Most, if not all, of the stories feature women that are unabashedly horny. The first line of the first story in the book reads, “In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. Sex is so often the source of violence against women, and yet, Machado suggests, sex, when it’s consensual, is a significant way that women exercise power in their lives.Īs one might expect from a book called Her Body and Other Parties, the collection is full of sex-raunchy sex, restrained sex, queer sex, straight sex.

How exactly sex fits into this is a major concern of Machado’s collection. Women’s bodies signify so much, both to ourselves and others, that inhabiting them and having ownership over them often feel like two different states of being. Supernatural or not, a bow is not just a bow, just like a woman can never be just a woman. The more the husband is rebuked, the more physical his entreaties become, and in this way the bow also functions as a metaphor for how terrifying male entitlement can be. Is the bow an actual bow or is it some sort of supernatural bow? The bow is clearly a metaphor: for the secrets women keep from those closest to them for the fact that no matter how much a woman gives up for her family, it will never quite be enough. Indeed, the first story, “The Husband Stitch,” about a wife who rejects her husband’s wishes to unwrap the bow tied around her neck, is neither a work of pure “realist” fiction nor is it a work of “genre” fiction.

Machado studied writing formally at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop as such, her stories often straddle the line between “literary” and “genre” fiction, to the point that such distinctions cease to have meaning. This contradiction, this push and pull between autonomy and powerlessness, so present in the everyday lives and experiences of women, is burned into each of the eight stories in Machado’s collection, which uses the idea of “genre”-horror, fantasy, science fiction-to explore the surreality of what it’s like to be a woman. On the other, more insidious hand, there’s the sense that “her body” is a party thrown for the benefit of others, something to be enjoyed by everyone else but its owner. On one hand, the title refers to the empowerment of taking pleasure in one’s own body, that the body can and should be a cause for celebration for its owner.

There’s a contradiction inherent in the title of Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties.

Synopsis of her body and other parties