"These tensions and paradoxes are mirrored in Marlatt’s mother/daughter relationships. The mother is someone who tyrannizes, constricts, and enforces the patriarchal order, and also someone who loves and nourishes. Mother is both victim of patriarchy and architect of her own demise. The mother/daughter relationship is not resolvable in Marlatt’s poetics and this is of utmost importance because a lack of resolution is precisely what makes the mother/daughter relationship a locus of desire. Desire for the mother is one recurring element which fuels Marlatt’s narratives, which gives the narrative its urgency and necessity."
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killing the retro-mom-who-wants-to-coax-you-into-boredom in your head
feminist matrilineal anxieties
my mother and I are having a pitched battle about futurity - she’s on the side of paranoid temporalities when it comes to how I organize my life, I’m all anticipatory and bright-eyed
neither of us want me to be bored but I’m the only one who believes I really don’t have to be. stay in your hometown dull education dull politics dull sex life dull everything because you could wreck your life. my resistance to boredom as queer art of failure, looks like collapse but there’s more energy in refusing something intolerable than in (ugh) staying on the prairies and gritting your teeth forever.
she’s so scared for me but she’s trying to bully me into minimizing the risks I take. when she doesn’t understand my behaviour she says I’m being “self-destructive” as though that gives her the right to call me, screaming, in the middle of the night, about how everything I do is worthless, filling my inbox with vicious messages, what does it mean about hysteria if my mother performs the same erratic affect to try to get me to stay home and stay bored?
sometimes leaving your hometown is a hysterical gesture and it’s what you have to choose because you’ve got nothing to say for yourself but the affect is there
leaving your mother, leaving your hometown, she thinks I’m being reactionary but mostly I just want to read lots of theory. I don’t know how not to seem deviant to her so what’s the point. momfemme bullying is not okay. expect lots of mother-rants in the weeks to come.
my dad says she’s irrational and I don’t know how to agree with him without tying myself to his “expertise” and “logic”, puke on that but what do I do?
mom: “your choices affect me. what happens to you happens to me” (okay but also, we’re not the same person? and that’s too fucking oppressive, to only make choices she approves of, parents just don’t understand)
(Source: www2.athabascau.ca)
