#carmen maria machado

[sarahreesbrennan]

Are all the themes in “in other lands” supposed to be a commentary on something? Or do you just like writing sex scenes between minors, age gaps, and reverse misogyny?

Genuine question.

Ohhh, my dear anon, I don't believe this is a genuine question.

But it does bring up something I've been meaning to talk about. So I'll take the bait.

Firstly. Yes, my work contains a commentary on the world around us. I wonder what I could be doing with the child soldiers being sexually active in their teens (people hook up right after battles), and the age gap relationship ending in the younger one being too mature for the elder. What could I possibly have been attempting when I said 'how absurd gender roles are, when projected onto people we haven't been accustomed by our own society to see that way'? I wasn't being subtle, that's for sure.

Secondly. Yes I do enjoy writing! I think I should, it's my life's work. Am I titillated by my own writing, no - though I think it's fine to be. The sex scenes of In Other Lands aren't especially titillating, to be honest. It is interesting to me how often people sneer at women for writing romance and sex scenes, having 'book boyfriends,' insinuating women writers fancy their own characters. Women having too much immoral fun! Whereas men clearly write about sex for high literary purposes.

… I have to say from my experience of women and men's writing, I haven't found that to be true.

I’m not in this to have an internet argument. Mostly people use bad faith takes to poke at others from the other side of a screen for kicks. But I do know some truly internalise the attitude that writing certain things is wrong, that anyone who makes mistakes must be shunned as impure, and that is a deeply Victorian and restrictive attitude that guarantees unhappiness.

I've become increasingly troubled by the very binary and extreme ways of thinking I see arising on the internet. They come naturally from people being in echo chambers, becoming hostile to differing opinions, and the age-old conundrum of wanting to be good, fearing you aren't, and making the futile effort to be free of sin. It makes me think of Tennyson, who when travelling through Ireland at the time of the Great Famine, said nobody should talk about the 'Irish distress' to him and insisted the window shades of his carriage be shut as he went from castle to castle. So he wouldn't see the bodies. But that didn't make the bodies cease to be.

In Les Mis, Victor Hugo explores why someone might steal, what that means about them and their circumstances, and who they might be - and explores why someone else is made terribly unhappy, and endangers others, through their own too rigid adherence to judgement and condemnation without pity. The story understands both Jean Valjean the thief and Javert the policeman. Javert’s way of thinking is the one that inevitably leads to tragedy.

Depiction isn't endorsement. Depiction is discussion.

Many of my loved ones have had widely varying relationships to and experience of sex (including 'none'). They've felt all different types of ways about it. If writing about them is not permissible, I close them out. I'd much rather a dialogue be open than closed.

I do understand the urge to write what seems right to others. I've been brain-poisoned that way myself. I used to worry so much about my female characters doing the wrong things, because then they'd be justly hated! Then I noted which of my writer friends had people love their female characters the most - and it was the one who wrote their female characters as screwing up massively, making rash and sometimes wrong decisions. Who wrote them as people. Because that's what people do. That's what feels true to readers.

I want my characters to feel true to readers. I want my characters to react in messy ways to imperfect situations. I love fantasy, I love wild action and I love deep thought, and I want to engage. That's what In Other Lands is about. That's even more what Long Live Evil is about. That sexy lady who sashays in to have sexy sex with the hero - what is her deal? Someone who tricks and lies to others - why are they doing that, how did they get so skilled at it? What makes one person cruelly judgemental, and another ignore all boundaries? What makes Carmen Maria Machado describe ‘fictional queer villains’ as ‘by far the most interesting characters’? What irritates people about women having a great time? What attracts us to power, to fiction, and to transgression?

I don’t know the answers to all those questions, but I know I want to explore them. And I know one more thing.

If the moral thing to do is shut people out and shut people up? Count me among the villains.

[aconissa]

WRITERS + DIRECTORS ON THE POWER OF HORROR

Catriona Ward, interview for The Guardian Mark Gatiss, in A History of Horror (2010) Pascal Laugier, for Electric Sheep Candyman (1992), dir. Bernard Rose Colin Dickey, Ghostland Carmen Maria Machado, for Paris Review Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women Possession (1981), dir. Andrzej Żuławski Mariana Enríquez, ‘Notes on Craft’, Granta Guillermo del Toro, Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors

[thehopefulquotes]

Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness.

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

[soracities]

Carmen Maria Machado, from "Meat Eater No. 5" [ID'd]

[yvain]

Megan Fox in knitted leg warmers and short-shorts, a puffy coat and red fishnets, a color guard uniform, an Evil Dead raglan tee and star-spangled underwear, a cropped hoodie and low-rise jeans, an Edwardian prom dress with long white opera gloves. A wet strand of hair drawn through her mouth. Swimming naked in a lake glassy with twilight. Blackening the tip of her tongue with a lighter. In hunger, wan and beautiful as a consumptive heroine. Levitating. Snarling. Doe eyes, full and glossed lips. Dropping onto a car like a wild cat. Projectile vomiting an unctuous, inky liquid onto her best friend. Teeth like a nurse shark. A distended, disarticulated jaw like a python. Jennifer’s body on a sacrificial altar, sobbing. Jennifer’s body moving eerily from a great distance; then too close, and from the wrong angle. Jennifer pulling a rod out of her shish-kebabbed torso, saying, through a mouth of blood, “Do you have a tampon?” Jennifer’s body underlining the politics of Jennifer’s Body; a sex symbol through a funhouse mirror. (The film’s execs thought she’d be a draw for teenage boys, but teenage boys hated it. They didn’t know they were coming to be eaten. Not like that.)

Carmen Maria Machado, “Both Ways,” in It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (ed. Joe Vallese)

[quotefeeling]

Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness.

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

[perfectquote]

Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness.

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

[liesmyth]

In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the “violence of the archive.” This concept—also called “archival silence”—illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.

The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or—like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its “stumbling blocks”—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death.

Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive—it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. (“I’m getting so hungry to see you.”)

The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz 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.

[...] Consider: What is the topography of these holes? Where do the lacunae live? How do we move toward wholeness? How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record-keeping toward justice?

The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.

In The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado

[dwellordream]

- Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

[ordinaryheavenn]

in the dream house - carmen maria machado

[thoughtkick]

Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness.

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

[paperbaacks]

loved in the dream house so much i ended up getting her body and other parties too!

[goreprofonde]

Cannibalism stories ask us to wrestle with thorny questions about what it means to eat the things we eat, or what it means to unmake something just like us in service of ourselves. It is a subject impossible to untangle from our human desire to consume, or the vulnerabilities that make us easy to be consumed. In her essay on cannibalism as metaphor for capitalism and feminism, Chelsea G. Summers—author of her own brilliant cannibal novel, A Certain Hunger—writes on the way the idea has infected our very language: “We don’t just win; we devour. We don’t just vanquish; we roast our rivals, and we eat them for breakfast. We go to bars described as meat markets in search of a piece of ass, and if we find a lover, we nibble, we ravish, we swallow them whole.” Cannibalism is a way of framing the capitalistic impulse to conquer; how the upper hand, so to speak, always goes straight to the mouth.

- Carmen Maria Machado, Hollywood’s Gruesome, Lurid Obsession with People Eating People.

[campgender]

from In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019)

In Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home,” a group of lesbian friends gathers for a drink and they discuss a bit of community gossip: a pair of women recently broke into another woman’s house and trashed it, smashing glass and dishes and destroying her art, which they deemed pornographic. They spray-painted the story’s eponymous phrase on her wall. The friends debate police involvement and intragroup conflict mediation; but toward the end of the story, as they are parting ways, the problem crystallizes into a single, telling exchange:

“Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?”

Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.”

“Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say.

“Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else.

Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest.

The queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse. Which is not to say that activists and academics didn’t try. When the conversation about queer domestic abuse took hold in the early 1980s, activists gave out fact sheets at conferences and festivals to dispel myths about queer abuse. [see footnote 45] Scholars distributed questionnaires to get a sense of the scope of the problem. [see footnote 46] Fierce debates were waged in the pages of queer periodicals.

But some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions. Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity. Abusers were using “male privilege.” (To borrow lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu’s phrase, they were guilty of “[smuggling patriarchy] into lesbian utopia.”) Some argued that consensual S&M was part of the problem. Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing. [see footnote 47] There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other!

Many people argued that the issue needed to be handled within their own communities. Ink was spilled in the service of decentering victims, and abusers often operated with impunity. In an early lesbian domestic abuse trial, a lawyer noted the odd and unsettling detail that most of the time the jury spent behind closed doors was—contrary to what she’d been worried about—the straight jurors attempting to convince the jury’s sole lesbian member of the defendant’s guilt. When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn’t “wanted to convict a [queer] sister,” as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman.

Around and around they went, circling essential truths that no one wanted to look at directly, as if they were the sun: Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would.

footnote 45: Among the myths tackled by the Santa Cruz Women’s Self Defense Teaching Cooperative: “Myth: It’s only emotional/psychological, so that doesn’t count.” “Myth: I can handle it—unlike her last three lovers.” “Myth: Staying together and working it out is most important.” “Myth: We’re in therapy, so it’ll get fixed now.”

footnote 46: Actual questionnaire language by researcher Alice J. McKinzie: “Is your abuser present at this festival? If your abuser is at this festival, is she present while you are filling this out? If your abuser is not present while you are filling this out, is she aware that you are filling out this questionnaire? If you answered NO to the question above … do you plan to tell her later?”

footnote 47: This No True Scotsman fallacy could bend these narratives in every direction conceivable; create a kind of moving goalpost that permitted an endless warping of accountability. In a firsthand account of her abuse in Gay Community News in 1988, a survivor wrote: “I had been around lesbians since I was a teenager, and although some of them had troubled relationships, I was unaware of any battering. I attached myself to the comforting myth that lesbians don’t batter. Much later, when I was ‘out’ enough to go to gay bars in a town that was liberal enough to tolerate them, I saw that some lesbians did indeed batter. However, I thought they were all of a type—drunks, sexist butches or apolitical lesbians—so I decided that feminist lesbians don’t batter.” Activist Ann Russo put it more succinctly in her book Taking Back Our Lives: “I had found it hard to name abuse in lesbian relationships as a political issue with structural roots.”

[vampiremotif]

harrow the ninth tamsyn muir / her body and other parties carmen maria machado / mabel podcast / tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow gabrielle zevin / harrow the ninth tamsyn muir / much ado about nothing william shakespeare

[llovelymoonn]

carmen maria machado meat eater no. 5

kofi