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Orlando Reade

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye can be read in The White Review No. 13.



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Wildness of the Day

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December 2016

Orlando Reade

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December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier that year a canopy of...

Interview

Issue No. 13

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Orlando Reade

Interview

Issue No. 13

Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects. Philosophers have discovered in love a lived...

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

Orlando Reade

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette...

Life outside the Manet Paradise Resort : On the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

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November 2012

Orlando Reade

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November 2012

*   A person is represented, sitting in what appears to be the banal and conventional pose of a high street studio portrait photographer:...

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poetry

January 2015

Litanies of an Audacious Rosary

Enrique Vila-Matas

TR. Rosalind Harvey

poetry

January 2015

FEBRUARY 2008   * I’m outraged, but I’ve learned a way of reasoning that quickly defuses my exasperation. This...

fiction

April 2013

The Story I'm Thinking Of

Jonathan Gibbs

fiction

April 2013

There were seven of us sat around the table. Seven grown adults, sat around the table. It was late. We...

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Issue No. 7

Comment is Fraught: A Polemic

Mr Guardianista

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Issue No. 7

When not listening to the phone messages of recently deceased children or smearing those killed in stadium disasters, journalists...

 

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