The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Carmen Maria Machado's haunted feminine

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Vox's Constance Grady talks with writer Carmen Maria Machado, whose 2017 short story collection Her Body and Other Parties was a National Book Award finalist. In this episode, which is a recording of a live Vox Book Club event, they discuss how this haunting genre-straddling collection conveys the underlying horrors of being an embodied woman, how the nation's shifting cultural mores around sexual violence are reflected in Law & Order: SVU, and how Machado's writing expresses what she just might start calling the "femme uncanny."

Host: Constance Grady (@constancegrady), staff writer, Vox

Guests: Carmen Maria Machado, author

References: 

  • Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf; 2017)
  • Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (2002)
  • Kelly Link
  • "The Green Ribbon" by Alvin Schwartz, from In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories (1984)
  • "'Law & Order' is lost without Stabler and Benson. Here's why their pairing works," by Carmen Maria Machado (LA Times; Apr. 8, 2021)
  • "The Trash Heap Has Spoken" by Carmen Maria Machado (Guernica; Feb. 13, 2017)


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    This episode was made by: 

    • Producer: Erikk Geannikis
    • Editor: Amy Drozdowska
    • Engineer: Patrick Boyd
    • Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall

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