was born in Chicago, Illinois. She 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, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been assistant professor, associate professor, and is now full professor at Northwestern University.

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."

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". "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".

Her essays and reviews have appeared in Slate, Harper's, Playboy, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Bookforum.

Writings about sexual harassment policies

In March 2015, after Northwestern University professor Peter Ludlow had been accused of sexual harassment, Kipnis wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she decried "sexual paranoia" on campuses and discussed professor-student sexual relationships and trigger warnings. A group of students at Northwestern protested Kipnis's piece, demanding that the administration reaffirm its commitment to the sexual harassment policies that Kipnis criticized. 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. Two students "took issue with the piece, saying Kipnis was describing a real-life scenario and that her facts were off. They accused Kipnis of retaliatory behavior and creating a hostile environment". They filed a complaint with Northwestern's Title IX office, arguing that her essay had a "chilling effect" on students' ability to report sexual harassment. The school opened an investigation into the case. Kipnis discussed the charges and details of the investigation of those complaints in an essay titled "My Title IX Inquisition," noting that her faculty support person had also been brought up on Title IX complaints over public statements about her case. Northwestern eventually exonerated her. Title IX complaints were also filed against Northwestern's President Schapiro over his Wall Street Journal column.

Kipnis's 2017 book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus discusses the Ludlow case and argues that sexual harassment policies do not empower women and impede the fight for gender equality. One of the students who had brought the Title IX complaints against Ludlow initiated a lawsuit naming Kipnis and her publisher, HarperCollins, and alleging invasion of privacy, defamation, and other charges relating to the book.

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)
• Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (New York: HarperCollins, April 2017)

Essays

• Laura Kipnis: High Theory/Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 1986, 'Refunctioning' Reconsidered: Toward a Left Popular Culture, S. 11–36. 
• Aesthetics and Foreign Policy. In: Social Text. Nr. 15. Duke University Press, S. 89–98, doi:10.2307/466494, JSTOR:466494. 
• Feminism: The Political Conscience of Postmodernism? In: Social Text. Nr. 21. Duke University Press, 1989, S. 149–166, 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. In: Village Voice. 31. Dezember 1996, S. 37–39. 
• Laura Kipnis: Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Backwell, Malden, Mass. 2001, (Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler, S. 133–153. 
• Meet Playboy Sr.: Has the Once-Groundbreaking Magazine become Culturally Irrelevant? In: Slate. 30. Oktober 2003 (slate.com). 
• The Anxiety of (Sexual) Influence: Are Onetime "Unwanted Advances" Really a Feminist Issue? In: Slate. 19. März 2004 (slate.com). 
• Condi's Inner Life: What Freudian Slips Do—Or Don't—Tell Us about Politicians. In: Slate. 26. April 2004 (slate.com). 
• Can Marriage Be Saved? In: The Nation. 279. Jahrgang, Nr. 1, 5. Juli 2004, S. 19 (thenation.com). 
• Navel Gazing: Why Even Feminists are Obsessed with Fat. In: Slate. 5. Januar 2005 (slate.com). 
• Ladies First: The Utopian Fantasy of Deep Throat. In: Slate. 11. Februar 2005 (slate.com). 
• Is Porn Really Transforming Our Sex Lives? In: Slate. 20. September 2005 (slate.com). 
• Why Aren't More Women "Opting Out"? In: Slate. 21. September 2005 (slate.com). 
• America's Waistline: The Politics of Fat. In: Slate. 28. Oktober 2005 (slate.com). 
• Why We Can't Live Without Them. In: Slate. 25. August 2010 (slate.com). 
• They Produce Very Useful Scapegoats. Like Dr. Laura, For Example. In: Slate. 1. September 2010 (slate.com). 
• What Tiger Woods Didn't Understand About His Mistresses. In: Slate. 1. September 2010 (slate.com). 
• Roger Clemens, James Frey, and the Thrill of Watching the Overly Ambitious Fall. In: Slate. 8. September 2010 (slate.com). 
• We're All Scandal Addicts Now; And That's a Good Thing. In: Slate. 15. September 2010 (slate.com). 
• Why is Eliot Spitzer on TV? Because Disgrace Doesn't Stick Like It Used To In: The Washington Post, 3 October 2010 
• Why Did Weiner Do It? In: Slate. 9. Juni 2011 (slate.com). 
• Vorlage:Cite magazine
• Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe. In: The Chronicle of Higher Education. 27. Februar 2015 (chronicle.com). 
• My Title IX Inquisition. In: The Chronicle of Higher Education. 29. Mai 2015 (chronicle.com). 
• Vorlage:Cite magazine

Reviews

• Girl, Interrupted. In: Village Voice. 16. März 1999 (villagevoice.com). 
• Lust and Disgust: A Short History of Prudery, Feminist and Otherwise. In: Harper's Magazine. 315. Jahrgang, Nr. 1,888, September 2007, S. 87–91. 
• School for Scandal: The Larger Meaning of the Sordid Little Tale. In: Harper's Magazine. 318. Jahrgang, Nr. 1,906, März 2009, S. 73–77. 
• Pushing The Limits: Why Is Contemporary Art Addicted to Violence? In: New York Times Book Review, 14 July 2011, S. 1 
• Amazing Disgrace. In: Bookforum. (bookforum.com). 
• I Mean It In: New York Times Book Review, 12 August 2012, S. 17 
• Death by Self-Parody. In: Bookforum. (bookforum.com). 
• Crazy in Love. In: Bookforum. (bookforum.com). 
• Me, Myself, and Id: The Invention of the Narcissist. In: Harper's Magazine. 329. Jahrgang, Nr. 1,971, August 2014, S. 76–81. 
• Marry by 30. In: Slate. 9. April 2015 (slate.com). 
• Vorlage:Cite magazine

Bibliography

• Michelle Goldberg: The Laura Kipnis Melodrama. In: The Nation. 16. März 2015 (thenation.com). 
• Jane Juffer: At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life. NYU Press, New York 1998, ISBN 0-8147-4237-8. 
• Rebecca Mead: Two Beds and the Burdens of Feminism. In: The New Yorker. 6. April 2015 (newyorker.com). 
• Morton Schapiro: The New Face of Campus Unrest. In: The Wall Street Journal. 18. März 2015 (wsj.com). 

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 in the Video Data Bank
• "Laura Kipnis Biography", Electronic Arts Intermix (website). – Biographical info circa 1988.
• "An Interview with Laura Kipnis" by Jeffrey J. Williams, Minnesota Review.
• Laura Kipnis on "Eight Books That Made Me" podcast