Analyzing some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century through the lens of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, author Olivia Laing explores gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights revolution as it relates to bodily rights in her newest book Everybody: A Book About Freedom. To discuss her life and latest work, Laing was joined by MacArthur fellow Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts, The Art of Cruelty). They discussed freedom and the celebration of the ways that bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
Featured Book
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Everybody
By Olivia Laing
Published by WW Norton
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.
Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century—among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.
Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
