Queer Visibility Theme Analysis

While Machado seeks to make queer stories more visible and to celebrate queer love, she’s also deeply focused on portraying the harm and violence that can exist in those stories. She scrutinizes the trend in pop culture of queer, or queer-coded, characters like Ursula from The Little Mermaid being disproportionately given the role of the villain. Machado suggests it isn’t a problem to have queer villains, as long as there are plenty of other queer characters, too, showing that queer people are just as complex and flawed as everyone else. For Machado, queer representation is only freeing when those queer characters aren’t either upheld as morally perfect or reduced to evil stereotypes, but allowed to exist in as much complexity as non-queer characters.

It’s not only in pop culture that a gap in representation has detrimental effects. Though some research on domestic violence in same-sex relationships exists, it’s not something Machado is aware of until she begins writing this book, by which time she’s already left her abusive relationship and analyzed it deeply herself. This lack of complex, widespread representation has a deep impact on Machado’s ability to label and escape from an abusive queer relationship. Because, at the time of her relationship, she isn’t aware of many stories in which queer women abuse other queer women, she struggles to identify the woman from the Dream House as an abuser. She believes that if these kinds of stories were more prominent or even more widely published, she might have stumbled across them earlier, and they could have shown her a model of the kind of danger she experienced. She notes that a portion of the queer community is wary of stories of queer people that might cast a negative light on the community as a whole. But across her memoir, Machado illustrates that sharing complex, difficult stories about people with marginalized identities is a positive step towards protecting and informing people who may be, or become, victims of abuse, even if such stories leave other people in that marginalized group vulnerable to unfair scrutiny.