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Chris Newlove Horton
Chris Newlove Horton is a writer living in London.

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DATE NIGHT

Prize Entry

April 2016

Chris Newlove Horton

Prize Entry

April 2016

He said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’ He said, ‘Tell me about you.’ He said, ‘Tell me everything. I’m interested.’ He said, ‘I want to...

fiction

April 2015

Heavy

Chris Newlove Horton

fiction

April 2015

It is a two lane road somewhere in North America. The car is pulled onto the shoulder with 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

Chris Newlove Horton

Contributor

August 2014

Chris Newlove Horton is a writer living in London.

James Richards: Not Blacking Out...

Art

December 2011

Chris Newlove Horton

Art

December 2011

Artist James Richards appropriates audio-visual material gathered from a range of sources, which he then edits into elaborate, fragmented collages.   But whereas his...

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Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Tom McCarthy

Fred Fernandez Armesto

Interview

Issue No. 1

For those expecting him to be, as the New Statesman called him, ‘the most galling interviewee in Britain’, Tom...

fiction

Issue No. 1

From the Town

Desmond Hogan

fiction

Issue No. 1

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School,...

fiction

January 2015

Shishosetsu...

Minae Mizumura

TR. Juliet Winters Carpenter

fiction

January 2015

This is an excerpt from the novel published in Japanese as Shishosetsu from left to right (私小説 from left...

 

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