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Nicole Flattery

Nicole Flattery's criticism has appeared in the GuardianThe Irish Times and the LRB. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time was published in 2019. Her favourite Chantal Akeman film is News From Home.



Articles Available Online


Chantal Akerman’s ‘My Mother Laughs’

Book Review

October 2019

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

October 2019

There’s a scene in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere, about the Belgian filmmaker’s Chantal Akerman’s life and work, where she discusses her only...

Book Review

August 2018

Lorrie Moore's ‘See What Can Be Done’

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

August 2018

Lorrie Moore writes in her introduction to See What Can Be Done that, at the start of her career,...

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

January 2018

Nicole Flattery

Contributor

January 2018

Nicole Flattery’s criticism has appeared in the Guardian, The Irish Times and the LRB. Her story collection Show Them A Good...

Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘Her Body and Other Parties’

Book Review

January 2018

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

January 2018

I’m reluctant to admit this but it’s often easier for me to write about a book I hated rather than a book I loved....

READ NEXT

Prize Entry

April 2017

Remain

Ed Lately

Prize Entry

April 2017

The apology had been the most charged and contested gesture between us, the common element in arguments whose subjects...

fiction

November 2016

Somnoproxy

Stuart Evers

fiction

November 2016

The day’s third hotel suite faced westwards across the harbour, its picture window looking down over the boats and...

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend

Cutter Streeby

poetry

September 2012

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend     [SEAside          Gra-                         –i.m. Ronny Burhop 1987-2010                                                                      ffiti]...

 

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