PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies
Vol. 21, No. 1/2
December 2025
JOURNAL ARTICLE (PEER REVIEWED)
Queering #MeToo: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as Narrative Activism
Corresponding author: Bianca Martin, College of Arts, Society & Education, James Cook University, 1 James Cook Drive, Douglas, Queensland, Australia, bianca.martin@my.jcu.edu.au
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v21i1-2.9917
Article History: Received 16/07/2025; Accepted 24/12/2025; Published 19/02/2026
Abstract
When #MeToo emerged in late 2017, the public conversation about sexual violence intensified. Across the globe, survivors of sexual violence shared their stories, initially through digital hashtags on social media and later through formal life writing publications. These narrative moments revealed the pervasiveness of sexual violence, the breadth of survivors’ diverse experiences, and the ways in which survivors have been historically silenced. American writer Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental memoir In the Dream House (2019) is one such text that participated in this public reckoning. Machado creatively manipulates genre and form to narrate both her abusive relationship with another woman and uncover the history of queer intimate partner violence. Reading Dream House in the context of #MeToo positions the text as a work of narrative activism through its intention to expose the systemic and structural barriers to breaking the silence on queer intimate partner abuse and violence. Narrative activism promotes social change through storytelling techniques that inform, educate, and persuade readers about a certain topic. The combined effort of disclosing personal experiences and contextualising these experiences against the backdrop of social movements can not only facilitate empathetic responses that hold the potential to lead to real-world action, but also provides readers with the vocabulary and knowledge to become literate advocates. Machado echoes the findings of queer sexual violence researchers and addresses issues of heterosexist definitions of sexual violence, dominant cultural narratives about queerness, and the binary view of gendered power relations. Dream House is an important contribution to the wider discussion that #MeToo started about sexual violence as it brings to light the experiences of queer people that have been overlooked and misrepresented in the mainstream #MeToo discourse.
Keywords
#MeToo; Life Writing; Sexual Violence; Intimate Partner Violence; Queer
In an interview following the publication of In the Dream House (2019), an experimental memoir about queer intimate partner violence1, the book’s author, Carmen Maria Machado, discusses the limitations of #MeToo in addressing instances of sexual violence that fall outside of ‘perfect open-and-shut cases’ (Shapiro 2019: para. 12). Machado expands on her criticism, explaining that ‘people really struggle because they want these super-concrete examples’ in order to determine whether the label of abuse can be justified (Shapiro 2019: para. 11). Machado has also openly criticised #MeToo elsewhere, stating in an interview with The Paris Review that #MeToo falls short in addressing the grey areas of sexual violence, where the boundaries of power dynamics or the acts of harm are less discretely defined (Qasim 2019). She states that ‘#MeToo—while a useful movement in many ways—fails in really basic ways when it comes to everything that is not rape’ (2019: para. 12). Machado’s statements echo those found in contemporary Western sexual violence research. Scholars note that sexual violence experiences which fall outside of heteronormative and cisnormative paradigms do not fit within the dominant narratives and language about sexual violence. Testimony from queer victim-survivors is thus commonly overlooked within #MeToo discourse (McCann & Sharp 2023: 4). Machado says that in Dream House she is ‘interested in trying to give people language to talk about things they don’t think they have the language to talk about’ (Shapiro 2019: para. 12). In writing her personal story of sexual and intimate partner violence in a queer relationship, Machado prompts readers to consider the limitations of the predominantly heteronormative frameworks of sexual violence.
Carmen Maria Machado is a queer Latina author based in North America and known for her subversive fictional short stories. Dream House follows the publication of Machado’s critically acclaimed short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) and expands on the themes of power, psychological abuse, and gender identity that she often explores in her work. In Dream House, Machado chronicles her abusive relationship with another woman, who remains unnamed. She details the insidious ways the abuse begins and highlights how difficult it was for her, and those around her, to recognise the relationship as abusive because it was a same-sex relationship. Machado points to the dearth of representation of sexual and intimate partner violence in queer relationships as one reason for this blindness. Machado situates her personal narrative alongside extensive historical and archival research into this overlooked history, predominantly within her own North American context. She applies the concept of archival silencing to her research experience, where she ‘spent years struggling to find examples of [her] own experience in the history of queer women’ (Machado 2019: 261). Archival silencing occurs when a story ‘is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve’ (2019: 2). Marginalised people, such as queer people, Indigenous peoples, or people of colour, regularly find their stories missing from the archive. This silencing results in ‘gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves’ (2019: 2). And this exclusion ‘is akin to an absence of recognition of experiences as valid or valued’ (Wiese 2023: 207). Recording the diversity of people’s lived experiences is key in providing context for others to recognise their own experiences, and this is a project Machado explicitly takes up in Dream House.
In the prologue to Dream House, Machado declares, ‘I enter into the archive to assert that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this’ (2019: 4). Machado therefore positions her memoir as a text that has the potential to inform, educate, and persuade her readers about the issue of queer intimate partner violence. Machado insists that instances of same-sex intimate partner violence can, and must, be located in history, and she uses the form of the memoir to do so. Much of the work of #MeToo life writing concerns locating such patterns of abuse throughout history and revealing their pervasiveness through a contemporary lens. While these themes are widely applicable across global contexts, Machado’s memoir and the theoretical underpinnings of this article remain specific to a Western, and largely North American, setting where #MeToo emerged and has been popularised. It is through this context that Dream House can be read as a work of narrative activism, with the aim of furthering broader discussions about issues of power, coercion, and systemic silencing that #MeToo started.
Life writing scholar Leigh Gilmore defines narrative activism as ‘storytelling in the service of social change’ (2023: 2). Authors employ ‘the power of storytelling to create empathy and understanding in diverse audiences’ in order to shape the public narrative about issues such as sexual violence (Gilmore 2023: xii). In his research about social movement literature, Stephen Schneider similarly theorises that texts aligned with specific social movements ‘seek to change the minds of their various audiences, to inspire action, and ultimately to bring about social change’ (2024: 5). The work of narrative activism is therefore about the psychological shift a reader may experience through engaging with the text, as it ‘provides the viewer-participants with an enriching starting point for their own reflection on the political and civil context’ (Steinbock et al. 2021: 3). Reading such texts within the sociopolitical frame of #MeToo inspires readings that not only pay close attention to depictions of sexual violence, ‘but also to the nuances of coercion and consent, speech and silence, and credibility and doubt’ (Holland & Hewitt 2023: 602). Specific to the context of #MeToo, authors reveal the everyday pervasiveness of sexual violence, expose the complex modes of silencing that victim-survivors face, and situate their personal experiences of sexual violence within historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, authors ‘use their texts to centre structural problems in relation to their personal traumas’ (Burns 2023: 17).
In Dream House, Machado writes back against the cultural scripts that have marginalised stories of queer sexual and intimate partner violence. Machado inscribes three key limitations in addressing queer sexual and intimate partner violence in both her personal narrative and supported by the archival research that she conducted: dominant cultural narratives about queerness, limited social understanding of sexual violence outside of heteronormative instances, and gendered assumptions of how power can be held and abused. She identifies such factors as contributing to her own personal struggle in recognising and naming her abuse and provides historical examples of how such assumptions have been enacted. In calling attention to the ways in which stories of queer sexual and intimate partner violence have been silenced or overlooked, Machado challenges preconceived beliefs about how queer sexual and intimate partner violence is discussed and represented.
Contextualising #MeToo
In October 2017 articles in both New York Times and The New Yorker exposed the extensive history of sexual harassment and assault allegations made against Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein (Kantor & Twohey 2017; Farrow 2017). In the wake of these allegations and the surrounding public discourse, American actress Alyssa Milano took to the social media platform Twitter, writing: ‘Me Too. Suggested by a friend: If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me Too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem’ (cited in Boyle 2019: 3). Milano followed this post with a call to action: ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write “me too” as a reply to this tweet’ (cited in Wanzo & Stabile 2022: 379). The hashtag #MeToo began trending globally across social media, with hundreds of thousands of people sharing their own experiences of sexual violence or voicing allyship for survivors in the first twenty-four hours alone (Clark-Parsons 2021: 362–3). The Weinstein media coverage and viral hashtag worked together to bring the conversation about sexual violence to the forefront of the public sphere.
The #MeToo hashtag was quickly connected to the social justice work of African American activist Tarana Burke, who started using the phrase ‘me too’ a decade prior. Burke founded the ‘me too. Movement’ while working with survivors of sexual violence in the American south and wanted to provide ‘a sense of empowerment through the understanding that they are not alone in their circumstances’ (Just Be Inc. 2013: para. 2). While Burke’s work was not credited in the original social media posts, Milano did later acknowledge her, and ‘Burke has subsequently become a prominent figure in media debates about #MeToo’ (Boyle 2019: 5). Burke’s advocacy was specific to vulnerable and marginalised communities, particularly young Black girls, and was intended to be ‘queer and intersectional’ (Guadalupe-Diaz & Whalley 2022: 171). When the hashtag went viral on social media, Burke expressed anxiety that her work would be co-opted to focus on wealthy white women (2021: 6). The initial #MeToo stories that garnered the most attention, and thus the most visibility, were those of white celebrities naming and shaming influential public figures. The hashtag came to be associated with celebrity culture and the outing of individual perpetrators (Hill 2021: 9). Despite its global reach, this popularised iteration of #MeToo has also largely remained within the North American context. This is a tension that remains largely unresolved in the ever-changing understanding of what constitutes the #MeToo, or ‘me too’ movement(s) and has continued to impact on what stories are deemed worthy of inclusion under the #MeToo label.
At the core of both iterations of the movement though is the ‘belief that stories of harm and survival can help to effect change’ (Wanzo & Stabile 2022: 381). Positioning #MeToo within the context of Burke’s social justice work serves to connect the movement to a greater history of feminist activism and narrative-driven consciousness raising that highlights the transformative power of storytelling. #MeToo was popularised in digital spaces, but it has maintained momentum in part through long-form publications, particularly in the genre of memoir. Memoirs published in the wake of #MeToo write beyond the personal, seeking to uncover the structural and systemic inequalities that have historically permitted and perpetuated sexual violence and have silenced those who attempt to speak out.
Queer stories remain largely absent within popular and mainstream #MeToo reporting, where the focus has remained on stories of ‘heterosexual sexual assault in which both people are cisgender’ (Ison 2019: 151). Sexual violence researchers Sophie Hindes and Bianca Fileborn suggest that ‘the silence in media representation [of stories about queer sexual violence] likely reflects broader social attitudes’ (2021: 168). They explain that because of prejudice and homophobia, the violence or abuse that may occur within queer relationships remains largely unspoken about or disbelieved. Jess Ison echoes this sentiment in her research into queer #MeToo representations, explaining, ‘LGBTQIA people, our lifestyles, relationships and sex lives were historically – and often still are – seen as illegitimate,’ which leads to a ‘misconception that violence does not happen in queer communities’ (2019: 153). Continuing to overlook queer narratives thus perpetuates the notion that this violence does not exist.
In the Dream House
Chloe R. Green posits that Dream House ‘joins a growing body of testimonial literature responding to the mass reckoning of the #MeToo movement’ (2023: 532). With its primary focus on emotional and psychological abuse, Dream House may not initially seem like a text that speaks to the themes commonly associated with #MeToo. The popularisation of #MeToo prompted debate as to ‘what counts as sexual injury’, particularly when the most prominent stories centred on the sexual assault of white women in the workplace (Wanzo & Stabile 2022: 384). However, in addressing concerns about power imbalances, coercion, and silencing, Dream House furthers the conversation about ‘gendered and sexual abuse’ that is core to #MeToo (Green 2023: 532). Dream House destabilises the assumption that the power relations reproduced in gendered and sexual abuse can only occur within a gender binary. Instead, Machado demonstrates how her partner routinely weaponised their sexuality as a means of maintaining and abusing power within the relationship. Such a positioning reflects an expanded conception of sexual harassment beyond ‘unrequited sexual desire’ but rather sexual harassment ‘can also be based on the treatment of an individual’s sexual or gender identity’ (Guadalupe-Diaz & Whalley 2022: 167). This differentiation is something that queer criminology scholars Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz and Elizabeth Whalley find key to placing ‘more transgender and queer people’s experiences of harassment squarely within the #MeToo movement’ (2022: 167).
In her research on #MeToo memoirs, Victoria Burns suggests that Dream House ‘overlaps with the wide-scale goal of Burke’s “me too.” Movement’ (2023: 142). Burke’s vision is to ‘first and foremost’ connect ‘survivors to resources for healing, justice, action and leadership’ (me too. 2025: para. 4). Dream House provides a framework for other victim-survivors of queer sexual and intimate partner violence to understand why their experiences may be under-represented and thus overlooked or dismissed. By bringing sexual and intimate partner violence into a larger dialogue about gendered, racialised, and classed injustices, the conversation moves away from those ‘perfect open-and-shut cases’ to a more nuanced discussion of power and coercion. While rape and intimate partner violence are not interchangeable terms, legal scholar Sarah Deer explains that ‘any relationship marked by domestic violence is almost guaranteed to involve sexual coercion’ (2015: xvii–xviii). Hindes and Fileborn further argue that ‘overt coercion is not always necessary for participation in unwanted sex’, which suggests that the ongoing insidious nature of intimate partner violence could be understood as a gradual wearing down of autonomy in a relationship (2021: 166). Positioning Dream House within the context of #MeToo prompts questions of consent in a relationship built on coercive control and about what this looks like in a relationship that does not fit a heteronormative paradigm.
The experimental form of Dream House reflects the incoherence, ambiguity, and complexity of intimate partner violence. Writing outside the conventions of memoir can be understood as an intentional queering of the form. Machado queers the narrative of intimate partner violence quite literally, in the sense that she is telling the story of a same-sex intimate partner violence relationship. However, to queer something is more than simply including LGBTQIA+ or non-normative sexualities or genders as subjects. Guadalupe-Diaz and Whalley explain that ‘Queering involves deconstructing power and challenging assumptions behind language, culture, institutions, and more’ (2022: 171). In breaking with the tradition of conventional memoir form, Machado disrupts the established reading strategies for the genre. Narrative theory scholar Annjeanette Wiese proposes that ‘narrative theory forces us to think about form, how we construct meaning, and how experimenting with such forms changes and enhances new, additional, or more nuanced meaning’ (2023: 209). By telling a marginalised story through familiar narrative devices, Machado exposes the social and cultural constructions a reader may bring to the text.
One such mode of experimentation that Machado deploys is the use of the recurring motif of the Dream House. This motif anchors Machado’s narrative as she moves between genre and form. The Dream House is both a real place, referring to the physical home Machado shared with her partner, and a constructed space where Machado can collect all of the pieces of the story together and bear witness to her abuse (Stefanakou 2023: 121). Dream House consists of 146 chapters told through the style of a different genre, trope, popular culture reference, or literary device. Each chapter adheres to a similar title formula, starting with ‘Dream House as …’ and then follows the style and conventions related to each theme or subject. This technique both furthers the narrative through chapters designed to engage with character (‘Dream House as Bildungsroman’, ‘Dream House as Star-Crossed Lovers’), setting (‘Dream House as World Building’, ‘Dream House as Set Design’), and point of view (‘Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View’), but also reimagines Machado’s relationship and abuse across a range of genres. ‘Dream House as Erotica’ is sexually explicit, drawing focus to the intense passion experienced early in the relationship; ‘Dream House as Noir’ evokes the cynicism and tension that are inherent to the genre and positions her abusive partner as a femme fatale trope; and ‘Dream House as High Fantasy’ reimagines Machado as a heroine who must undergo a series of dangerous quests as a means of saving the world. Here, the manipulation of genre becomes powerful, as this chapter can be read as an analogy for how Machado believes she must endure this abuse in order to eventually fully win over the love of her abusive partner. In writing her memoir through these various lenses, Machado is both trying to locate her story within existing forms and expressing to her reader ‘how familiar concepts can be applied to something unfamiliar and incomprehensible’ (Stefanakou 2023: 125). In employing this experimental mode, Machado makes visible the linguistic and narrative challenges of telling a story that does not fit within existing, and accepted, frameworks.
Dominant Cultural Narratives of Queerness
In Dream House, Machado points to the dominant Western cultural narratives about queer people, both within and outside of the queer community, that prevented her from speaking out about her abuse. The pervasiveness of cultural narratives of lesbian relationships as a utopian ideal and, conversely, the historical positioning of queerness as a kind of sexual deviance or mental illness, created a conflict for Machado as she found herself in ‘a liminal space between these two tropes’ (Wiese 2023: 211). Wiese expands, that if Machado ‘tells her story in an authentic way, she risks perpetuating a stereotype that is harmful to queer individuals, and in doing so, she disrupts the one positive narrative: that her relationship should be paradise, a fantasy she is lucky to have fallen into’ (2023: 212). In Dream House, Machado critiques both cultural narratives for how they unintentionally invalidate complex lived experiences.
Machado describes how, in her experiences of the queer community, lesbians view their relationships as egalitarian and utopian because they sit outside of patriarchal influence. She explains, ‘To find desire, love, everyday joy without men’s accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise’ (2019: 124). However, Machado prefaces this by noting that ‘Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliché of female queerness’ (2019: 124). Isobel Lavers, in her work on Dream House, conceptualises this utopian fantasy as ‘a vision of a queer future absent of the traumas associated with life in a homophobic, heteronormative society’ (2024: 135). There is consequently no space for narratives of interpersonal violence in this utopian ideal because ‘the recognition of abuse perpetrated internally in queer communities exists in opposition to the affective priorities of the wider queer community’ (2024: 135). Machado argues that this recognition is important, even if it does not fit within the utopian fantasy: ‘we deserve to have our wrongdoing represented … because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity’ (2019: 50–51). She further suggests that it is ‘the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality’ that ‘can defeat every other interest’ (2019: 230). This utopian fantasy can create a double bind, where the aspirational ideals of progressing towards a life free from violence and discrimination ultimately silences the lived reality of interpersonal violence.
In her own research on Machado’s memoir, Carolin Jesussek similarly identifies the perceived challenges of this utopian fantasy and suggests it may persist due to ‘pressure not to confirm society’s stigmatisation of lesbians and mental health issues’ (2024: 194). For Machado, encountering stereotypical depictions of queer women as mentally unstable is a source of frustration and sadness. Queer narratives are largely absent from the wider public conversation about intimate partner violence, but the few she does find reinforce this behaviour as an innate part of the queer experience. One of the few pieces of media portraying lesbian intimate partner violence that Machado encounters during her research is the Bollywood film Girlfriend, which depicts the ex-girlfriend in a same-sex couple as ‘possessive and violent’ (Machado 2019: 145). Machado reflects:
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.” (2019: 145)
Machado signals here that she is aware of how damaging negative depictions of queer women can be. She elaborates, ‘It’s not radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove’ (2019: 261). Similarly, Lavers contends that ‘queer communities have historically fought against this vilification’ and that acknowledging the issue of sexual or intimate partner violence ‘may resist that struggle’ (2024: 135–136).
Machado also cites the historical equation of queerness and sexual deviance as another factor that prevented her from speaking out about her abuse. Guadalupe-Diaz and Whalley explain that ‘in a heterosexist and transphobic society, deviance from heterosexuality and cisnormativity is socially constructed as a predatory threat’ (2022: 174). When queerness is viewed as innately dangerous, instances of harm become normalised and expected. Victim-survivors may be less willing to speak out about their experiences of sexual or intimate partner violence out of fear that they are contributing ‘to data that might be used to perpetuate stereotypes of queer people as sexually violent predators’ (2022: 166). Similarly, sociologists Hannah McCann and Megan Sharp discuss a reluctance in queer communities to advocate around issues of sexual violence because ‘conservative commentators may draw on this as evidence that an LGBTQ+ “lifestyle” is dangerous’ (2023: 4). The fear of ‘homophobic backlash’ and the harmful—and incorrect—stereotypes that are applied to queer people ‘maintain the silence around accounting for LGBTQ+ experiences’ (2023: 4–5).
In locating the cultural association of queerness as a predatory threat, Machado introduces the concept of queer-coding. Queer-coding denotes where fictional characters are portrayed with stereotypically queer mannerisms, but are not specifically labelled as queer. In the chapter ‘Dream House as Queer Villainy’ she cites popular Disney movies where the villains are commonly queer-coded, creating cultural associations in which ‘villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other’ (Machado 2019: 49). When queer characters are so uncommon in popular and mainstream media, their ‘disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect’ (2019: 50). She explains that these recurring representations of queer-coded villains in movies ‘tell a single story … and create real-life associations of evil and depravity’, thus reflecting villainous or deviant associations back onto the queer community (2019: 50). The reference to the single story echoes the popular 2009 TED Talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, delivered by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie’s talk illustrates how the stories we consume directly influence our understanding of the world and ‘how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story’ (2009). Adichie explains that when she emigrated to attend university in the United States she was regularly met with shock that she could speak English, knew about contemporary popular music, and had not grown up in poverty. She links this misconception to the dominant story about African culture that Western societies are exposed to. She explains that this ‘single story’ results in ‘no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals’ (2009). In referencing Adichie’s notion of the single story, Machado conveys the challenges she faced in resisting the dominant narratives of queerness. Wiese concludes that ‘representation and its conventions present obstacles’ in Machado’s ability to tell her story (2023: 214). However, it is not only the dominant cultural narratives about queerness that impacted Machado’s story of abuse, but also the dominant cultural narratives about sexual violence.
Heteronormative Assumptions of Sexual Violence
Sexual violence is largely measured by ‘heterosexist and phallocentric definitions’ (Guadalupe-Diaz & Whalley 2022: 166). Such definitions restrict the accepted understanding of sexual violence to instances of penetrative rape perpetrated by cisgender men against cisgender women (2022: 166). In these definitions, the diversity of gender identities and sexual expressions within the queer community cannot be accounted for. Notably, these definitions also exclude cisgender women from being understood as perpetrators. Guadalupe-Diaz and Whalley explain that the ‘invalidation of nonpenetrative sex contributes to the social invalidation of sex that does not include a cisman’ (2022: 170). Therefore, if sex between women is not considered ‘real sex’ in the dominant heteronormative and cisnormative society, it follows that ‘sexual violence between women, genderqueer, or gender-nonconforming people is invalidated’ (2022: 170). The public understanding and acceptance of sexual norms therefore directly impacts the understanding of sexual violence.
When stories of queer sexual and intimate partner violence are dismissed because they are not considered to be ‘real’ in relation to the heterosexist and phallocentric definitions, survivors may be unable to identify their own experiences as abuse or violence. In their research on media representations of sexual violence, Hindes and Fileborn utilise Judith Butler’s2 framework of cultural intelligibility to interrogate how instances of queer sexual violence are reported (2021: 165). Cultural intelligibility is a framework that explains how individuals are perceived in relation to dominant social norms and practices. They explain that the way we are understood as individuals is ‘fundamentally dependent on social norms’ and ‘those who are outside of the norm are … constructed as intelligible in relation to the norm’ (2021: 165). Gender and sexuality are two key facets of identity that influence how a person may be read as intelligible. Failing to conform to the dominant social norms renders an individual, and therefore their experiences, as culturally unintelligible. So, sexuality, and therefore sexual violence, is understood in relation to the dominant social norms of heterosexuality. Understanding queer sexual violence then becomes problematic, as it is read in relation to heterosexual sexual violence (2021: 166).
Machado undertakes significant work to demonstrate to her readers why queer sexual and intimate partner violence is a topic that has been overlooked, dismissed, or minimised. In ‘Dream House as Ambiguity’ she explains how, historically, there was ‘flat out denial that sex between women is even possible’, therefore rendering lesbian relationships invisible (Machado 2019: 157). Machado references gender studies academic Janice L. Ristock, who surmises that ‘lesbianism was not only unspeakable but “legally unimaginable”’ (cited in Machado 2019: 158). The lack of a legal or social framework to understand a sexual relationship between two women continues to influence the understanding of sexual violence between two women. In this chapter, Machado references historical legal cases of lesbian intimate partner violence and demonstrates how the reception of such occurrences remains unchanged over time. She writes about how judges and juries struggle to make sense of these cases where the perpetrator does not fit the accepted and understood norm, leading to perpetrators being dismissed as mentally unwell instead of being convicted of crimes relating to intimate partner violence. Dismissing cases of same-sex intimate partner violence as issues of mental illness serves to erase queer narratives from history, perpetuating a myth that intimate partner violence does not occur outside of heteronormative relationships.
In ‘Dream House as Myth’, one of the final chapters of the memoir, Machado shows how she contends with these pervasive beliefs about intimate partner violence in queer relationships. The title of the chapter signals the public perception that intimate partner violence in lesbian relationships is a falsehood. When she discloses her experiences, she is met with disbelief. She explains, ‘When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen’, while others are uninterested in hearing her version of events (2019: 255). While people are ‘kind to [her] in person, what they say to others makes its way back to [her]: We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says … was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?’ (2019: 255). Such sentiments echo the historical notion that sexual and intimate partner violence between women is not possible. Machado’s experience is not understood as culturally intelligible because of ‘limited norms regarding queer sex, queer sexual violence, and queer consent’ (Hindes & Fileborn 2021: 166).
In narrating her personal experience, Machado also challenges this very notion of lesbian sexual and intimate partner violence as culturally unintelligible, simply because those involved do not fit within the dominant social norms. One way Machado achieves this is through her narration of the gradual breakdown of consent in her relationship. Using consent as a framework for understanding sexual violence negates the necessity to define sexual violence by specific acts of harm. In her book Sex, Consent, and Justice, Tina Sikka positions consent as ‘the primary barometer of sexual permissibility’ in #MeToo discussions (2022: vii). Consent, she defines, ‘implies cooperation of free will communicated by words or actions by one party to another’ (2022: 30). Consent is not a static concept, and its definition has shifted with cultural influence. Consent, and particularly whether consent has been coerced, has been central in #MeToo conversations.
Machado portrays the beginning of her relationship as intensely passionate and sexual. The first time they have sex, Machado’s partner seeks continuous affirmative consent: ‘“I’d like to take your shirt off. May I?” And you nod, and she does. She slides her hand around your bra clasp. “Is this all right?” she asks … Every time her hand moves somewhere else, she whispers, “May I?”’ (2019: 21–22). Machado responds with ‘the thrill of saying yes, yes’ (22). Seeking affirmative consent is a means of ensuring all partners are consciously willing and happy to engage in sexual activity. This scene depicts Machado’s partner as someone who, in the early stages of this relationship, is respectful of boundaries and values an enthusiastic sexual partner. The result is that this consent-seeking led Machado to trust her partner.
Later into their relationship, Machado depicts a contrasting experience:
One day, as she rubs her fingers over your clit, and you close your eyes in pleasure, she grabs your face and twists it toward her. She gets so close to you, you can smell something sour on her breath. “Who are you thinking about,” she says. It is phrased like a question but it isn’t. Your mouth moves, but nothing comes out, and she squeezes your jaw a little harder. “Look at me when I fuck you,” she says. You pretend to come. (2019: 91)
The language used here is starkly different from the first scene. Machado’s partner does not ask permission to touch, but rather grabs, twists, and squeezes. This scene positions Machado’s partner as someone who no longer values affirmative consent, but instead acts with anger and violence. Before, Machado granted consent with an enthusiastic ‘yes’, but here she finds herself unable to speak. She is no longer affirming consent to her partner, but is instead immobilised by her partner’s change in demeanour. The accusation of ‘who are you thinking about’ serves as a means of controlling Machado’s sexual autonomy and is an indication of manipulative behaviour. Machado is in a vulnerable position and her reaction and response in the moment determine her physical and psychological safety.
Then finally, towards the end of the relationship, Machado depicts a sexual interaction with her partner that is void of communication: ‘That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you’re gone. You have voided your body so many times now that it is force of habit’ (2019: 198). There are no longer requests for permission to touch or affirmative responses. Notably, there is also no indication of controlling language or behaviour to coerce Machado into consent. This passivity has become ‘force of habit’ and suggests the pattern of coercion has been successful.
Here, Machado’s depiction of the breakdown in consent provides a clear and comprehensible example to her readers of what intimate partner violence can look like in a same-sex relationship. The above examples are not concerned with the gender identity or sexual orientation of either party, nor is the focus on discrete acts of sexual relations. Reading these examples as issues of consent moves the conversation away from hetero/homosexual frameworks of sexual violence to one centred on power and coercion. The fear of being subjected to her partner’s aggressive behaviours has rendered Machado compliant in order to prioritise her safety. We can understand her consent to sexual activity with her partner as being coerced. Gender and sexuality studies scholar Ashwini Tambe explains that coercion is ‘more than just whether someone says yes or no’ (2018: 201). In the latter two examples, Machado does not verbally respond affirmatively or negatively. In fact, she is unable to respond out of fear. Coercion therefore ‘hinges on whether one has power over that other person such that they might interpret a request as force–or even as a threat’ (2018: 201). In the second example, the partner uses physical force to control Machado’s participation in sex, with the implied threat that her grip will tighten if Machado dissents. Tambe concludes that if someone ‘faces negative consequences for saying no to a sexual advance, then that sexual advance is coercive’ (2018: 201). Understanding coercion in a same-sex relationship therefore also requires a critique of the dominant cultural understanding of how power is held and abused.
Understanding Power Imbalances Outside of the Gender Binary
How power is understood within relationship dynamics relies on a largely binaristic view of gender. In their research on university campus sexual violence prevention strategies since #MeToo, McCann and Sharp utilise the concept of cisheteropatriarchy to analyse how power relations are socially understood (2023: 2). They explain that ‘the discourse around sexual violence operates via the assumption that power relations can be neatly mapped onto a single-axis (heterosexual) dynamic of cisgender men’s power over cisgender women’ (2023: 2). Experiences of sexual violence where the parties share a gender identity or are not cisgender therefore ‘trouble any neat gender mapping of sexual violence’ (2023: 4). Machado points to the masculine, gendered notions of power as one of the reasons why queer sexual violence, even within the queer community, is overlooked. She claims that ‘the queer community has long used the rhetoric of gender roles as a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse’ (Machado 2019: 230). Machado writes that ‘some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions’ (2019: 230). For example, ‘Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity’ (2019: 230). Stipulating power through this gendered lens promotes a narrow understanding of what constitutes power in relationships and how it can be held and abused. The result is, again, that many queer and same-sex experiences of sexual and intimate partner violence are rendered invisible.
Sexual violence is ‘overwhelmingly’ perpetrated by heterosexual men against heterosexual women, where ‘this violence is situated within, and reproduces, gendered power relations’ (Hindes & Fileborn 2021: 166). However, feminist media studies researcher Karen Boyle ascertains that contemporary conceptions of power explain that sexual violence can now also be understood through the intersections of ‘racial privilege, class, wealth, workplace status, or age’ (2019: 104). Considering additional identity markers of privilege means that ‘it is also possible for some women to hold power over some men’ or over others within the same gender (2019: 104).
Throughout Dream House, Machado demonstrates the subtle ways power was enacted in her same-sex relationship through physical attributes, racial identity, and life experience. Machado’s initial descriptions of her partner are as ‘short and pale and rail-thin’ with ‘fine blonde hair’ and blue eyes (2019: 24). She has a ‘distinctly upper-class, New England air’ from attending Harvard for college (2019: 24). Machado positions her partner as conventionally attractive, intelligent, and respectable. In contrast, Machado describes herself as ‘a weird fat girl’ who ‘felt lucky’ because her partner ‘did what you’d wished a million others had done—looked past arbitrary markers of social currency and seen your brain and ferocious talent and quick wit’ (2019: 26). Later, Machado presents another contrasting description of herself as a ‘racially ambiguous fat woman in her mid-twenties with terrible posture’ and her partner as ‘white’ and ‘petite’ (2019: 84). For Machado, living in a larger body was a significant factor in identifying a power imbalance in the relationship. She identifies that this feeling of inferiority stems from the social script of ‘being told you should be grateful for anything you get as a fat woman’, which impacted what she accepted or tolerated in a relationship (2019: 244).
Machado’s Latina identity is not explored in great detail in Dream House. When the two first begin dating, her partner notes their physical differences: ‘she loves to marvel over your differences: how her skin is pale as skim milk, and yours olive … “Everything is darker on you,” she says’ (2019: 44). While the statement in itself is not said in a disparaging way, when read in the greater context of the memoir it can be interpreted as a microaggression. Emphasising Machado’s largeness or darkness serves to highlight her Otherness. The repeated descriptions of Machado’s partner as white, blonde, and small ‘emphasizes [her] appearance as fitting a norm of nonthreatening white femininity’ (Lavers 2024: 139). Such descriptions also reinforce Latino queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s assertion that in the United States, ‘whiteness claims affective normativity and neutrality,’ which in turn renders Latinx identity as ‘excess’ (2000: 70). Machado explains how a narrative that features ‘a smaller person abusing a larger one’ further complicates how stories of sexual and intimate partner violence are perceived (cited in Brown 2019: 34). Machado questions, ‘what are you looking at when the person abusing you is one hundred pounds lighter than you or six inches shorter than you?’ (Brown 2019: 36). Through emphasising their contrasting physical attributes, Machado is ‘directly challenging cultural abuse narratives’, calling into question the pre-existing scripts about who can hold power (Lavers 2024: 139).
Machado also reflects on how differing life experiences impacted the power dynamics of the relationship: ‘Despite the fact that you were the same age, you felt like she was older than you: more experienced, worldlier. She’d worked in publishing, she’d lived abroad, she spoke fluent French. She’d lived in New York and been to launch parties for literary magazines’ (2019: 24). Here, Machado shows a variety of ways in which she felt inferior to her partner, who is positioned as more knowledgeable and therefore more in control. Machado’s partner weaponises this perceived leverage during a trip to New York City, where she previously lived but where Machado feels overwhelmed and uncomfortable. When visiting a craft fair together, Machado ‘walk[s] too slowly for her taste’ (2019: 185). As her partner walks away from Machado, leaving her alone with the luggage and no means of transport, she says to Machado, ‘maybe you should go back to your parents’ house in Allentown if you can’t take the city’ (2019: 185). Such a comment plays on stereotypes of people from suburban or regional areas as less resilient or less sophisticated. The comment is intended as a criticism of Machado’s ability to participate in city life, suggesting she is perhaps less cultured and better suited to a quiet life where she is unchallenged. Taken individually, these various elements do not constitute a significant power imbalance. However, as Machado shows, when these elements compound and intersect, power imbalances can develop into an unequal partnership.
Machado also shows how her partner weaponised her lesbian relationship experience over her. Machado identifies as bisexual and describes this relationship as her first serious relationship with another woman. In their research specific to sexual and intimate partner violence within the queer community, Catherine Donovan and Rebecca Barnes put forward the term ‘identity abuse’ to describe ‘where a more established, confident LGB and/or T+ person exploits a less established, newly out partner with their apparently superior knowledge about what it means to be authentically LGB and/or T+’ (Donovan & Barnes 2020: 16). Identity abuse constitutes a form of ‘experiential power’ as a newly out person can be positioned as ‘“younger” than a partner who has been out for some time’ (2020: 16). Donovan and Barnes identify a key aspect of identity abuse as ‘undermining a partner’s sense of self-identity as an LGB and/or T+ person’ in order to ‘control, punish, [or] torment’ (2020: 16). They explain that queer people can be particularly vulnerable if they did not grow up with knowledge about queer lives or relationships, or did not live somewhere where there was a visible queer community (2020: 108). Identity abuse preys on the vulnerability and insecurities of a newly out person or someone with limited experience in queer romantic or sexual relationships. Identity abuse, especially if enacted alongside other demeaning or degrading behaviours, can reinforce fears about finding another queer partner (2020: 109).
Throughout Dream House, Machado’s partner is shown as regularly belittling her for her limited experience in queer relationships. Early in the relationship, Machado and her partner are on holiday together. They are walking around the town, holding hands, when a drunk man approaches them. He harasses the two women and grabs Machado. Machado’s partner shouts and intervenes, causing the drunk man to leave, and Machado ‘tremble[s] for the better part of the next hour’ (2019: 29). Machado’s partner tells her, ‘I know this is new to you, but I’ve dated a lot of women. This is just par for the course. This is the risk you’re taking’ (2019: 29). In this scene, the drunk man is positioned as targeting the women because they are holding hands and are therefore openly queer. The experience clearly rattles Machado, who it seems has not previously experienced public harassment for her sexuality. Her partner, instead of offering comfort or reassurance in this moment, minimises the experience by emphasising Machado’s ignorance. This early scene establishes an important dynamic in the relationship, where Machado’s partner is depicted as more experienced and knowledgeable, and therefore the one who controls what is understood to be permissible in the relationship.
Speaking from the position of hindsight, Machado identifies that her partner used Machado’s limited experience in same-sex relationships as a means to excuse her abusive behaviours. Shortly following the first time Machado’s partner acts aggressively towards her—raising her voice and pounding the dashboard of the car after Machado failed to answer her phone—Machado presents another scene demonstrating how her limited experience in same-sex relationships positioned her to be vulnerable to abuse. Machado explains, ‘She is not your first female crush, or your first female kiss, or even your first female lover … She is the first woman who yokes herself to you with the label girlfriend. Who seems to be proud of the fact’ (2019: 48). Machado indicates that while this relationship is not her first same-sex experience, she understands that this relationship is different from the experiences she has previously had. However, she is unable to comprehend the differences as abusive. She elaborates, ‘so when she walks into your office and tells you that this is what it’s like to date a woman, you believe her. And why wouldn’t you? You trust her, and you have no context for anything else’ (2019: 48). Machado alludes to not only her limited personal experience here, but also the broader dearth of representation for queer relationships. Wiese identifies this greater context as being key to identifying abuse, explaining, ‘This lack of context isolates individuals and forces them to question whether they are actually experiencing what they think they are’ (2023: 207). When stories of queer sexual and intimate partner violence are silenced, the context for others to make sense of their experiences is also removed.
Machado connects the tumultuous beginning of her relationship to the dominant social script of women as excessively emotional. She explains, ‘You have spent your whole life listening to your father talk about women’s emotions, their sensitivity’ (2019: 48). So when Machado finds herself in a relationship where her partner’s outbursts can initially be labelled as emotional or sensitive, she wonders if she is ‘in the middle of evidence that he’s right’ (2019: 48). The placement of this scene immediately following the first act of aggression pairs Machado’s partner’s rationale of ‘this is what it’s like’ as a response to that incident. With this logic, if women are inherently emotional and sensitive, then it is normal to raise your voice and physically lash out. Machado’s partner is telling her that this is a natural part of being in a relationship with another woman, so Machado concludes, ‘here you are learning that lesbian relationships are, somehow, different—more intense and beautiful but also more painful and volatile, because women are all of these things too’ (2019: 48).
Conclusion
Dream House has been met with critical acclaim for its contributions to the public conversation about sexual and intimate partner violence in queer relationships. In 2019, Machado was awarded the Bisexual Book Award, and then in 2020 the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. Also in 2020, Dream House was named a book of honour for the Stonewall Book Awards, given to ‘works of exceptional merit relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience’ (American Library Association 2020: para. 2). The recognition from queer awards and prizes signifies the importance of narratives depicting queer sexual and intimate partner violence. And in 2021, Machado was awarded the Rathbones Folio Prize for Dream House, with one of the judges commenting, ‘In the Dream House has changed me—expanded me—as a reader and a person’ (cited in Flood 2021: para. 8). These awards, and the surrounding praise, signal the resounding regard, and importance, for stories such as Machado’s and point to its success as a work of narrative activism. In bringing an under-represented topic to the forefront, Dream House has evidently found an audience willing to bear witness, particularly against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement.
However, Dream House has also been met with criticism. In 2021, parents at a Texas high school demanded the book be removed from the recommended reading list for English class book clubs due to its content. In an essay for The New York Times, titled ‘Banning My Book Won’t Protect Your Child’, Machado directly responds to this controversy (Machado 2021). Machado explains that while passages from Dream House may be ‘potentially uncomfortable, challenging, or even offensive’, the very reason this book exists is to bring into the open an otherwise taboo topic (2021: para. 4). In Dream House, Machado explicitly addresses her difficulty in recognising and naming her experience of intimate partner violence in a queer relationship because she had no context to understand it. She argues that banning books that contain such material ‘deprive[s] students of a better understanding of themselves and one another’ and that ‘You can’t recognise what you’ve never been taught to see’ (2021: para. 7, 11).
In an interview with The Paris Review, Machado expresses her exasperation at the reception of her memoir: ‘My book hasn’t come out yet but even in some early reviews, reviewers don’t agree about whether the abuse I experienced was physical. We prioritize certain kinds of abuse and not others’ (Qasim 2019: para. 14). Such public scepticism should only serve to reinforce Machado’s arguments, demonstrating the lack of understanding and awareness about queer or same-sex abuse. In an article in Vulture, the interviewer writes, ‘While her story will resonate deeply with some, others may feel that whatever Machado says her ex-girlfriend subjected her to (manipulation, deceit, screaming rages) didn’t rise to the level of abuse’ (Shapiro 2019: para. 1). The surrounding public discourse from reviewers, interviews, and scholarship exemplifies Machado’s argument in Dream House that queer sexual and intimate partner violence is often minimised, overlooked, or disbelieved.
Reading Dream House within the sociopolitical context of #MeToo positions Machado’s story alongside a contemporary movement seeking to address the complex power structures that enable and condone rape culture and perpetrators of sexual violence. The work of a text of narrative activism is to use storytelling to promote social change. Discussions of queer abuse and violence continue to be significantly impacted by factors such as the dominant cultural narratives about queerness, the limited social understanding of sexual violence outside of heteronormative instances, and the gendered assumptions of how power can be held and abused. Through making visible a history of same-sex intimate partner violence, Machado expands the archive of queer sexual violence and intimate partner abuse, and in doing so challenges the way readers understand issues of power, coercion, and systemic silencing.
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1 Throughout this article, I favour the term ‘intimate partner violence’ over ‘domestic violence’. While the two terms are often used interchangeably, contemporary research indicates a shift away from the term domestic violence which has come to be historically associated with opposite-gender physical violence (Nash et al. 2023: 3). In the context of this article, ‘intimate partner violence’ more accurately captures the continuum of experiences that can occur within an abusive relationship across any genders.
2 I find it important to note the complexity of using Butler’s framework here, as Butler previously voiced their support for another queer academic who had been accused of sexual harassment by her student (Guadalupe-Diaz & Whalley 2022: 164). Given this, it may seem incongruous to cite Butler in a paper that concerns the erasure of queer sexual violence, but I believe this in fact further exemplifies the challenges of identifying and acknowledging queer stories of sexual violence, abuse, and harassment, even within the queer community.