Fragments from a Fractured Self: Abusive Queer Relationships in Carmen María Machado’s In the Dream House (2019)

Abstract

By forgetting that queer people are just polyhedric human beings, we can easily fall prey to essentialisms and reinforce two contraposed tendencies: seeing and representing queerness as "pure evil" or "pure goodness''. Envisioning queer individuals and their relationships as unflawed contributes to an essentialist idealisation that leads to the silencing of certain issues within the community such as abuse in queer relationships. In this work we will address this matter through the analysis of Carmen María Machado's memoir In the Dream House (2019), deploying a theoretical framework which, like Machado's work, is multiple and hybrid in its references, as it brings together queer theory, socio-cultural studies on abusive queer relationships and criticism on trauma and life writing. In doing this, we aim to shed light on the role of literature - and in particular texts focusing on often silenced problems such is abuse in queer relationships - in giving visibility and raising awareness. The dissertation will be divided into three distinct chapters, each focusing on different aspects related to the topic under scrutiny, and all having both a theoretical and an analytical component. The first chapter will handle queer essentialism and its role in perpetuating abuse in queer relationships; the second chapter will tackle the visible effects of trauma in writing with a focus on queer life writing; and, lastly, the third chapter will deal with the importance of inscribing abusive queer relationships into the collective archive, showing how Machado accomplishes such task by mobilising well-known images and tropes from folktales and popular culture.