Laura Kipnis 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. [1] 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 and free speech policies in higher education.
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, [2] and the National Endowment for the Arts. 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." [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 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 .
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. [6] The essay was later included in the Best American Essays of 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. [7]
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. [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] 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. [10] 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. [11] Title IX complaints were also filed against Northwestern's President Schapiro over his Wall Street Journal column. [12]
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. [13] 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. [14] Kipnis has publicly stated, "In case there’s any confusion, Unwanted Advances remains in print and I stand by everything in the book." [15] Unwanted Advances was named one of the Wall Street Journal's ten best non-fiction books of 2017. [16] 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.” [17]
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. [18]
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." [19]
Title IX is the most commonly used name for the landmark federal civil rights law in the United States that was enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government. This is Public Law No. 92‑318, 86 Stat. 235, codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688.
Sexual harassment is a type of harassment involving the use of explicit or implicit sexual overtones, including the unwelcome and inappropriate promises of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. Sexual harassment can be physical and/or verbal. Sexual harassment includes a range of actions from verbal transgressions to sexual abuse or assault. Harassment can occur in many different social settings such as the workplace, the home, school, or religious institutions. Harassers or victims can be of any gender.
Colin McGinn is a British philosopher. He has held teaching posts and professorships at University College London, the University of Oxford, Rutgers University, and the University of Miami.
Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co., 130 F.3d 1287, was the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit in the United States. It was filed in 1988 on behalf of Lois Jenson and other female workers at the Eveleth Taconite mine in Eveleth, Minnesota on the state's northern Mesabi Range, which is part of the Iron Range.
Peter Ludlow, who also writes under the pseudonyms Urizenus Sklar and EJ Spode, is an American philosopher. He is noted for interdisciplinary work on the interface of linguistics and philosophy—in particular on the philosophical foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative linguistics and on the foundations of the theory of meaning in linguistic semantics. He has worked on the application of analytic philosophy of language to topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic, among other areas.
Sexual harassment in education in the United States is an unwelcome behavior of a sexual nature that interferes with an American student's ability to learn, study, work or participate in school activities. It is common in middle and high schools in the United States. Sexual or gender harassment is a form of discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Sexual harassment involves a range of behavior from mild annoyances to unwanted touching and, in extreme cases, rape or other sexual assault.
Campus sexual assault is the sexual assault, including rape, of a student while attending an institution of higher learning, such as a college or university. The victims of such assaults are more likely to be female, but any gender can be victimized. Estimates of sexual assault, which vary based on definitions and methodology, generally find that somewhere between 19 and 27% of college women and 6–8% of college men are sexually assaulted during their time in college.
Annie Elizabeth Clark is a women's rights and civil rights activist in the United States. She was one of the lead complainants of the 2013 Title IX and Clery Act charges lodged against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, claiming that the institution violated the law by the way they handled sexual assault complaints. Clark and Andrea Pino, then a fellow UNC student and also a victim of sexual assault, launched a nationwide campaign to use Title IX complaints to force U.S. universities to address sexual assault and related problems more aggressively. Clark is co-founder with Pino of End Rape on Campus, an advocacy group for victims of campus sexual assault.
Andrea Lynn Pino (born February 15, 1992) is an American women's rights and civil rights activist, author, and a public scholar on issues of global gender based violence, media framing of violence, gender and sexuality, and narratives of survivorhood. She is the queer daughter of Cuban refugees and has stated that she is a survivor of sexual assault.
Toni Bentley is an Australian-German dancer and writer. Bentley was born in Perth, Western Australia.
Angie Epifano, a former student at Amherst College, gained widespread media attention and millions of page views after she wrote an essay on her personal experience of sexual assault that was published in the Amherst student newspaper, The Amherst Student. After the publication of her essay, Amherst College began investigating its sexual assault procedures, and women from other college campuses in the United States came forward to file federal complaints under Title IX and to form groups to reduce sexual assault on college campuses.
Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is a queer theorist, art critic and sports writer.
Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) (2014–2015) was a work of endurance/performance art which Emma Sulkowicz conducted as a senior thesis during the final year of a visual arts degree at Columbia University in New York City.
Katherine Clare Timpf is an American libertarian columnist, television personality, reporter, and comedian. She is currently a regular panelist/co-host of Fox News Channel's Gutfeld! and appears as a contributor on various other Fox News shows. In 2017, Timpf co-hosted Fox News Specialists alongside Eric Bolling and Eboni K. Williams. As of June 2019, she hosts the Fox Nation show Sincerely, Kat.
In April 2013, Emma Sulkowicz, an American fourth-year visual arts major at Columbia University in New York City, filed a complaint with Columbia University requesting expulsion of fellow fourth-year student and German national, Paul Nungesser, alleging he had raped Sulkowicz in her dorm room on August 27, 2012. Nungesser was found not responsible by a university inquiry.
Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus is a 2017 book by the American cultural critic and feminist intellectual Laura Kipnis, published by Harper. The book is largely based on the case of the philosopher Peter Ludlow, who resigned from Northwestern University after a university disciplinary body found that he sexually harassed two students. Ludlow denied any wrongdoing and said the relationship was consensual. A central argument of the book is that "the stifling sense of sexual danger sweeping American campuses" and "neo-sentimentality about female vulnerability" do not empower women, but impede the fight for gender equality.
#MeToo is a social movement and awareness campaign against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture, in which people publicize their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment. The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in 2006, on Myspace, by sexual assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke. The hashtag #MeToo was used starting in 2017 as a way to draw attention to the magnitude of the problem.
The 2017–18 United States political sexual scandals saw a heightened period of allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault, and resulted in the subsequent firings and resignations of American politicians. Some of the allegations are linked to the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases starting in October 2017 amid the wider MeToo movement.
Sexual harassment in the military is unwanted sexual behaviour experienced as threatening, offensive, or otherwise upsetting, which occurs in a military setting.
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