the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Maud Lavin

Bring It On: New Images of Aggressive Women in Art and Mass Culture

This lecture took place on October 5th, 2010 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

In this lecture Bring It On, Maud Lavin discusses the new and mainly positive images of aggressive women in U.S.-based art and mass culture and questions what relation these bear to women’s lived experience and socio-political contexts.  Focii here include women-in-sports Hollywood movies like surfer-girl film Blue Crush and cheerleading comedy classic Bring It On and art works such as Marlene McCarty’s Murder Girls series.

About Maud Lavin

Maud Lavin is a professor of Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Her most recent book is the just-published Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women (MIT).  Earlier titles include The Business of Holidays (Monacelli/Random House), Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design (MIT), and Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Yale).

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.