Latinx/a Identity in 'Her Body And Other Parties'

A major question about ‘Her Body And Other Parties’ by Carmen Maria Machado that we’ve tried to address in class is the question of whether or not the book is “a Latinx book.” As I was reading I tried to keep this question in the back of my mind, and my instinctive answer was that, yes, it is a Latinx book. My gut reaction was that Her Body And Other Parties strikes me as a deeply personal set of short stories, and so, if the author is Latinx, then the stories themselves are also Latinx, even if that is not said outright within them, because the idea of white being the default is something that should be resisted. However, our discussion in class challenged and complicated that perspective, so I decided to return to one of the readings we did early on in the semester about defining Latinx identity and literature.

In the essay Latinidad/es by Frances R. Aparicio (linked on the Resources page,) Aparicio discusses the utility of the term “Latinidad” as a potentially homogenizing identifier. He references scholar Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s work on the term, saying “while it is the preferred term in academic circles and in many community organizations and groups, it is still suspect for its homogenizing potential. This effect is evident in many scholarly works that include the word Latina/o in their title in order to sell, yet ironically tend to caution against the “homogenizing” effects of this term, which “elides historical specificity, ethnic and racial differences, sexual preference, and varying class perspectives into a monolithic conception,” (McCracken 1999, 5.)” (Aparicio, 114.) If we take this analysis of the term ‘Latinidad’ and apply it to ‘Latinx’ in the context of our question: is Her Body And Other Parties an inherently ‘Latinx book?’ then my initial response is challenged; perhaps we should not assign this label to Carmen Maria Machado’s work without her explicit say-so.

There are many more factors which complicate this discussion, but one of the most important and glaring is the fact that womanhood and misogyny—the primary subjects of Her Body And Other Parties—are undoubtedly experienced differently across racial identities. This is what makes it difficult to do a complete 180 even after acknowledging the possibly homogenizing effect of these terms. It’s impossible to label Carmen Maria Machado’s work as ‘Latinx’ without evidence from the text, without running the risk of assigning an unwanted label to her work. (There are moments in the text that imply a Latinx identity for some of her characters, however they are all up for interpretation as opposed to being completely straightforward.) With that being said, it is also impossible to discuss the realities of womanhood without acknowledging the presence of race.

What is known for certain is that Her Body And Other Parties is a book about womanhood. And there are certain experiences of womanhood that are borderline universal across racial, geographic, religious, socioeconomic, etc. lines. I feel that the stories in this book reflect many of those experiences: childbirth, for example, in The Husband Stitch; unattainable beauty standards and the mutilation that women often put themselves through in an effort to attain them, in Eight Bites; the fear of going missing as a woman, in Real Women Have Bodies. In this way, an argument could be made that Machado strived to write a book about womanhood that is applicable to all women. However, the fact is that all of these experiences, however universal among women, would differ depending on the woman’s race. Which leads back to the question of, as a Latinx woman, did Machado write a Latinx book? The experiences of Latinx women are undoubtedly represented in Her Body And Other Parties, but did Machado mean for Latinx women to be the focus? Ultimately, I don’t have an answer to this question. Within this post alone I made arguments for both sides, and it is impossible to capture all of the nuances of a question like this in one to two pages of writing. Either way, I think that not assigning a race to any of the characters in any of the stories was clearly a conscious choice, meant to bring up this question of race within feminism among readers. This in itself may be the point: it is a book about womanhood, that in its stark exclusion of race as a whole, even further complicates the identity of womanhood in a racist world.

Original illustrations of the woman with the green ribbon from The Husband Stitch:

https://bookriot.com/the-girl-with-the-green-ribbon/

http://www.horrorhomeroom.com/unraveling-the-green-ribbon-in-horror-stories-and-movies/