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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

I   This spring, in cities and towns all over the United States, schools, churches and other organisations will hold daddy-daughter dances The daddies will dress up in suits and ties and the little girls will dress up in their finest Sunday dresses The mommies, presumably, will style their little girls’ hair, and patent leather shoes and pearls will be applied, and all of these scenes, playing out in kitchens, moving on to hotel ballrooms and school auditoriums and church cafeterias, will be adorable   They will also, even as they fly under the radar as being such, be profoundly heteronormative   We can put this heteronormativity through a prism that reflects two views One way of looking at it is according to the traditional definition of heteronormativity: a cultural bias in favour of opposite-gendered sexual and marital relationships, ‘a world view’, as the dictionary suggests, ‘that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation’ Under this definition, these dances necessarily exclude families of two mommies They force families of two daddies to make a Styronian decision about which parent should attend   A more expansive understanding, however, accounts for the work of Michael Warner, the social theorist who coined the term According to his understanding, heteronormativity undergirds all sorts of social and economic structures with the pervasive and exclusionary belief that people fall into distinct yet complementary gender roles, an assumption which carries several implications for the nuclear family and for society at large These range from the tax structures that reward the married two-parent family to the idea that mothers, not fathers, should lead Girl Scout troops And under this definition, one can easily see the ways in which the daddy-daughter dances, and all those adorable scenes playing out in kitchens and church basements and school auditoriums, also exclude families led by single parents One could, of course, in the absence of an actual daddy, ask a male adult friend to fill in A single mother might ask her own father to accompany her child But excepting such arrangements, which often depend on forced and even staged interpretations, the scene of the daddy-daughter dance,

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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fiction

March 2017

A Table is a Table

Peter Bichsel

TR. Lydia Davis

fiction

March 2017

I want to tell a story about an old man, a man who no longer says a word, has...

Interview

Issue No. 2

Interview with William Boyd

Jacques Testard

Tristan Summerscale

Interview

Issue No. 2

On a wet, grey morning in March, William Boyd invited us into a large terraced house, half-way between the...

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April 2017

Everywhere and Nowhere

Vahni Capildeo

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April 2017

Part of my reluctance to write on citizenship is that as a poet, a worker in delicate, would-be-truthful language,...

 

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