December 1, 2006

Laura Kipnis and 'The Female Thing'

"It's sometimes been said that a colonized mentality far outlasted the political conditions of colonialism; Soviet Communism crumbled virtually overnight, but the inner apparatchik lives on. So to with female progress, it appears," writes Laura Kipnis in her new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (Pantheon). In the latest chapter of the feminism wars, the acid-tongued professor of media studies at Northwestern University asserts that femininity and feminism are caught "in