Laura Kipnis

So I found this blog entry that I wrote last year on my old PRIVATE xanga and wondered what my point was in keeping it private. Thus I would like to share this food for thought with my readers..

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"So we all know that I’m probably the president of the Dr. Kim fan club, but I don’t think people really understand what an amazing professor she is. If it wasn’t for her, I would probably still be stuck in the same mindset society, my parents, and the media have implanted in my brain over and over again. But she is my Jesus! And she came at just the right moment in my life..

All her classes are pretty radical (radical meaning cool AND politically radical) but one that has shaped my consciousness more so than any other was this class I took with her last year called feminist theory in sexuality. It exposed me to the field of queer theory - which basically aims to deconstruct all normative notions of sexuality, marriage, family, and love (to say the least). Anyway, a question I’m going to pose to you is this: why do you think the state has a significant interest in regulating love? The divorce rate in our country is obscene, about 40%. Almost HALF of all marriages end in divorce. Why do you think this happens? The way we think about love is completely tied to this ‘web of mutuality’ (stole that from Kipnis) and monogamy all within this language and culture of capitalism. What if we were able to let people love on their own terms? I am in no way discrediting monogamous love, and in no way advocating cheating and promiscuity. But why do moral judgments have to be made when one deviates from monogamous love...non-heterosexual love...non-romantic love...non-procreative love...

Love in any way YOU think it should mean."

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And just in case you're interested, here is a review from salon.com of Kipnis' argument for her article Against Love: A Polemic

In the Kipnis marriage universe, coupled partners learn to tolerate each other, but barely. They're people with mutual needs that have to be met, but to meet them, you usually have to guess what they are first, unless, of course, they're enumerated for you regularly in a shrill lecture. And forget the fact that sexual desire in human beings is disorderly and unpredictable: We're expected to pick a partner and stick with him or her forever, claiming that we have achieved "mature love" when the sex becomes boring or nonexistent.

The point is that marriage, which ostensibly jerks us into a lockstep of manageability that should ideally last a lifetime, serves society more than it serves the human spirit. And that's where the idea of adultery as civil disobedience comes in. Kipnis isn't interested in feelings here: What she really cares about are social patterns. (More than once she sends out a message to the aggrieved partners of cheating spouses everywhere -- a shout-out along the lines of Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain.") And adultery, for all its bad juju, does have its good points.

For one thing, it completely confounds your sense of time, and, as Kipnis wisely observes, "Time organizes us as selves, from the inside out ... Even small protests against time-management are worth some attention, because screw around with time and, in fact, you're adulterating the very glue of orderly social existence."

Adultery is a form of risk-taking, a renegade act, a reaffirmation that, OK, we may be married, but we're not dead. We're humans with "messy subjectivities." Adultery is a kind of performance art (Kipnis refers to it, more than once, as "acting out") in which "conventions are defied; chance elements introduced; new viewpoints engineered."

I recommend any reading by Laura Kipnis! She'll definitely give you a perspective that you don't want to hear, but can't help but understand.