This story, among many others, lends itself to the conclusion that psychological domestic abuse within same-sex relationships is not just rare, but legally unfathomable. Most of the other members of the Eight had their sentences stripped away or commuted, yet Debra remained incarcerated, and the board concluded that she and her girlfriend had partaken in a “mutual battering relationship”, despite this never having been mentioned during her trial. In order to gain parole, attorneys believed (and were right), that she had to conform to the heteronormative notion of being the ‘woman’ in the relationship (she cooked, she cleaned, she supervised the children), so that she could more convincingly play the ‘battered woman’ victim stereotype, even though both the abused and the abuser were women. As not only a Black woman, but also the only member of the Eight in a same-sex relationship, people were uncertain about what to do with her. Machado cites the particular case of Debra Reid, the second to last of the Framingham Eight to receive any form of freedom for killing her abusive partner. This structural ignorance extends to the law itself courtrooms trying and failing to grapple with variations of intimate partner violence, before falling dismally short of justice. Carmen Maria Machados debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circles John Leonard Prize.
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