Olivia Laing

"Astute and consistently surprising critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

A Book about Freedom

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Karolina

Sexual freedom is threatening, unruly. It's no accident that authoritarian regimes, then and now, crack down on homosexuality and abortion, returning each gender to their rigid, pre-ordained duties of procreation, or that these limitations occur as a prelude to more dehumanising acts, the purges and liquidations of genocide.

How do you convey the systemisation of violence against women if there is a conspiracy of silence around it, if it is so tolerated and sustained as to have merged with the fabric of ordinary reality?

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