Queering #MeToo: Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House as Narrative Activism

Abstract

When #MeToo emerged in late 2017, the public conversation about sexual violence escalated. Across the globe, survivors of sexual violence shared their stories, initially through digitised hashtags on social media and later through formal life writing publications. These narrative moments revealed the pervasiveness of sexual violence, the breadth of diverse experiences, and the ways in which survivors have been historically silenced. 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 on 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 binaristic 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 greater mainstream #MeToo discourse.