“Real Women Have Bodies” by Carmen Maria Machado is a haunting story about a woman working at a high end dress store who lives through a strange epidemic of women becoming incorporeal. She enters a relationship with another woman named Petra, who is the daughter of the seamstress who makes many of the store’s dresses. Petra shows the narrator that many women who have faded have gathered and are allowing themselves to be stitched into the dresses that her mother makes. The narrator is disturbed by this and quits her job. Later, after the relationship between the narrator and Petra has advanced, Petra begins to fade. In the end, Petra is gone completely, and the narrator breaks into the dress store to tear apart dresses, freeing the women inside them. She implores them to leave, but they don’t.
This story reminded me of Julia Armfield’s “The Great Awake” in that it explores an individual’s experience of a large-scale supernatural event, while giving no clear explanation of the cause or meaning of the events. We do not learn exactly why the event is happening, but we hear a few popular theories (in “The Great Awake,” the separation of Sleep from peoples’ bodies was blamed on phones and social media, among other things, and in this story, the increasing incorporeality of women is blamed on everything from the fashion industry to the water). I enjoy the ambiguity of these stories because it allows the reader to interpret the meaning of the events in whatever way resonates with them, as well as because it adds a layer of realism to a fantastic premise. In real life, we don’t usually get answers.
I interpreted the fading in this story as a statement on a few women’s issues. First, I thought it could be about dehumanization of women by men. At one point, the two men who work at the photography studio, Chris and Casey, objectify women and judge them based on their sexual appeal even as they are suffering from something as horrific as watching their bodies disappear. Additionally, women are accused of lying and deceiving by becoming incorporeal, as if they had a choice in the matter and as though this were a desirable outcome for them. This is reminiscent of how victims of sexual assault are treated by many men. I also thought that women’s fading actually did have something to do with the fashion industry, or more largely the expectation that women be beautiful. A sizable paragraph in the text is dedicated just to describing the beauty of the dresses, which we later learn that many women who have disappeared want desperately to be physically stitched into. They do not choose to “cook [themselves] into the mustard” at the condiment factory, they choose beautiful things to embody. I think this idea also fits with the line: “they were fading younger and younger, weren’t they?” as a reference to how girls are expected to grow up quicker, and seem to no longer be allowed to look like children.