28 pages • 56 minutes read
Carmen Maria MachadoHer Body and Other Parties
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 4 Summary: “Especially Heinous”
“Especially Heinous” reimagines 272 episodes of the popular television series Law and Order: SVU. Episode to episode, Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler must solve especially heinous crimes involving violence against women. Detective Benson becomes haunted by “the girls-with-bells-for-eyes”: teenage models who were raped and killed and who, mistaken for another set of murdered teen models, were accidentally buried underneath their doppelgängers’ tombstones. The number of dead girls who haunt Benson multiplies until she can no longer sleep. Meanwhile, Stabler is preoccupied with solving the mystery of his wife’s rape.
By season four of this reimagining, a new pair of detectives, Henson and Abler, are introduced. Henson and Abler look similar to Benson and Stabler. The two are sleeping together. Henson is a notorious bachelorette while Abler has a wife and family. Henson and Abler terrorize Benson and Stabler, though their motives are never made clear. The district attorney, who is secretly attracted to Benson, starts sleeping with Henson.
The dead girls begin to inhabit Benson’s body. They wait in her apartment until she comes home, “draped over every surface like Dalí’s clocks” (72). Benson and Stabler, and Henson and Abler, continue to battle for power. Benson and Stabler finally shoot and kill Henson and Abler. Benson and Stabler solve all the dead girls’ murders, and the dead girls leave Benson alone for good. The DA confesses her attraction to Benson. The two begin a romantic relationship.
Story 4 Analysis: “Especially Heinous”
By revisiting and retelling Law and Order: SVU, a show that showcases criminal violence, Machado uses the structure of a TV series to highlight the pervasiveness of violence against women in contemporary society. From the normalization of murder and rape to Stabler’s subtle sexism against Benson, Machado walks the reader through an obstacle course of male dominance that the female characters must face in order to reach some semblance of agency.
“Especially Heinous” clearly outlines Machado’s exploration of the popular culture motif. Machado positions popular culture as a mirror to toxic gender dynamics. The use of repetition in “Especially Heinous” implies that violence against women becomes socially acceptable through society’s constant exposure to it, thus fortifying the book’s themes of female oppression and male entitlement/dominance. The repetition technique also positions violence against women as a kind of living dystopia, one in which greater society is complicit through inaction.
