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Laura Kipnis
Laura Kipnis (born 1956) is an American cultural critic, essayist, educator, and former video artist. 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 emerita 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, and free speech policies in higher education.
Kipnis was born in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up on the South Side, where her father owned a shoe store.
She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute; and a Master of Fine Arts degree 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. In her early career she worked as a video artist.
She has been assistant professor, associate professor, and is now full professor at Northwestern University. She taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and as a visiting professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the University of British Columbia.
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, The Guardian, and Bookforum.
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Laura Kipnis
Laura Kipnis (born 1956) is an American cultural critic, essayist, educator, and former video artist. 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 emerita 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, and free speech policies in higher education.
Kipnis was born in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up on the South Side, where her father owned a shoe store.
She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute; and a Master of Fine Arts degree 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. In her early career she worked as a video artist.
She has been assistant professor, associate professor, and is now full professor at Northwestern University. She taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and as a visiting professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the University of British Columbia.
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, The Guardian, and Bookforum.