Self-loving in the epidemic years: Carmen Machado's .

This article explores Carmen Machado's (2017) as articulating generative unmaking of bodies. Mobilizing that which I examine as , a thread of Latina rhetoric wherein wounds are strategically positioned to emphasize flesh as space of conflict, Machado writes body horrors to provoke dis-ease in audiences. Specifically, Machado highlights pervasive discursive discomforts that decentralize narratives about women's body (un)wellness. It is important to note, however, that Machado's attention to the corporal becomes, in part, rejection of body, a de-composition of physicality-sometimes reached through sexual ecstasy, other times through violence and epidemics-to re-compose self. Such a tactic recalls conversations advanced in Cherríe Moraga's writings and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano's embodied theories, both included in Carla Trujillo's landmark anthology, (1991). Moraga and Yarbro-Bejarano investigate textual dismemberment of female physique to re-imagine and reclaim body for enactments of Chicana desire. What marks Machado as distinct is her resistance to reclaim body. Often, Machado's characters manifest phantom states that quarantine body from toxic physical and social spaces. Concurrently, characters lose rights to body due to self-hate within that toxicity. Machado's characters find clarity only when freed from physicality, at which point they may re-compose themselves according to their testified truths. I see this distinction as a progression of works contained in Trujillo's anthology as Machado envisions a worldmaking process that one composes through autonomous self-love and self-partnership to nurture female narrative and solidarity.