Alexandra Chasin received a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University in 1993, and an MFA in Fiction Writing at Vermont College in 2002. She is the author of Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, a study of the relation between the LGBT “market” and the LGBT social movement. Other books include Kissed By, a collection of short formally innovative fiction. Chasin is a past recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, and a 2012 Fiction Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches in the Literary Studies Department at Lang College, The New School.
Chasin is the author of Brief.
From the author
“I’ve had a long-standing interest in art theft, art forgery, and art vandalism—violations of art norms. I like them because they expose the contradictions that structure the norms. Maybe Brief started in graduate school, when I took a course in the Sociology of Culture, taught by Ann Swidler. Suddenly, it was possible to see art as a practice governed by social values, culturally variable values, art as a cipher or a fetish, art as a thing framed—the frame was the thing, and the structures on which art had been hanging all along came into focus. ”