![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
In this article, I undertake an investigation of queer women’s archive, that collection of cultural memory which delineates queer women’s identity, and its chronic marginalization regarding narratives of intimate partner abuse. As I find, there exists a notable gap within the queer women’s archive wherein discussions of intimate partner violence are dismissed and diminished. Engaging with this archive’s minimal acknowledgment of intimate partner violence within cultural memories and discourses, I examine how this gap within the literature perseveres, and the efforts memoirs such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House have played in rectifying this literary absence. Through a close analysis of Machado’s text and its reception, this paper argues that Machado’s extensive experimentation with memoir form—evident in her use of genre and second person language—forges new methods of understanding queerness and queer abuse. Moreover, this article proposes that Machado’s experimentation with form reveals Dream House’s metatextual tendency to both address and attempt to fill the archival silences within queer cultural memory, in turn creating a space for queer identity to expand. That is, I contend, Machado’s experimentations with memoir form recognize—and demand recognition of—queer abuse in an autobiographical answer to the archive’s absence.
Disclosure Statement
I declare I have no known competing financial or personal interests that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Notes
1 Machado, In the Dream House.
2 Rainbow, “Through a Queer Lens,” 184.
3 Machado, In the Dream House, 50.
4 Machado, In the Dream House, 4.
5 Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture, 88.
6 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 242.
7 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 243-4.
8 Assmann, Cultural Memory Studies, 97.
9 Assmann, Cultural Memory Studies, 97.
10 Rigney, “Portable Monuments,” 381.
11 Cifor, “Aligning Bodies,” 769.
12 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
13 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 19.
14 Machado, In the Dream House, 3.
15 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 5.
16 Duggan, “The New Homonormativity,” 2002.
17 Assmann, Cultural Memory Studies, 97-8.
18 Berlant, Queen of America, 36.
19 Bates and Weare, “Female-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence,” 583.
20 Capezza et al., “Perceptions of Psychological Abuse,” 1415.
21 Capezza et al., “Perceptions of Psychological Abuse,” 1416.
22 This paper relies on these instances of documentation. Especially significant are essay collections such as Queering Sexual Violence and curated online forums such as “Say it Loud”; however, there are countless other examples of this documentation across published works, online forums, and private social media posts.
23 Patterson, “Introduction,” 21.
24 Rainbow, “Through a Queer Lens,” 184.
25 Davis and Glass, “Reframing the Heteronormative Constructions of Lesbian Partner Violence,” 13.
26 De León, “Closeted Violence,” 36.
27 Dickson, “Queers Don’t Do Sexual Violence, Do We?” 58.
28 Machado, In the Dream House, 87.
29 Machado, In the Dream House, 13; 19; and 24.
30 Capezza et al., “Perceptions of Psychological Abuse,” 1416.
31 Machado, In the Dream House, 143.
32 Machado, In the Dream House, 144.
33 Machado, In the Dream House, 26; and 44.
34 Taylor, “‘Flabulously’ femme,” 460.
35 Carbado, “Colourblind Intersectionality,” 819.
36 Machado, In the Dream House, 129.
37 Machado, In the Dream House, 124.
38 Machado, In the Dream House, 50.
39 Rigney and Erll, “Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory,” 112.
40 Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture, 87-8.
41 Yagoda, Memoir, 9.
42 “Code Switch,” 00:01:05-10.
43 “Code Switch,” 00:01:20-36
44 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 17.
45 Machado, In the Dream House, 129.
46 Machado, In the Dream House, 165.
47 Trahan, “Genre and the Memoir,” 155.
48 Machado, In the Dream House, 166; 258; and 259.
49 Kraus, “Proof of Life,” 248.
50 Machado, In the Dream House, 8.
51 Machado, In the Dream House, 12.
52 Lejeune, On Autobiography, 7.
53 Machado, In the Dream House, 278.
54 Eakin, “Talking About Ourselves,” 100.
55 Gilmore, Tainted Witness, 5.
56 Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography, 67.
57 Miller, “The Entangled Self,” 544.
58 Miller, “The Entangled Self,” 544.
59 Machado, In the Dream House, 17.
60 Machado, In the Dream House, 189.
61 Machado, In the Dream House, 189; and 202.
62 Machado, In the Dream House, 200.
63 Machado, In the Dream House, 202; and 203.
64 Machado, In the Dream House, 278.
65 Machado, In the Dream House, 278.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Isobel Lavers
Isobel Lavers is a PhD Student at the Australian National University, working in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. Her research project considers the significance of mother-daughter relationships in women’s life writing.