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.

Career 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. and the National Endowment for the Arts. In her early career she worked as a video artist.

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.

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. Kipnis claimed that having sex with professors was "practically on the syllabus" when she was an undergrad, and she implied that as a professor she had dated at least one of her own graduate students. The essay was later included in the Best American Essays of 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen.

Two students filed a complaint with Northwestern's Title IX office against Kipnis following the essay. 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.

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 but rather 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, alleging invasion of privacy and defamation. Kipnis has publicly stated, "In case there’s any confusion, Unwanted Advances remains in print and I stand by everything in the book." Unwanted Advances was named one of the Wall Street Journal'''s ten best non-fiction books of 2017. Jennifer Senior wrote in the New York Times, “Few people have taken on the excesses of university culture with the brio that Kipnis has. Her anger gives her argument the energy of a live cable.”

In addition to speaking on college campuses around the country about issues related to feminism, free speech, #MeToo, campus sexual politics, and gender equity, in 2017 Kipnis participated in a New York Times Magazine roundtable on the subject of "Work, Fairness, Sex and Ambition" together with Anita Hill and Soledad O’Brien. Kipnis said:Here’s a historical and political way of looking at the current moment. There have been, roughly speaking, two divergent tendencies in the struggle for women’s rights that come together in the issue of workplace harassment, which is why I think this all seems so significant. If you look at the history of feminism, going back to the 19th century, you’ve got, on the one hand, the struggle for what I’d call civic rights: the right to employment, the right to vote, to enter politics and public life. On the other side, there’s the struggle for women to have autonomy over our own bodies, meaning access to birth control, activism around rape, outlawing marital rape, and the fight for abortion rights. What we’re seeing now is the incomplete successes in both of these areas converging. We’ve never entirely attained civic equality. We’ve never entirely attained autonomy over our bodies. Which is why the right not to be sexually harassed in the workplace is the next important frontier in equality for women.

New York Review of Books controversy Kipnis wrote, in a 2018 New York Times opinion piece "The Perils of Publishing in a #MeToo Moment" protesting the Books' firing of editor Ian Buruma: "One consequence of Mr. Buruma’s departure will be a new layer of safeguards we won’t even know are in place, including safeguards from the sort of intellectual risks The New York Review of Books always stood for."

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, 2017) Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2022)

Essays

"The Perils of Publishing in a #MeToo Moment". The New York Times''. 25 September 2018. "Why Are Scholars Such Snitches?", Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2022

Reviews