dislocation

from in the dream house by carmen maria machado

"the late queer theorist jose esteban munoz pointed out that 'queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. . . when the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.' what gets left behind? gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. crevices people fall into. impenetrable silence."

"we can't stop living. which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. and it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. it is simply a state of being -- one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. so bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. they can be a complete cast unto themselves. let them have agency, and then let them go."

"later, you will learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is 'dislocation.' that is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she's somewhere where she doesn't speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. she is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. and so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own. the setting does its work."