‘Queer Villainy’: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as Testimony to Lesbian Abuse and Love

Abstract

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are popularly believed to be the exclusive preserve of the heterosexual population. This assumption underpins the fact that policy and interventions aimed at reducing DVA often focus on remediating men’s behaviour so that they become less violent towards women. Such views exclude the fact that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people also experience DVA. This lack of knowledge is partly due to the lack of legitimacy afforded to non-heterosexual relationships. This extends to literary-cultural representations, and there is a particular dearth of texts representing lesbian partnerships. Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House (2019), fills a gap in literary representations of lesbian relationships, as well as in representations of DVA between same-sex partners. In this article, we read the work as literary scholars, but we do not interpret it as a hermetically sealed work of art with no reference to the world. Instead, we argue that it makes an important contribution, in literary form, to the emerging scholarship on DVA amongst LGBTQ people. We explore how its literary strategies create rich connections with popular culture and give it a place in the queer archive.

Keywords

• Carmen Maria Machado
• In the Dream House
• lesbian interpersonal abuse
• lesbian writing
• DVA