Faculty Highlight
Libby Nutt Williams
Annual Colloquium - 2005
Representations of Sex(uality): Pornography, Obscenity, Deviance
Laura Kipnis
Professor
Cultural Studies
Northwestern University
A cultural theorist, critic, and former video artist (Marx, the Video: A Politics of Revolting Bodies, Laura Kipnis is professor of cultural studies at Northwestern University. Her work on the politics of sexual representation intersects aesthetics, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, pornography, and politics. She is the author of Against Love: A Polemic (2003); Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (1996); and Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (1993).
In her talk, "'I'm Offended,'" Kipnis will speak on the psychodynamics of aesthetic offense by treating the 1994 documentary Crumb, which pits the notoriously vulgar counter-cultural cartoonist R. Crumb against his feminist critics. She will also examine what it means to be offended and why exactly offense is experienced as unpleasant and even threatening.
Links to other 2005 speakers:
