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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices that they can caress fairly openly by virtue of their both being women ‘Nobody was looking,’ she thinks to herself ‘I realised they probably thought we were only two friends who liked to touch each other a lot when they talked’ While the obliviousness of those around them is conducive to their affair, this moment encapsulates a problem queer women frequently encounter when searching for their counterparts in print and on screen So little attention is paid to women’s relationships with each other that amity and eroticism are too often confused, to uncomfortable effect: such blurring shows the lack of significance regularly attributed both to lesbianism and to deep female friendship When I was younger and first looking for media that represented my own experiences, this inchoate model of relationships used to make me cautious about ever getting too close to my female friends, in case they or I became similarly confused I was already lonely without a queer community, and this caution made me even lonelier   But in recent years I’ve begun to notice an increase in art by women about female friendship, which I hoped would help to make clearer the difference between these two kinds of relationship Perhaps, I thought, if we had more iconic examples of non-romantic, non-erotic friendships, representations of things I might do on a date with another woman — like holding her hand, or kissing her — wouldn’t be so readily coded as just being really great pals But on reading and watching works feted for their depictions of female friendship, I found that even writers I admired seemed determined to shoehorn in eroticism as a way of showing how close two women are I was disappointed by the passage in Zadie Smith’s NW where Natalie gets given a vibrator by Leah, whose past as a not entirely straight woman feels tacked on amid much more thoroughly explored class- and race-based discomfort The section of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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fiction

August 2017

Lengths

Matthew Perkins

fiction

August 2017

1   I sat at the kitchen table while Valentine prepared cups of flowery, smoky loose leaf tea. Antoine...

Art

Issue No. 5

A New Idea of Art: Christoph Schlingensief and the Opera Village Africa

Sarah Hegenbart

Art

Issue No. 5

I think the Opera Village. . . will lead to a new idea of art, and what will emerge...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

 

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