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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