Carmen Maria Machado's haunted feminine

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vox's Constance Grady talks with writer Carmen Maria Machado, whose 2017 short story collection Her Body and Other Parties was a National Book Award finalist. In this episode, which is a recording of a live Vox Book Club event, they discuss how this haunting genre-straddling collection conveys the underlying horrors of being an embodied woman, how the nation's shifting cultural mores around sexual violence are reflected in Law & Order: SVU, and how Machado's writing expresses what she just might start calling the "femme uncanny." Host: Constance Grady (@constancegrady), staff writer, Vox Guests: Carmen Maria Machado, author References: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf; 2017) Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (2002) Kelly Link "The Green Ribbon" by Alvin Schwartz, from In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories (1984) "'Law & Order' is lost without Stabler and Benson. Here's why their pairing works," by Carmen Maria Machado (LA Times; Apr. 8, 2021) "The Trash Heap Has Spoken" by Carmen Maria Machado (Guernica; Feb. 13, 2017) Enjoyed this episode? Rate Vox Conversations ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of Vox Conversations by subscribing in your favorite podcast app. Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by: Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Patrick Boyd Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:16.0	Results may vary.
0:46.0	Why are bodies so horrifying?
0:56.0	I'm Constance Grady and I write about culture for Vox and this week I'm your host for Vox Conversations.
1:06.0	Her body and other parties is a collection of short stories and these stories don't have a clear genre.
1:21.0	Author by Carmen Maria Machado, the collection came out in 2017, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
1:28.0	And the stories live in this fuzzy space between literary fiction and fairy tales and queer fantasy and the Gothic.
1:40.0	But I think of them as horror stories.
1:48.0	Some of them are the kind of horror stories you tell around the fire at sleep away camp shivering deliciously over years and more.
1:56.0	Some are horrifying the way fairy tales are horrifying all grievance and rose thorns and broken glass.
2:05.0	One of them is just a long list of law and order SVU episodes and it may be the most horrifying of all.
2:16.0	What brings together the stories of her body and other parties is the way they talk about bodies.
2:24.0	These stories are fleshy, visceral, muscular, they are fully embodied.
2:31.0	In one story, a woman can't get her otherwise devoted husband to stop fixating on the ribbon around her neck and what lies underneath it.
2:41.0	In another, a woman goes through bariatric surgery only to be haunted by her lost fat.
2:47.0	In a third, a woman living through the apocalypse goes through a mental list of her sexual encounters.
2:54.0	This is a book of horror stories about bodies and specifically about women's bodies.
3:02.0	If her body and other parties has a piece of statement that piece of statement is living in the world in a woman's body, is a horrifying experience.
	...

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