"You're constantly thinking about the house!"
It took me a few minutes to fathom what about this comment riled me so much. Certainly, the gratuitousness of the "constantly". More than that, the implication that thinking about the "house": what needs to be bought, what needs to be repaired, is a simple-minded, lowbrowed exercise. Rather than a labor of love.
You didn't mean this? Perhaps.
2 comments:
I get that all the time. And yes, it often seems like a put-down. But perhaps it's not only the way it's said (which is probably part of the reason) but also a generational anxiety about not wanting to be (thought of as) even potentially 'housewife'... so that even that simple desire to make a space more habitable, to seek to enjoy the intimacy of a 'home', threatens to define one's concerns as those of bourgeois domesticity - classed, limited, unfeminist, pointless.
what do you think?
t
I agree. Perhaps also the challenge is to transform the politics of domesticity, so that for each of us it is not something "bourgeois" but a meaning full of hope and possibility?
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