Her Body, Our Horror: Self-Abnegation; or, On Silence, Refusal, and Becoming the Un/Self

Chapter 5 examines short stories from Carmen Maria Machado’s collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) to argue that the female body is presented as a speculative arena through which self-abnegation and refusal are explored in relation to hunger and desire. Latinx scholars have shown an affective attachment to reading Machado as a Latinx author, although her work evinces no overt signs of race and ethnicity, either Latinx or white. Imagining Machado’s work as Latinx positions latinidad as a speculative endeavor that is outside the reach of language—unsayable and unknowable—even as it is happening through language. The chapter’s examination of the speculative female body in Machado’s work unearths unexpected narrative strategies, literary patterns, and networks. These networks are particularly significant in our contemporary moment, in which difficult conversations about sexual abuse and its intersection with race, ethnicity, and financial and institutional power dominate the zeitgeist.