Thoughts on the human condition

This past autumn has felt more uncomfortable than usual to be a woman looking at men looking at women. From Hillary Clinton’s ‘overheating’ episode (‘Does she have Parkinson’s? Is she wearing a catheter?!’) to Donald Trump’s assessment of female limbs as if they were building materials, election season finished with the male members of our new first family peering over the voting booth to check on their wives.

Siri Hustvedt has long been interested in how the way we look at the world
privileges certain political, gendered, artistic and scientific agendas, while excluding others. These dynamics are at play between a reader and a writer, a doctor and a patient, a neuroscientist and the brain she studies. A writer of novels and non-fiction (on topics from sculpture to cybernetics), Hustvedt also lectures in psychiatry and speaks eloquently about her own medically
unexplained neurological ‘shakes’. Rather a ‘perpetual outsider’ than an interdisciplinary scholar, she likes to ‘spot what the experts often fail to question’.