She points out that abusers are rarely cackling maniacs: they just want something and know how to get it. Indeed so much of what she details constitutes what we now recognise as “coercive control”. The “battered woman” defence began to be used by the late 1980s and Machado’s discussion of gaslighting – she goes back to the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play Gas Light and the two 40s films it inspired – is superb. It is the expression of breaking down in the form and structure of the book that makes it a tour de force
If sex between women was acknowledged, “it still acted as an unmooring from gender”. In the first instance, women such as Mitchell were considered mad. Or does it? Is a simple butch/femme dynamic any real explanation here? Machado looks at historical cases: in 1892 Alice Mitchell slit her lover Freda Ward’s throat in Memphis Annette Green shot her abusive partner in West Palm Beach in 1989. The abuse between women resembles the abuse between men and women. Machado begins to name them – to actually go there. She has quoted the Cuban American scholar José Esteban Muñoz: “Queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence … when the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left out then? Where are the gaps? The archive on domestic violence in the queer community is itself liminal. It’s an effective device: searching for a way to make sense of what has happened, she is driven to create. The abuse and its repercussions are examined through a range of lenses, and the various viewpoints come together in Machado’s narrative. The relationship is reimagined though every possible genre: as folktale, as American gothic, as Mrs Dalloway. It is the expression of this breaking down in the form and structure of the book that makes it a tour de force. She scares her, grabs her, rages at her, frightens her. She flies into jealous rages accusing her of wanting to fuck everyone else, including her own father. But then her new partner no longer wants to be in an open relationship and no longer wants to share her with anyone.
Her full body – “zaftig”, as she describes it – is now worshipped. Machado is completely in sexual thrall to her.
She meets a woman who is in an open relationship and who has to have her. The relationship that she describes is so familiar. And second, never forget I am a lesbian.” Reading Machado’s extraordinary book one is caught in this ambiguity. The African American poet Pat Parker has said: “First forget I am a lesbian.
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