Reforming the Female Form with Lauren Elkin and Alice Blackhurst

A conversation with Lauren Elkin and Alice Blackhurst at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 31/10/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom. The female body, taken art historically, is an invention of the male gaze. Forged and fictionalized by male hands, how can women offer a new vision of themselves? With author and critic Lauren Elkin, learn how feminist artists have used art as a tool of resistance, inserting themselves into the very artistic lineage responsible for their oppression. In new work Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Elkin proposes an alternative narrative of art history, painting a vivid portrait of art as a celebration of beauty, excess, sentimentality, touch, and the politics of the body. She appears in conversation with art historian and visual culture expert Alice Blackhurst. About the speakers: Lauren Elkin is the author most recently of Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, which redefines monstrosity as a key element in feminist aesthetics; it's "destined to become a new classic," according to Chris Kraus. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables After twenty years in Paris, she is now based in London. Alice Blackhurst is a writer, academic, and the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image recently shortlisted for the 2023 R Gapper Best Book in French Studies Prize. In 2024 she will publish The Lover Reread, about revisiting Marguerite Duras’s 1984 novel The Lover with Columbia University Press. Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.