Speaking into the Silence: Lesbian Intimate Partner Violence in Carmen Maria Machado’s in the Dream House and a Queer Women’s Archive

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.