ABSTRACT
Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House engages with many of the key elements of the female Gothic – using the material realm to express fears and trauma, themes of domesticity, entrapment, and isolation – and explores them innovatively through the lens of a queer abusive relationship, centering the intersectional perspective of a queer Latinx fat woman. Jesussek applies Sedgwick’s theory of the unspeakable, Hartman’s violence of the archive, and Cvetkovich’s queer archival theory to explore how In the Dream House queers and updates the female Gothic and how transgressions of normative gender and sexuality are mirrored in transgressions across stylistic and topical lines denoting the traditional boundaries of this subgenre.
