Saint Rita’s Women: Religion and Myth in Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties

This essay explores the use of religious references in Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (2017), paying specific attention to the stories “Especially Heinous” and “Real Women Have Bodies.” Machado is often lauded for her seamless integration of myriad literary elements across her body of work, yet there is little scholarly consideration given to her use of religion. Through my analysis, I explain the ways Machado invokes religion in these two stories, about sapphic love and violence against women, as an act of defiance and reclamation as a queer woman. I discuss the way Machado’s references to folklore throughout the collection are deliberate as a feminist subversion of their source material. I then examine how they establish the framework which enables Machado’s pointed use of religious allusions as an act of rebellion, before finally demonstrating what sets these references apart from the intertextuality of the rest of the collection. While there is ample colloquial conversation regarding Machado’s work, there is a disheartening lack of published scholarly consideration for any of what she has written. Further, the existing scholarship mainly focuses on one story from this collection – “Real Women Have Bodies” – and its connection solely to folklore. With this essay, I aim to expand the nature of and fill the gaps in scholarly conversation about Machado’s genre bending to showcase that her techniques not only make for good writing, but are a personal and important demand to be heard from a member of the communities about which she writes.