A Powerful Pride Month Read
I can’t recommend ‘In the Dream House’ enough
I’m not exactly telling the world anything new when I say that Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a worthy read; as of now, it has nearly 130,000 Goodreads ratings and has been out for almost five years. However, I had ignored much of its praise, only reading when a professor assigned the memoir and wondering if it was for me.
Yes, as it turned out, and I think it should be a book for everybody.
Much of the marketing surrounding Machado’s memoir centered around her pushing against the narrative of sapphic relationships being inherently safe and loving. It’s easy to intellectually accept the possibility of a queer female abuser, but perhaps more difficult to stop perpetuating such stereotypes.
Intentions are usually good when queer female relationships are elevated over male/female relationships, stemming from a desire to celebrate queerness or acknowledge how a “relatively consistent finding in research on lesbian and gay couples is that they are more likely than heterosexual couples to value and achieve equality in their relationships” (Dunne, 1997).
However, as Machado notes with meticulous research, such lionization of lesbian relationships can make it more difficult for abuse victims to find validation…
