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Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert (Columbia University Press). Forthcoming in Summer 2023 from Riverhead is The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, as well as Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press in early 2024. ‘Insekt’ is part of an in-progress work of fiction, Realisms. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Articles Available Online


Insekt or large verminous thing

Fiction

September 2022

Kate Zambreno

Fiction

September 2022

Around dusk one evening in March, I went out back to the small garage, and switched on my small square of artificial light at...

Feature

January 2018

Accumulations (Appendix F)

Kate Zambreno

Feature

January 2018

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of...

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

Kate Zambreno

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study...

Heroines

feature

March 2013

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like...

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poetry

August 2016

No Holds Barred

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

TR. Brian Hagenbuch

poetry

August 2016

Hello. Dr Rivers’ clinic? Thank you. Yes. Yes, doctor, I would like to be your patient. With your permission,...

Interview

September 2013

Interview with Max Neumann

TR. Andrea Scrima

Joachim Sartorius

Interview

September 2013

‘It’s as though you’d like to speak, but have no language.’ These are the words chosen by German painter...

Art

January 2017

New Communities

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty...

 

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