Her Body and Other Parties

The main character of “Inventory” serves as a traveling heroine. She catalogues her sexual exploits before and after the outbreak of a deadly virus. Despite the virus’s widening range, the main character survives by moving from place to place and being vigilant about whom she comes into contact with. As the situation becomes more dire, the main character increases her list-making, implying that this activity is a psychological survival strategy. The story leaves the protagonist on an island, where she has fled to avoid other people. However, the question remains if she will be able to survive her own loneliness.

The main character wrestles with the trajectory of her dysfunctional relationship with her partner Bad after Bad leaves her with their baby girl, Mara. The story shifts in tone from the euphoric to the dystopic, as the main character outlines the ways in which her and Bad’s relationship went array. While Bad is charismatic, she is also abusive—a reality that the protagonist slowly comes to terms with. As she struggles with the truth about her romance with Bad, she must mourn the domestic fantasy she has conjured of her life with Bad. By the end of the story, the reader comes to realize that even Mara is a figment of this imagined ideal partnership. 

Carmen Maria Machado draws from the popular television series character Detective Olivia Benson from Law & Order: SVU for her retelling of the show, episode by episode, in the short story “Especially Heinous.” In “Especially Heinous,” Benson is pursued by the ghosts of women whose violent deaths have gone unresolved. These girls literally haunt Benson, keeping her from sleeping and eventually inhabiting her body, until she and her work partner, Stabler, solve all of their murders. Through Benson’s relationship with these girls, Machado evokes a message of female solidarity and accountability.

The workplace sexism that Benson faces on the part of her male colleagues, including Stabler, tie into the book’s theme of male domination and entitlement. Her distress at witnessing a particularly violent crime against a woman is met with irritation. Benson’s characterization also touches upon the book’s motifs of isolation and queer desire. When she is given a reprieve from her ghosts, Benson surprises herself by missing them. By the end of the story, Benson has entered into a lesbian relationship with the DA, who has long harbored an attraction for Benson.

The protagonist faces a moral dilemma once she discovers that the trendy boutique she works for, Glam, is selling dresses into which so-called “faded” women—women who have slowly lost their bodies—are sewn. Her personal investment in the issue increases when her lover Petra begins to fade. The protagonist watches her lover struggle to assert her independence and sense of self as her body ceases to be her own. After Petra fades completely, the protagonist returns to Glam to free the women from the dresses, but they refuse to move. This inertia paired with the protagonist’s eventual knowledge that she, too, will fade suggests a sense of impending doom—that the social pressures of fashion and idealized body image will eventually erode the agency of all women. 

The “Eight Bites” protagonist succumbs to social pressure by undergoing an invasive weight loss surgery. Encouraged by her sisters, she succumbs to her mother’s advice that a woman only needs eight bites to get a sense of what she is eating. However, though the woman has physically shed her old body, it still lives in her house, a situation that implies the psychological ramifications of yielding to beauty standards. “Eight Bites,” like many of the book’s stories, critiques popular culture and toxic idealizations of femininity and their effects on the mental health of women in contemporary life.

CM, the main character in “The Resident,” is one of the most headstrong protagonists in Her Body and Other Parties. Despite criticism from her fellow residents, CM refuses to compromise her creative vision for gender-based double standards. Her residency at Devil’s Throat serves as a reckoning with her past, yet she comes out the other end of the experience with a stronger resolve to be true to herself. Her experiences of judgment and inauthenticity with her fellow artist residents mirror the social isolation she felt as a Girl Scout grappling with her queer identity at the same location. At the end of the story, CM resolves not to let these humiliations define her.