Her Body & Other Parties
1 media/cmy1-square-orig_thumb.jpg 2020-11-08T19:54:11-08:00 Sam Weiss 42b7114c4fc177afeee9854ca91d46d344449687 38275 3 A red figure with a shaved head tilts their chin up, exposing their neck. Their neck looks like exposed muscle. Around their neck is a loose green ribbon. The background is black, and the title of the collection is superimposed over the image of the person in white lettering. plain 2021-04-30T11:59:33-07:00 Sam Weiss 42b7114c4fc177afeee9854ca91d46d344449687This page is referenced by:
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"Real Women Have Bodies" by Carmen Maria Machado
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2021-04-30T14:31:06-07:00
Found in Machado's collection, Her Body and Other Parties
IDs: Queer, Sapphic, Terminal Illness/Degenerative Disease
In “Real Women Have Bodies,” Machado explores queer disability through a phenomenon called "fading," which results in women’s bodies “fading” out of existence. However, these women don’t completely disappear. Instead, a wisp of them remains in the world--only visible if one strains their eye. The cause of this fading is unknown, and its targets seem to share only their identities as women. The women that fade are often blamed or feared. Some of them haunt buildings or people, others insert themselves into ATM machines and cause financial havoc.
Author IDs: Bisexual, Latinx/Latine, Fat
The story focuses on an unnamed narrator who works at a formal dress shop in a mall, and her relationship with a woman named Petra. Petra is the daughter of the dressmaker who makes the dresses for the shop. When the narrator goes home with Petra for the first time, they drop off some gowns in Petra's mother's workshop. There, the narrator discovers that "the room is full of women...see-through and glowing faintly, like afterthoughts. They drift and mill and occasionally look down at their bodies. One of them, with a hard and sorrowful face, is standing very close to Petra’s mother. She moves toward the garment slung over the dress form...She presses herself into it, and there is no resistance, only a sense of an ice cube melting in the summer air. The needle--trailed by thread of guileless gold--winks as Petra’a mother plunges it through the girl’s skin. The fabric takes the needle, too" (Machado 134).
As the narrator tries to reckon with her newfound discovery that faded women live in the gowns that she helps to sell, Petra herself begins fading. The fading process appears to take at least a few weeks, and our narrator brings us along through her and Petra’s relationship as Petra fades. Machado’s fading phenomenon creates space for a simultaneously embodied and imagined representation of queer disability. While fading is not a recognizable disability in our reality, Machado treats it as if it is. Therefore, we as readers witness an embodied account of fading that shares many traits with degenerative diseases or chronic illnesses that exist within our reality.The mystery and social stigma of fading, combined with the our narrator's account of Petra's fading, parallels both known epidemics in our reality and known social stigma that certain marginalized communities face.
