Review: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen María Machado

Her Body and Other Parties: The Stories of Women are Always Scary

Written by: Sofía Sánchez Morales

Translated by: Yasmine Haro

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen María Machado, is a collection of short stories that show how being a woman can be a story of terror.

There is a widely questioned medical procedure that can be given to women after labor without their consent. It is known in the Anglo-Saxon world as ‘the husband stitch’ and refers to making more stitches then necessary during the episiotomy or to repair the perineum.

What is its purpose? To make men feel more pleasure when they have penetrative sex again (after the baby’s birth), despite the pain and discomfort this can cause women.

In the short story The Husband Stitch, a woman has a green ribbon tied around her neck. She lives a normal life, full of sex and passion for the man who will become her husband, who she teaches everything and gives everything too. She gives herself entirely to him and the only thing she asks of him is: do not touch my green ribbon.

Of course, what he wants most is to touch the green ribbon and finds it impossible to accept being denied this part of her.

This is the first story in the collection of stories in Her Body and Other Parties, by the American author Carmen María Machado, who as the age of 33 has become one of the great literary voices of her generation.

A Book Without Category

As her name reveals, Machado is Latinx (at least her paternal grandfather is Cuban), but she does pass for white, so she doesn’t always feel comfortable touching on the issue of race within her stories.

What she does feel comfortable talking about is sexual diversity. Virtually all of her characters are bisexual or lesbian and her stories are told with no strangeness about their sexuality.

The stories Machado tells are indefinable, or perhaps they are more accurately described as being uncategorizable. Just when you think it is a scary book, the next story is science fiction, next mixes fantasy, urban legends, magical realism, and humor so dark that laughter seems painful but inevitable.

Two stories occur in the midst of a global pandemic, making them particularly powerful in today’s current context. The first story, Inventory, is about the end of the world through the narrator’s intimate and sexual partners (which are not always the same, especially when the world is ending). From childhood, the first time a girl kissed her, to the most recent sexual experiences with men and women seeking human contact, despite the possibility they could transmit the virus to the other... but human contact is so necessary.

In the second story, Real Women Have Bodies, a strange condition starts to take hold of women that causes their bodies to disappear, but not their essence, and they are able to still walk the streets like ghosts. One-man comments: “They can’t be touched but they can stand on the ground, which means they must be lying, they must be deceiving us in some way.”

Erotism and Disgust

It is evident the pain that comes across in the stories from the female perspective, a perspective that dares to show the grotesque, the bodily fluids, sex, smells, pleasure, and orgasms. Erotism and disgust are blended into one.

What we find the most disturbing about these stories is that we know them. They are scary because they are based on truth, even if they are fantasy in nature. We know these stories because they have happened to us, or to a friend, cousin, or to a friend of a grandmother’s friend.

One of the most interesting and polarizing stories is Especially Heinous, a recount of 272 episodes of the tv series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which questions societies and the media and the entertainment industries fascination with violence against women that so often results in their death.

Why is this story polarizing? There seems to be a radically different perception of the show from those of us who grew up watching the series and those who never have. It is the longest story being almost 72 pages, it is practically a small novel.

Her Body and Other Parties, from the title signaling to the readers, explores the female body from various sides, from the relationship with the body itself to the ideal of a couple to the actions of society, mental health, the mechanisms of defense and of course, lots of sex. And, if, after entering this universe, you are interested in the topic of the Latin and Queer authors, we recommend exploring the work of the Mexican author Rosamaría Roffiel (who wrote which is considered the first Mexican lesbian novel Amora), the Cuban poet Odette Alonso, the Chicana novelist Alicia Gaspar de Alba and the Cuban-Colombian writer Daisy Hernández.

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