Laura Kipnis

Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics features new essays and poetry from some of today’s best writers and artists, along with introducing new talent, to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of culture and politics. This inaugural issue of Liberties includes: Michael Ignatieff on liberalism and the environment; Laura Kipnis cheers transgression; David Grossman on literature and peace; Ramachandra Guha on the Indian tragedy; Thomas Chatterton Williams on the real James Baldwin; Mark Lilla on the power of indifference; Helen Vendler on Yeats' The Second Coming; Sean Wilentz on abolition and American origins; Adam Zagajeweski on Gustav Mahler; James Wolcott on America’s modern Jacobins; Andrea Marcolongo on how language defines us; Eli Lake on the birth of American unexceptionalism; Sally Satel on the riddle of addiction; Moshe Halbertal on creating a democratic Jewish state; David Thomson on the wonder of Terrence Malick; Julius Margolin’s memoir confronting hatred; Clara Collier on plague literature; Shawn McCreesh’s personal look at a youthful community of addiction; new poetry from the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück, Joshua Bennett, and Hannah Sullivan; and, Leon Wieseltier (editor) and Celeste Marcus (managing editor).

“A Meteor of Intelligent Substance”“Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is”"Liberties is THE place to be." Liberties, a journal of Culture and Politics, is essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues and causes of our time. Liberties features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and leaders throughout the world; new poetry; and, introduces the next generation of writers and voices to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today’s culture and politics. In this issue of Liberties: Laura Kipnis on Genders Without Fear; Dorian Abbot’s call to arms - Science to Politics: Drop Dead; Bernard Henri-Lévy on What is Reading?; Bruce D. Jones on today’s reality of Taiwan, China, America; David Greenberg examines The War on Objectivity; Helen Vendler on Art vs. Stereotypes through the work of Marianne Moore; Ingrid Rowland captures Thucydides on our Conflicts; David A. Bell exposes the Greatest Enemy of Democracy in France; Robert Cooper reports on Myanmar, Atrocity in the Garden of Eden; Steven M. Nadler on Bans and Excommunications, Then and Now; Morten Høi Jensen on the State of Literary Biography; Clara Collier on Women with Whips — Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck; Celeste Marcus on Unknown Heroes of Modern Art; Leon Wieseltier reveals Christianism in Modern Politics; and, new poetry from Durs Grünbein, Nathaniel Mackey, and Haris Vlavianos.

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world? COVID produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will the cultural afterlife of Covid-19 be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love in the intervening decades, even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did to gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional siloes or coupled cocoons despite the fact that, pre-Covid, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans? Just as COVID revealed the nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis (often hilariously) weaves her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences and those of others against a larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and #BLM, even as she maps their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.

Feminism is broken: the current attempts to protect women from sexual abuse on campus, and on line. Regulation is replacing education, and women's hard-won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by well-meaning bureaucrats. In Unwanted Advances, passionate feminist Kipnis, find the object of a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an essay about sexual paranoia on campus. In response she starts to question women's role in national debates over free speech and "safe spaces". She explores the astonishing netherworld of accused professors and students, campus witch hunts, rigged investigations, and demonstrates the chilling effect of this new sexual McCarthyism on higher education. Without minimizing the seriousness of campus assault, Kipnis argues for more honesty: a timely critique of feminist paternalism and the covert sexual conservatism of hook-up culture.

A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 From a highly regarded feminist cultural critic and professor comes a polemic arguing that the stifling sense of sexual danger sweeping American campuses doesn't empower women, it impedes the fight for gender equality. Feminism is broken, argues Laura Kipnis, if anyone thinks the sexual hysteria overtaking American campuses is a sign of gender progress. A committed feminist, Kipnis was surprised to find herself the object of a protest march by student activists at her university for writing an essay about sexual paranoia on campus. Next she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a "hostile environment." Defying confidentiality strictures, she wrote a whistleblowing essay about the ensuing seventy-two-day investigation, which propelled her to the center of national debates over free speech, "safe spaces," and the vast federal overreach of Title IX. In the process she uncovered an astonishing netherworld of accused professors and students, campus witch hunts, rigged investigations, and Title IX officers run amuck. Drawing on interviews and internal documents, Unwanted Advances demonstrates the chilling effect of this new sexual McCarthyism on intellectual freedom. Without minimizing the seriousness of campus assault, Kipnis argues for more honesty about the sexual realities and ambivalences hidden behind the notion of "rape culture." Instead, regulation is replacing education, and women's hard-won right to be treated as consenting adults is being repealed by well-meaning bureaucrats. Unwanted Advances is a risk-taking, often darkly funny interrogation of feminist paternalism, the covert sexual conservatism of hook-up culture, and the institutionalized backlash of holding men alone responsible for mutually drunken sex. It's not just compulsively readable, it will change the national conversation.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice We all relish a good scandal. Why do people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why do we so enjoy watching them? The motifs are classic--revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness--though the pitfalls are ones we all negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deception--the necessary ingredients--are our collective plight. How to Become a Scandal is "an extremely smart, funny, acid, and beautifully written meditation on a scary truth that we all try desperately to ignore" (David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto).

From the author of the acclaimed Against Love comes a pointed, audacious, and witty examination of the state of the female psyche in the post-post-feminist world of the twenty-first century. Women remain caught between feminism and femininity, between self-affirmation and an endless quest for self-improvement, between playing an injured party and claiming independence. Rather than blaming the usual suspects--men, the media--Kipnis takes a hard look at culprits closer to home, namely women themselves. Kipnis serves up the gory details of the mutual displeasure between men and women in painfully hilarious detail. Is anatomy destiny after all? An ambitious and original reassessment of feminism and women's ambivalence about it, The Female Thing breathes provocative new life into that age-old question.

An analysis of the social ramifications of adultery examines its cultural significance, considering that adulterers may pose valid political questions about social contracts and offering a utopian vision that challenges the modern purposes of fidelity. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

This text challenges the position that pornography perpetuates misogyny and sex crimes. It opens with the case of a man convicted of conspiring to make a snuff film and sentenced to 33 years for trading fantasies with undercover cops. It argues that criminalizing fantasy has dire consequences.

In "Ecstasy Unlimited", Laura Kipnis provides a collection of essays on popular culture, politics, aesthetics, feminism, and postmodernism, along with complete scripts from three of her videotapes. These essays, written from her perspective as a practising artist, in tandem with her videoscripts, are singular in bringing a wide range of theoretical sophistication to film and video studies. Kipnis challenges political and aesthetic orthodoxies. Her interpretations take risks at a number of levels, and do not easily fit into established disciplines and categories. Extensively illustrated with stills from her videotapes, "Ecstasy Unlimited" examines everyday life and popular culture produced by consumer capitalism in ironic - and, at times, very funny - ways. Laura Kipnis is a video artist and theorist whose work has been shown widely in the United States and Europe. Her latest video production is "Marx: the Video". She has written extensively on the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, feminism, and popular culture. This book is intended for students and academics of media studies, cultural politics.

A unique collection of essays on popular culture, politics, aesthetics, feminism, and postmodernism, along with complete scripts from three of Kipnis' videotapes." Laura Kipnis has made the leap from artist to theorist (or was it the other way around?) making videos which are informed by theory and writing essays that have and edge of the practice of everyday art. The book contains the scripts for three of Kipnis' videotapes and several essays which range form a critique of theories of the avant garde to colonialism. The best of the group has to be '(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,' which is an amazing argument for the radical potential of Hustler magazine based on an analysis of the notion of disgust. It's a stretch, but a well-argued and intriguing stretch. Kipnis' position on avant-garde film and video is also an articulate call for the merits of popular culture as the basis from which to build a contestatory cinema/video practice." -Film Maker