In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Author:Carmen Maria Machado [Machado, Carmen Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64445-102-1
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

30. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type E279.3, Ghost pulls bedclothing from sleeper.

Dream House as Sniffs from the Ink of Women

Norman Mailer once said, “The sniffs I get from the ink of women are always,” among other things, “too dykily psychotic.” In other words, one woman writing is mad and a woman-who-loves-women writing is mad squared. Hysteria and inversion, compounded like interest; an eternally growing debt. Mailer’s use of the adverb dykily suggests that, for him, disinterest in his dick must be a species of psychosis.

Narratives about mental health and lesbians always smack of homophobia. I remember watching Girlfriend in college—a rare Bollywood film about queer women—in which a wrench-wielding, butch lesbian seduces a gorgeous femme, but eventually the femme pulls away and falls in love with a dude and the butch goes ballistic, becoming possessive and violent before dying in a fall from a window.

I came of age in a culture where gay marriage went from comic impossibility to foregone conclusion to law of the land. I haven’t been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian. I did not want my lover to be dogged by mental illness or a personality disorder or rage issues. I did not want her to act with unflagging irrationality. I didn’t want her to be jealous or cruel. Years later, if I could say anything to her, I’d say, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.”

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