The Judith Center Book Club Session 04 will focus on Sylvère Lotringer’s Mad Like Artaud (2015) as part of a larger foray into considering how the idea of “madness” is weaponized by authoritarian powers to control and silo subjugated groups.

According to the University of Minnesota Press, Lotringer explores the life of French dramatist, poet, actor, and theorist Antonin Artaud, whose “madness, like the plague, is contagious, and everyone, from his psychiatrists to his disciples, family, and critics, everyone who gets close to Artaud, seems to participate in his delirium. Sylvère Lotringer explores various embodiments of this shared delirium through what Artaud called ‘mental dramas’—a series of confrontations with his witnesses or ‘persecutors’ where we uncover the raw delirium at work, even in Lotringer himself.”

Using the author’s interview-focused publication as a point of departure, we will investigate “madness” as a relational dynamic, and the ways it is used as a politic of defiance to systems of order. This reading will serve as a primer for more nuanced conversations about the artworks and narratives featured in our upcoming exhibition, From the Inside: Presented by Just Detention International, featuring contributions from nearly one hundred individuals who have experienced trauma behind bars, including those who have been subjected to sexual abuse while incarcerated. To enrich our conversation, participants are also encouraged to read Susan Sontag’s “Approaching Artaud,” published in The New Yorker in 1973.

Find more information on the event, where to source the book, and how to register if you are a first-time book club participant here.

On Wednesday, May 20, 2026, from 7-8:30 PM we will host Book Club Session 03, an exploration of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Private I: A Memoir (ZE Books, 2025), at The Judith Center (with options to participate via Zoom).

Building on our last session, we will expand our exploration of how gender has informed critical responses to technological development from the 1970s through today with Leeson’s retrospective text, which underscores technology’s corrosive applications in systems of repression, surveillance, and censorship. In her trailblazing practice, she imaginatively disarms technology by using it as a creative medium to platform progressive ideas—fabricating distorted, surreal, and alternate realities that probe technology’s encroaching influence on identity and society. This builds upon our prior session focused on Shulamith Firestone’s more utopian vision for technology’s liberatory potential. Attendees are encouraged to read "In Conversation: Lynn Hershman Leeson with Michelle Handelman" (Brooklyn Rail, November 2025). Tom Teicholz—an award-winning journalist, author of the Substack The Enthusiast by Tom Teicholz, and Editor of Private I: A Memoir—will join for the conversation.

Our bimonthly reading group spotlights a curated selection of texts that examine gender and sexism. Each session features conversations guided by guest artists, writers, and cultural thinkers whose work engages with the reading’s subject matter. With each session, the book club aspires to deepen our understanding of contemporary gender theory by tracing its historical foundations, social contexts, and evolving intersections with ecological and technological posthumanist thought. This event is free and open to the public, and will be hosted in a wheelchair-accessible building. To confirm your place, share specific questions or requests related to the event, source a copy of the book, or learn more about The Judith Center and our programs, please contact us at info@thejudithcenter.org.

The second installment of The Judith Center Book Club focuses on Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), a foundational feminist text that questioned the idea of gender as natural or fixed and reimagined it as a political and material system shaped by social arrangements. Writing decades ahead of much contemporary theory, Firestone traced gender hierarchy to reproductive labor and the structure of family life, showing how biological difference becomes oppressive through how it is organized and enforced. Her forward-looking engagement with technology as a possible site of feminist intervention—particularly in relation to reproduction—anticipated later anti-naturalist and technomaterialist approaches to gender, including strands of contemporary thought such as xenofeminism. Lana Dee Povitz, the Assistant Professor of History at Middlebury College currently authoring a biography of Firestone, joins the book club as a special guest.

The first installment of The Judith Center Book Club focuses on Barbara T. Smith’s memoir The Way to Be (2023), an autobiographical chronicle of the artist’s pioneering practice. The book also recounts her dialogues with other artists in her generation in Los Angeles and abroad, as well as her inroads into the 20th century’s male-dominated canon. For more context, participants discuss “Being Eaten: Barbara T. Smith’s Ritual Meal” in Emily Elizabeth Goodman's Food, Feminism, and Women’s Art in 1970s Southern California (2022). The event concludes with an in-person Q&A between Smith, Mara McCarthy, Founder of the Los Angeles gallery The Box, and Michael Ned Holte, the curator of how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith (2022) at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.