"Real Women Have Bodies" by Carmen Maria Machado
Found in Machado's collection, Her Body and Other Parties
IDs: Queer, Sapphic, Terminal Illness/Degenerative Disease
Author IDs: Bisexual, Latinx/e, 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 takes several weeks or months, and our narrator brings us along through her and Petra’s relationship as Petra fades. We experience watching Petra fade in much the same way that someone might experience watching their loved one battle a terminal illness. 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, terminal, 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.
Discussion Questions
1. What do non-realist representations of disability like Machado’s “fading” teach us? Are they necessary? Why or why not?
2.. What do you think “fading” represents?
3. What does it mean that the “faded” women are not entirely gone, but instead have these altered corporealities? What do these altered corporealities say about disabled queer existence?