Laura McLauchlan

    Laura McLauchlan is a sociocultural anthropologist based at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her work focuses on the interpersonal, particularly on connection across difference (and the limits of such openness), within environmental and social movements. With expertise in feminist more-than-human ethnography, as well as training in relational neurobiological approaches, her work attends to the interplay of material, biological and cultural aspects of how, when, and why we open to one another.

    With her non-fiction work employing narrative, illustration, as well as attention to embodied aspects of interpersonal relations, Dregs: Love and Monsters in a Small New Zealand Town is her first publication to venture into the realms of the fictional, giving space to the unspoken and unconscious aspects of the region that grew her up.

    orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4393-0614

    Dregs »

    Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand

    Authored by: Laura McLauchlan
    Publication date: August 2024
    Girls who join dog packs, boys who gain strength from trees, men who love bodies with nobody in them: Dregs is a collection of tenderly-monstrous love stories, set in a shadowy small town of the same name. Based in South Canterbury, New Zealand, these lovingly disturbing fictions welcome the strange and other-wordly, while keeping an ethnographic eye trained on the classed, religious, gendered, racialised and species-based forces shaping this rural region of New Zealand’s South Island. While at times grotesque, these darkly loving, richly-illustrated tales offer new avenues for ethnographic research and shed new light on the region, giving voice and form to unspoken aspects of this antipodean rural idyll. Shaped by a deep respect for the monstrous feminine, regardless of the gender of the bodies in which such forces appear, Dregs: Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand is a product of both an anthropological sensibility and a trust that naming and finding ways to live well with our monsters is a vital aspect of living well in our times.

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