The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Carmen Maria Machado's haunted feminine

06.02.2022 - By VoxPlay

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

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)

Enjoyed this episode? Rate Vox Conversations ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of Vox Conversations by subscribing in your favorite podcast app.

Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts

This episode was made by: 

Producer: Erikk Geannikis

Editor: Amy Drozdowska

Engineer: Patrick Boyd

Deputy Editorial Director, Vox Talk: Amber Hall

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

More episodes from The Gray Area with Sean Illing