For a provocateur, Laura Kipnis can be surprisingly sincere. The 49-year-old Northwestern University communications professor has made her reputation subverting conventional wisdom, wishes, faiths, and lies—especially about American sexuality. In her 1996 book Bound and Gagged she argued for the liberatory potential of smut; in Against Love: A Polemic (2003) she lit into widely cherished assumptions about monogamy. Her lively new book—The Female Thing, set for publication in October—launches a leftist critique of the present moment in American feminism, from the movement’s deals with various devils to sentimental notions of femininity still tucked away in some progressive women’s minds like a secret stash of chocolates. Kipnis claims her job is to demolish cultural catechisms, not replace them, but she harbors her own sentimental notion: an attachment to socialist/liberationist ideals of the 60s. This destroyer of worlds is also a utopian. But then, so was Jonathan Swift.
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Laura Kipnis: I was thinking about what the impasses seem to be, still, in gender progress, and when I started thinking about them they kind of grouped that way. It was an aha moment that got the book going. I had decided that I should write a book that was a follow-up to Against Love, dealing with gender. So then I spent about a year trying to put together an outline and think about whether there was anything I had to say about women and gender that hadn’t been said.
LK: A lot of what’s written about women strives very hard to be optimistic and say the good news. What isn’t said, by feminists or progressives, is the bad news. This sense of impediment that comes from within as opposed to without. That there are elements of the psyche that are not progressive and that are aligned with conservatism—or worse, with some kind of love of authority or subjugation. So that was the challenge of this book, to say those things without also being conservative.
TA: What you say about the trajectory of feminism reminded me of the Irish Republican Army—how it became politically regressive.
LK: I have to tell you I did tone that down because it was a bit of a rant in the first version. When [the book] asks, Did feminists play the unwitting shills to the new global economy? I thought that was a pretty Marxist moment.
TA: You can be very acid about family—and especially about children. Why?
LK: I do. In both these books I’m trying to reframe things and tell the story in a less conventional way. You know, the usual ways of talking about love and women are so tedious and so full of disavowal, it wasn’t hard to reframe them.
