About this Event
Clio’s is pleased to welcome Leora Fridman for a discussion with Lauren Markham about her newest book, Bound Up: On Kink, Power and Belonging, which Joey Soloway calls “honest, informative, and often hilarious.” Bound Up begins from an exploration of Nazi kink and roleplay and takes an autotheoretical journey through how sexuality and embodied practices meet historical oppressions, touching such themes as racialization, assimilation, and the role of humor and play in more intimately engaging with trauma and power.
Particularly relevant given rising fascism and politicized discussions of trauma and power, Bound Up demands a close attention to systemic and interpersonal relationships in the present tense, presenting alternatives to supremacist and militarized victimhood narratives. Framed also by our ongoing cultural discussions of consent, Bound Up insists on the resilience of sexuality and the reparative power of kink and play, even in the context of genocide and epic despair. It asks: what kind of healing can take place in the relational and physical realm? How can intimacy contradict and complement the process of political reparations? How can we integrate shifts in victim vs oppressor roles as history unfolds?
Leora will be joined in conversation by the writer Lauren Markham, whose A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging has been termed “a remarkable, unnerving, and cautionary portrait of a global immigration crisis.” This conversation will explore overlapping themes in their work on the politics of identity, belonging, diaspora and home. After the conversation, both authors will sign copies of their books.
Leora Fridman is a writer and educator whose work has focused primarily on identity, embodiment, dis/ability and care. In addition to Bound Up, she is author of Static Palace and other works of poetry, prose and translation. Recent work appears in the Believer, Lithub, Parapraxis, Bookforum, and other outlets. She’s currently faculty in nonfiction at the New School and Director of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship.
Lauren Markham is an award-winning journalist and essayist whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and Mother Jones. She is the author of the recent A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, which won the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award Silver Prize, and the Ridenhour Prize, and was listed for a Pen America Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. Her third book, Immemorial, a treatise on climate grief and the art of memorial, will be published by Transit in 2023.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Clio's, 353 Grand Avenue, Oakland, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 35.00
