March 13, 2026
By Dr Sita Balani with a response from Dr Natalia Cecire
Despite the ascendance of a far-right ‘family values’ agenda which seeks to retrench fixed gender roles and the nuclear family, late capitalist social relations can no longer effectively compel these social forms.
This presentation on Zombie Heteronormativity explores the other methods for organising social reproduction that are emerging with the tacit endorsement of the far right, despite their putative investment in the family.
Speakers
Sita Balani is a Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race (Verso, 2023) and co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto, 2021). She has published in Vice, Tribune, The White Review, Salvage, Five Dials, and Wasafiri.
Natalia Cecire is Associate Professor in English & American Literature at the University of Sussex. Her book Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2019. She is a member of the steering committee for the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence and Director of the Centre for American Studies (2024-26).