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Lauren Elkin
Lauren Elkin is most recently the author of No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK translator of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel, The Inseparables (Vintage). Her previous book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (Chatto/FSG) was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the New York Times, and Frieze, among others. Her next book, Art Monsters, will be out in July 2023 (Chatto/FSG). She lives in London.

Articles Available Online


Maria Gainza’s ‘Optic Nerve’

Book Review

May 2019

Lauren Elkin

Book Review

May 2019

In his foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, on the pleasures of philosophy, and of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in particular, Brian Massumi writes:  ...

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Issue No. 8

Barking From the Margins: On écriture féminine

Lauren Elkin

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Issue No. 8

 I. Two moments in May May 2, 2011. The novelists Siri Hustvedt and Céline Curiol are giving a talk...

A few years ago, I read Revolution at Point Zero (2012), Silvia Federici’s career-spanning collection of essays on reproductive work and domestic labour The essays articulate, in anger and clarity, what I and other women of my generation have begun, stutteringly, to understand: that the mass introduction of women into the waged workforce has not changed the fact that domestic chores outside of paid work continue to be conducted by women, nor the fact that this work remains invisible, or if seen at all, utterly devalued   Federici, who was born in Parma, Italy, in 1942, has been writing about these issues for almost 50 years She was a founding member of the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign, an international effort to draw attention to the unpaid labour of women in the home; after she moved to Brooklyn to teach at Hofstra University on Long Island, she became centrally involved in the New York Wages for Housework Committee She detailed that organisation’s history in Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, Documents (2017), which also reproduced her 1975 pamphlet, Wages Against Housework, famous for its provocative opening lines, ‘They say it is love We say it is unwaged work’   I came late to Federici’s theorising, but once I found her, I engaged with as much of her writing as I could The collection of essays in Revolution at Point Zero encompasses Federici’s early writings on feminism and housework alongside later pieces on the impact of globalisation on social reproduction – that is, the reproduction of everyday life – on the redistribution of housework onto the shoulders of immigrant women, and on the role of the commons in contemporary society   Federici’s work on capitalism’s war on women’s bodies is encapsulated by two books on witch-hunts, Caliban and the Witch (2004), which argued that the exploitation of women was a central element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018), which revisited the subject matter following the return of witch-hunting in many parts of the world   Her recent research on the commons, collected in Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism

Contributor

August 2014

Lauren Elkin

Contributor

August 2014

Lauren Elkin is most recently the author of No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute (Semiotext(e)/Fugitives) and the UK...

The End of Francophonie: The Politics of French Literature

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Issue No. 2

Lauren Elkin

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Issue No. 2

I. We were a couple of minutes late for the panel we’d hoped to attend. The doors were closed and there was a surly-looking...

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Art

November 2012

Pending performance: Cally Spooner’s live production

Isabella Maidment

Art

November 2012

It’s 1957 and the press release still isn’t written[1] An actress dressed in black overalls stands on a theatrically...

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Issue No. 20

Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 20

    As a bookish schoolchild in Galilee, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was invited to compose, and read...

Interview

March 2014

Interview with John Smith

Tom Harrad

Interview

March 2014

In 1976, whilst still a student at the Royal College of Art in London, John Smith made a short...

 

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