Edit: I think this collection is about the seduction of powerlessness. How gendered oppression operates through a slow trade off of one's autonomy for the pleasures of sex, beauty, stability, and comprehension. There're recurring themes of disappearance, emptiness, and numbness. Of being emptied out or filled in. Of the malleability of one's identity, but towards particular disciplinary ends. Becoming wife, becoming clothing, becoming thin, becoming sexually-active. Always a transition towards a new form, but one strictly policed by heteronormativity, consumerism, fat phobia, and so on. I came into this book pretty harsh, but on reflection, I think it's actually quite interesting. Though some of the stories are joyless, they create a frightening effect as a whole.

Here's my original review:

I can only recommend Difficult at Parties and Real Women have Bodies. The rest of the stories were too clinical for me, like a neural network of J G Ballard had been programmed to rewrite Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. They're alien and troubling. Cold and detached.

Difficult at Parties is harrowing, though. Some rabid dissociative breakdown at the intersection of porn, desire, and trauma. A schizophrenic whimper unfolding beneath the film of sensuous flesh. The more you try and understand the desire of the other, the less you understand your own, until you understand neither your own or the other's. The protag's terror at being dragged to a party, at the looming impersonal eye of a video camera seemingly fixed on her body the whole night, the same eye that inscribes the pornographic material she consumes in a dissociative trance in her apartment, while hearing the words how do I say how do I say how do I say without end—that terror hits fucking hard.

Real Women have Bodies is similarly terrifying and complex. A meditation on depression, gendered exploitation, and missing women. Outlines as demarcations of what once was and will now be. Things we seek beyond death to reaffirm our lost presence. A vicarious becoming of the objects that surround us. Where do all those missing women go? Back into the forms we shroud ourselves in. Stitched into the linings of our consumptive acts.

I think there should be space in feminist and queer writing for painful stories. Feelings of emptiness, lack of agency, disappearance, obsession, addiction, and alienation. To want to move beyond such negativity is to efface the experiences of those less fortunate than you.

I really wanna see where Carmen goes with her writing, because when she hits she hits fucking hard.