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Laura Kipnis with Jeffrey J. Williams Style: An Interview with Laura Kipnis A prominent cultural critic, Laura Kipnis has turned a lively eye on the politics ofsex and love in a well-known essay on Hustler and in her recent book Against Love: A Polemic. Kipnis began, as she tells here, as a videographer, producing Your Money or Your Life (1982), Ecstasy Unlimited: The Interpénétration of Sex and Capital (2985), A Man's Woman (2988), and Marx: The Video (2990). Thereafter she has turned more to nonfiction, publishing Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (LZ ofMinnesota P, 1993), which includes essays onfeminism and postmodernism as well as three videoscripts; Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Grove, 1996; Duke UP, 1999), which discusses the complex class relations ofporn; and, as she focuses on here, Against Love (Pantheon, 2003), which stems from an essay, "Adultery," that appeared in Critical Inquiry 24 (1998). Kipnis has also published in mainstream as well as academic venues, including Harper's, the Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine. Readers of minnesota review might recall her essay in 50-51, "Public Intellectuals Do It in Style." She currently teaches in Northwestern's Radio, Television, and Film department. This interview took place on 9 May 2003 in New York City. It was conducted by Jeffrey Williams and transcribed by Laura Rotunno, then managing editor ofthe minnesota review while a PhD student at University ofMissouri, now a professor at Penn State-Altoona. Jeffrey J. Williams: I just read the proofs of Against Love last week, and it's a tour de force. You write with a lot of brio. I can see how it's consistent with your earlier work, like Ecstasy Unlimited and Bound and Gagged, in that it takes up sexuality, domestidty, and politics, but in another way ifs a departure especially in its style. How does it connect with your earlier work? Laura Kipnis: I realized after I wrote the "Adultery" essay for Critical Inquiry that one thread running through a lot of my work has involved redeeming culturally low things. I'm on some sort of cultural rescue mission, I guess. The inception of Bound and Gagged was an earlier essay on Hustler magazine, obviously the lowest of the low, culturally speaking. The adultery essay, which was the jumping off point for Against Love, also involved trying to think in a different way about another rather maligned category—"cheating "—to entertain the possibility that it might be something more than just bad behavior, to dignify something usually seen as undignified. Even my MFA thesis, back when I was a video artist, which was about mugging, involved redeeming a criminal figure, the mugger—or if not precisely redeeming , then thinking about muggers in political and economic terms, not so unlike "sodai bandits," a term that Eric Hobsbawm uses. 64 the minnesota review Williams: In Against Love, you're saying that a problem with marriage is that it isn't quite as good as it's represented to be—as one of your chapters puts it, that we live in domestic gulags. I can see how, in the age of "family values," it might be taken as an anti-marriage tract, against family values and for a kind of liberation. Kipnis: I'm squinting at the "for liberation" because I worry about falling into those simplistic binaries, transgression and liberation versus repression . I'd like it to be more complicated than that. I don't think it is simply a pro-transgression argument. My work has neverreallybeen thatinvested in some simple notion ofsexual liberation. Even the pornography book wasn't simply pro-pornography, or not in the sense that pornography is the path to some kind of sexual liberation. I've never been a sexual liberationist, even though I guess I've written a lot about sex. Williams: It seems to me that your work is contrarian, in a good sense, insofar as you take standard positions, like the anti-pornography position, and turn them around, showing how there is something else going on, for instance with Hustler that the critical reaction stems from class disdain as much...

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