Dear Mothers

• In Event: The Mother

Abstract

Mothers do not figure in the history of political theory the way fathers do. They do not create the new and different (the birth of nations, the founding of republics, the finding of new worlds) but instead preserve what is already valued. Mothers bear sons who become soldiers; mothers preserve tradition and culture through food, fabrics, and households; daughters of mothers learn these skills and take their place in endless reproduction by becoming mothers themselves. As payment, mothers are the object of our idealized fantasies while treated with licensed cruelty (Jacqueline Rose 2018). In this paper I discuss two documentary films that treat mothers with a kind of loving attention that rejects both idealization and cruelty. Chantal Akerman’s 2015 No Home Movie documents Akerman’s Auschwitz-survivor mother’s aging and deterioration in her Brussels apartment, and Jennie Livingston’s 1990 Paris is Burning features African-American and Latinx Drag Balls nurtured by drag queen mothers. These two films are read as love letters to mothers that persist within the remnants of trauma and loss. Challenging Laura Mulvey’s contention that the narrative film replicates the male gaze, I argue that Akerman’s and Livingston’s cameras model a loving attention to mothers that rejects patriarchal kinship and the sovereign forms of citizenship and individuality they idealize.

Author

• Lori Marso, Union College