May 27, 2021

Jacqueline Rose

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes world-renowned feminist scholar and cultural critic JACQUELINE ROSE—author of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and Women in Dark Times—for a discussion of her latest book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women. She'll be joined in conversation by writer DAYNA TORTORICI, co-editor-in-chief of n+1. 

Details

Why has violence, and especially violence against women, become so much more prominent and visible across the world? To explore this question, Jacqueline Rose tracks the multiple forms of today’s violence—historic and intimate, public and private—as they spread throughout our social fabric, offering a new, provocative account of violence in our time.

From trans rights and #MeToo to the sexual harassment of migrant women, from the trial of Oscar Pistorius to domestic violence in lockdown, from the writing of Roxanne Gay to Hisham Mitar and Han Kang, she casts her net wide. What obscene pleasure in violence do so many male leaders of the Western world unleash in their supporters? Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence?

On Violence and On Violence Against Women is a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.

About Author(s)

Jacqueline Rose is one of the world’s leading feminist literary and cultural critics. She is codirector of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, cofounder of Independent Jewish Voices, and a fellow of the Britsh Academy. Rose is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and The Guardian, among many other publications. She is the celebrated author of Sexuality in the Field of VisionThe Haunting of Sylvia PlathWomen in Dark Times, and Mothers.

Dayna Tortorici is a writer and co-editor-in-chief of n+1, a magazine of literature, culture, and politics based in New York. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic MonthlyThe GuardianHarper's MagazineThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere.