The Goddess on Wheels: Maria R. Palacios

Cripsuality … socially misunderstood sensuality exuding from a crip’s body and mind. (Maria R. Palacios, 2013: 284)

This article examines creative works by disability artist, Maria R. Palacios. Through her poetry and onstage performances, Palacios provides viewers with the opportunity to witness the complex embodiment of a sexualized and crip-identified Latina. As such, she engages audience members to conceptualize the ways in which sexuality intertwines with disability, using her life stories as narrative models. This provides us with a unique way of understanding the construction of disability in the context of an intersectional framework. Autoethnographic poems pertaining to disability, sexuality, gender and ethnicity by Palacios in her text, The Female King (2002), are explored, as well as recorded performances from various websites. In general, her artistic pieces may be considered as counterstories to hegemonic notions of disability, sexuality, racialized or ethnic identity, religion, gender, class, national status and language.

The theoretical framework for this article is intersectional. The work is influenced by, and draws on, concepts from Chicana feminist theory, queer theory, and disability theory, as well as critical crip theory. Notions pertaining to decolonial imaginary, mestiza consciousness and coalitional subjectivity are applied from Chicana and Latina feminist lenses (Anzaldúa, 2012; Chávez, 2013; Pérez, 2003). Works by queer and disability theorists are used to engage a conversation surrounding sexual culture, disabled sexuality and fantasies of identification with theory in the flesh (Moraga, 1983; Samuels, 2014; Siebers, 2008). Lastly, critical crip theory is applied by connecting conceptual models from the texts Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (McRuer, 2006) and Feminist Queer Crip (Kafer, 2013). The confluence of these theories facilitates an approach to discussing sexuality and disability as performed embodiments while acknowledging intersectionality and multiple subjectivity.

The opening quote to this piece documents Maria R. Palacios’ positionality as a ‘feminist writer, poet, author, spoken word performer, polio survivor and disability activist’ (Palacios, 2010). She is known on stage as ‘The Goddess on Wheels’ and performs her embodiment as a disabled Latina showcasing her sexuality and sensuality onstage and through poetry. Palacios promotes herself as a queered, cripped, gendered and raced being in her works, and by doing so, establishes an intersectional or complex corporeality. Additionally, she incorporates environmental and representational aspects of her embodiment, such as her lived experiences as an immigrant, into her performances and poems. Palacios was born in Ecuador and emigrated to Texas as a young girl with her mother. She contracted polio when she was 8 months old and had close to 30 surgical procedures over a 20-year period. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protests of 1990 to fight discrimination against people with disabilities, Palacios has been a disability rights advocate promoting disability education and supporting independent living by being involved with several programs and workshops.

Her creative endeavors are dedicated to constructs of self-acceptance and empowerment relating to disabled women in connection with gender and sexuality, as well as social justice issues and diversity. Overall, her performed embodiment transforms marginalized axes of difference, including race, class, gender and sexuality, into political categories. For example, Palacios situates herself as a woman of color as opposed to a non-white woman in order to represent a mestiza consciousness, or non-hegemonic sense of self. Similarly, in her work, disability is presented as a theoretical platform decolonizing systemic notions of ability. Thus instead of dichotomizing able-bodied and non-able-bodied, disability is placed in the centre to distinguish disabled and temporarily non-disabled. By reimaging disability in this manner, it becomes ‘the dominant temporal frame of both disability rights activism (you are able-bodied only until you are disabled) as well as disability studies’ (Puar, 2013). Furthermore, Palacios has shifted her terminology to include the use of the term ‘crip’ in conjunction with crip theorists who perceive the use of ‘crip’ to indicate fluidity, intersectionality and the recuperation of power (Goodley, 2014).

In 2007, she joined Sins Invalid, a performance project focusing on artists with disabilities, particularly artists from marginalized populations, such as artists of color, genderqueer artists and queer-identified artists. Their primary goal consists of developing leadership opportunities for disabled people in disenfranchised communities, as well as in various social justice movements. Other goals include establishing supportive and politicized spaces for performances by artists with disabilities, and presenting creative pieces by disabled artists of color and members of LGBTIQ communities. The web page containing the mission statement for Sins Invalid provides the following information:

Our performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body. Conceived and led by disabled people of color, we develop and present cutting-edge work where normative paradigms of ‘normal’ and ‘sexy’ are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities. (Sins Invalid, 2006)

In an interview, Palacios (2010) explains how Sins Invalid provides a platform of artistic expression that fully embraces who she truly is ‘not only as a woman, but as a woman with a disability, as an artist with a voice and with a living, throbbing sensuality and sexuality’. Referring to her crip body, Palacios goes on to discuss the empowerment she feels as a performer, daring to come on stage with her ‘naked truths’ and the realities of what her body has experienced. In a recent Facebook entry, she states ‘it was my involvement with Sins Invalid, one of the most powerful conductors of sexy energy, which led me and my creative energy to actually become even more outspoken and “in your face” about sex and disability’ (Palacios, 2015). Recorded performances by Palacios shown on Sins Invalid’s website under ‘Performance Videos’ and the web page dedicated to Palacios through the International Guild of Disabled Artists and Performers (IGODAP, 2001) are explored in a later section.

Critical disability studies scholar Margrit Shildrick (2009) discusses how disability, subjectivity and sexuality constitute dangerous discourses. Particularly regarding sexual expression in the context of disability, she states that we need to ask ‘what psycho-social factors are in play and what exactly is the status of the boundaries that are in danger of being transgressed’ (p. 7). As a performer and disability activist, Palacios embodies dangerous discourses on multiple levels. First, as a woman of color, she voices her pre-Columbian heritage and Latinidad in her use of language and symbolism. Her ethnic and racialized identities are witnessed by audience members in politicized ways. An example of how this is achieved is found in the below verses from a piece named ‘Foreigner’:

I am an American

from a third world nation

daughter of an indigenous land

born on the heart of a continent

you claim to be only yours.

I am your morena sister

who you call foreigner

outsider

illegal

forgetting that your world

is the just the north

of the America I know.

(Palacios, 2002: 677)

In the above poem, Palacios brings to light two key points pertaining to a mestiza identity. The first portion of ‘Foreigner’ addresses the politics of the border by stressing the Chicano Movement slogan of ‘we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us’. Ideologically, this pertains to an Amerocentric reference to the US–Mexico Border, as well as borderlands farther south. The second portion of the poem speaks to an awareness of always being viewed, or perceived, as a stranger in her own home. In this case, she is describing herself as someone who is not recognized as an ‘American’ because of being a ‘brown-skinned sister’ or woman of color. Palacios uses the word ‘morena’ to emphasize a Latina, or Spanish-speaking, heritage.

Other social markers, such as class and language, are in poems focusing on issues pertaining to power and privilege. The following stanzas are from a poem titled ‘Immigrant’ describing Palacios’ experience as a young person migrating from a Spanish-speaking country to the United States:

To fit in

I learned to speak like you

and played with words

I’d never heard before

words of empty meaning

that tangled in my mouth

disguising my identity

drowning my roots.

To survive

I ate leftovers from your plate

and watched my mother

clean your fancy china

and mop your floors

until they held the reflection

of the tired stranger

she had become.

(Palacios, 2002: 524)

Here Palacios makes reference to experiencing a loss of language and the stigma associated with speaking English with a detectable accent in the United States. The line, ‘I learned to speak like you’, also pertains to the concept of assimilation and the adoption of the English language as necessary in order to achieve any level of success. The second half of the poem obviously implies not only her lived realities, but those of her mother as a maid. Again, this is a statement regarding the marginal status of women of color residing in the United States, where often a Third-World existence takes place in a First-World environment.

Palacios openly declares her identity as a disabled person through her creativity and art. In one poem she states, ‘Deformity, permanent irreversible damage. By age six I knew the meaning of each word like a small dictionary defining words nobody wants to hear’ (Palacios, 2002: 771). Her insightfulness at such a young age is a commentary on how disability is systemically regarded as a negative, and, as a result, the general populace from a Global North perspective is socialized to privilege non-disabled individuals. Palacios’ autobiographical pieces also express how language became her artistic platform for her disability activism. In the final passages of a poem dedicated to her sister, she shares how words became her weapons:

You punched the bully at school

because he called me crippled.

I punched you for defending me.

I wanted you to know

I had turned into a dragon

fire spitting crip

capable of fighting

on my own.

Through the years

we’ve learned to compromise.

Your feet dance.

mine give birth to poems.

You still punch bullies,

but in return,

I spit words of fire

to those

who punch you back.

(Palacios, 2002: 814)

This action is what Emma Pérez (2003: 123) refers to as evoking a decolonial imaginary, making ‘agency for those on the margins transformative’. In this instance, decolonial imaginary is recognized as an opposing mindset to hegemonic and heteronormative ways of understanding the world. For example, a colonial (dominant or mainstream) narrative foments descriptors pertaining to weakness and dependency in discourse surrounding disability or people with disabilities. In the above poem, readers are provided with a counter-narrative, whereby Palacios’ independence and fortitude as a disabled person are brought forth.

In connection with her identity as a disabled Latina, she also crafts her work to be inclusive of her sexuality and gender. ‘Still a Woman’ provides readers with Palacios’ self-integration of passion, femininity and disability:

No spike heels

making music on the floor.

no hips dancing

to the rhythm of their gait,

no familiar curves

defining

the human highway

on which you travel

this time.

You will not find the texture

of unaltered skin

or the spontaneous movement

understanding the language

of your hands.

Instead

you will find arms

that have learned to soar

on metal wings,

fingers that run

on the field of your flesh,

legs that have never known

motion

but dance to the caress

of nylon dreams.

(Palacios, 2002: 1089)

In this piece, we witness Palacios’ power as a woman and her sense of sensuality, as well as hints of the desires and pleasures found in her ‘nylon dreams’ as she runs her fingers on fields of flesh. She plays on the stereotype of the ‘hot-blooded Latina’ who is represented as a hyper-sexualized curvaceous woman, as well as heterosexual. Additionally, the poem uses the metaphor of a salsa, or flamenco, dancer, and the dance movements between two individuals, thus providing readers with a clear reference to what may be labeled as ‘Latin’ ballroom dancing. Most importantly, she disrupts notions of dance by providing a counter-story with her embodied use of her wheelchair and her ‘arms that have learned to soar on metal wings’ in a form of dancing.

In Palacios’ creative endeavors, audience members are exposed to her mestiza consciousness and multiple subjectivity. Mestiza consciousness is a theoretical construct fashioned by one of the foremothers of Chicana feminist theory, Gloria Anzaldúa. In her groundbreaking text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa (2012[1987]), formulated an ideological tool for disrupting normative ways of viewing and comprehending societal structures and institutionalized philosophies. She defined mestiza consciousness as a ‘new consciousness’ stemming from ‘continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspects of each new paradigm’ (Anazaldúa, 2012: 102). Using mestiza consciousness, we create a new mythos by changing ‘the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave’ (Anazaldúa, 2012: 102).

Palacios applies a mestiza consciousness in performances demonstrating her multiple identities, whether they be written or onstage. She breaks down, or queers (in terms of integrating a queer theory perspective), binaries of gender, race, sexuality, ability, language, etc. by developing new frames of reference for understanding multiple subjectivity. Thus, her work challenges viewers to recognize intersectional identities as viable and coherent. For instance, her identity as a disabled person is not separated from her ethnicity or gender. This is demonstrated in the poem ‘Rebirth,’ where Palacios connects her embodied subjectivity as a sexual Latina with a disability by exploring every angle of her body and revisiting sites never felt by other hands, causing an implied orgasm (2002: 1126). ‘Rebirth’ closes with the succeeding stanzas:

Abandoned corners of my spine

shiver

as they awaken to see

atrophied cells

dancing to the rhythm of my breath.

Lazy nerve endings

are the only audience

to this ceremony of reconciliation

between body and spirit

as I proclaim myself a woman

again. (Palacios, 2002: 1144)

The final stanza also connects back to Anzaldúa’s interpretation of mestiza consciousness within a framework incorporating a mindbodyspirit sense of self. In this case, Palacios’ mind is represented through her autobiographic writing, while her physical being and soul are reconciled. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa (2012[1987]) explains how with colonization came the ideological splitting of the mind from the body, as well as the splitting of the soul. It is only by using a mestiza consciousness that a sense of wholeness, or complex embodiment, is attainable. Again, in the case of Palacios, her complex embodiment is representative of her multiple identities, including (but not limited to) her sexuality, Latinidad, class, language, nation-state, and disability.

Previous scholars have attempted to formulate intersectional constructs to represent complex embodiment in the development of feminist disability studies, such as Women’s Studies scholar Judy Rohrer. In 2005, Rohrer wrote an article suggesting the model of what she coined ‘full-inclusion feminism’ (2005: 34). She defined full-inclusion feminism as an aspiration ‘toward a theory and praxis that considers disability, subjectivity and knowledges in fluid relationships to all other forms of subjectivity and knowledge’ (2005: 35). In the context of her article, Rohrer critiques a lack of academic interest in producing a field of disability feminist studies. She suggests that ‘a disability analysis could be applied to almost any project and productively integrated with other forms of analysis including gender, race, and class’, and I would add sexuality (2005: 40).

This leads to a discussion regarding Karma R Chávez’s (2013) application of coalitional subjectivity as a theoretical paradigm applying intersectionality. Engaging with coalitional subjectivity as an epistemic tool promotes inclusivity in ways that support a full-inclusion feminism, but does not prioritize a specific identity, or create a hierarchical continuum in relation to multiple identities. Chávez uses an intersectional framework in her studies on migrant and queer politics, and provides readers with an example of a queer migrant as ‘an inherently coalitional subject’ (2013: 9). She defines a coalitional subject as ‘one whose identities and relationships to power mandate managing multiplicity’ and who witnesses, via lived experiences, the junctures of possibilities pertaining to change.

In particular, as a performer and writer, Palacios expresses a coalitional subjectivity through the embodiment of her racialized disabled sexuality. Through her works, audience members’ viewpoints regarding disabled sexuality and the erotics of the body are challenged, ‘leaving behind many expectations and myths found in normative sexuality’ (Siebers, 2008: 150). This produces a public witnessing of what disability theorist Tobin Siebers identifies as the ‘sexual culture’ embodied by disabled people (Siebers, 2008: 137). ‘Sexual culture references the experience of sex itself – pure, impure, and almost never simple’ (2008: 138). As such, sexual experiences have the potential to counter fantasies housed in hegemony by merging ‘imagination and the real through desire, a desire that manifests in material effects on actual people’s bodies and lives’ (Samuels, 2014: 3). Queer crip theorist Alison Kafer (2013) provides a modality for thinking of counter-narrative fantasies through the politics of what she labels ‘crip futurity’. She frames disability as political and relational, and states that by claiming a crip futurity alongside feminist and queer realities, activists and cultural works engage in ‘multiple sites of radical politics’ (2013: 15). This provides a platform from which to challenge the ‘discrimination against people whose bodies, minds, desires and practices differ from the unmarked norm’ (2013: 16).

The next portion of this article uses onstage performances by Palacios to demonstrate how, in a similar fashion to her poems, they present audience members with counter-narratives pertaining to sexuality and disability, as well as complex embodiment.

The first piece, Testimony (2008), is executed with Palacios rolling her wheelchair onstage and stopping next to a full-length mirror covered by a see-through shawl, or rebozo. The rebozo immediately indicates her Latinidad to her viewers. She begins the performance with a bicultural reference to verse made popular in a childhood fairytale, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the cripple of us all?’ Linguistically and culturally, she also code-switches and moves temporally, taking her audience members to her youth and ethnic familiarity with Spanish.

I used to hate my body, cringe at the thought of a mirror. Deformities staring at me, pobrecita, poor little thing. Ssshh, don’t look, don’t ask, that’s when I was a cripple girl in a Barbie world. Ssshh, don’t talk, she’ll never walk. She will never know love, the mirror used to say that, and I used to believe it. Every mirror used to scream at me, there’s no Prince Charming, no magic slipper that fits feet bound by orthopedic shoes and the cold embrace of steel against my virgin skin.

Through temporal shifts, Palacios goes on to share how her ‘manifesto of self-love’ developed after ‘years of soul searching’ and ‘lovers that came and went’, along with ‘years of empty beds’ and ‘nights of solo play beneath the sheets’. It was through the silence of her hands between her thighs making herself cum that she realizes men were just ‘warm bodies without a name, one size fits all, one night stands’. In this moment of the performance, viewers witness what Palacios refers to as ‘the uneven angles of misunderstood sensuality’ by demonstrating a feminist disabled sexuality.

The performance closes with Palacios facing the mirror; reaching out with her hand and pulling down the shawl, letting it fall to the floor. At this point she sings the chorus line to the song, ‘You Are So Beautiful’ and states the following:

You are so beautiful, that’s what I am. Oh Mirror, friend of mine, I am love, forgiveness, acceptance and beauty redefined. The sacredness of this body is where my soul resides. I am a temple of love. I don’t need a man to make me whole. Yes, my testimony is one of survival, strength, an intense love affair with myself, with the woman in the mirror … Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Goddess of us all?

At this point, audience members are introduced to the background of Palacios’ stage name, ‘Goddess on Wheels’. Lastly, the word ‘testimony’ is a reference to testimonio, which is understood in Chicana/Latina feminist writings as an example of theory in the flesh in the form of personal truths and struggles leading toward personal empowerment.

The next onstage recording to be reviewed in this article is a self-titled enactment, Maria Full of Sin, by Palacios from 2008. The title of this piece serves as a play on words referencing ‘Mary, Mother of God', as well as the prayer, ‘Hail Mary, Full of Grace'. As a point of contextual entry, it is important to note that many Chicana and Latina feminists discuss, critique and transform in their creative and theoretical works the historical gendered connections to three culturally relevant female icons that (re)present social roles placed upon Latinas, particularly women of Mexican descent. The three female icons are la Virgen de Guadalupe (the dark-skinned Madonna), la Malinche (mother of the mestizos), and la Llorona (fabled mother figure who drowns her children). Since the 1960s, these icons have been (re)created and transformed by Chicana and Latina artists, activists and academics. These acts of (re)creation and (re)interpretation further serve to decolonize the icons from the white, male gaze, and in so doing, these icons have become feminist icons that are powerful and empowered. Palacios places herself as a reconstruction of the brown Mary and follows the Chicana and Latina feminist format of recreating the icon in her own image as a sexualized persona.

The performance begins with Palacios, hands folded, facing a small statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue rests on a table, only slightly higher off the ground than Palacios in her wheelchair. She starts off her dialogue in the format of a prayer, explaining to the Virgin that she doesn’t partake in confession with a man, i.e. priest, which is why she is praying to her, ‘woman to woman’. In her prayer, Palacio informs the Virgin that she comes to her ‘with the taste of sin between’ her lips and that she knows that ‘one of the Ten Commandments broke in half’ when she and her partner kissed. She continues with her prayer stating to the Virgin that she is not sorry and turns to face the audience with the following exchange:

I do not feel sorry at all. That’s what I feel guilty about. Having no regrets to feel. Hitting the rewind button of my mind. Rewind, replay again and again I savor my sins long after they’ve been committed. I feel the presence of my sinful side, my own sacrament of reconciliation. The rebellious Maria, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Frida Kahlo.

In this instance, Palacios is disrupting the authority of the church, in particular the Catholic Church, over the domain of her sexuality. She openly relishes her sexual acts and references these enactments of pleasure and desire as being comparable to the actions of Chicana/Latina feminist icons, particularly those of Maria la Virgen de Guadalupe, Sor Juana and Frida Kahlo. Maria Palacios' reference to these feminist icons can be related to their reputations as rebellious (read feminist non-subservient) in their sexualized representations, again by interpretation via Chicana/Latina feminist scholars and artists. For example, Maria the V. of Guadalupe, is also know to be a representation of a fertility Earth goddess, Sor Juana purposely becoming a nun in order to not marry and her image is also considered by some to be representative of a Chicana/Latina lesbian icon, and Frida Kahlo is represented as bisexual or pansexual and is known for having numerous relationships with lovers. It is also important to note that for this performance, Palacios is wearing a black, low-cut sleeveless dress and a rosary as a necklace. In doing so, she engenders her disabled sexuality, as well as her rebellion against institutional religious control.

Palacios (2008) goes on to inform audience members that she gave birth to the woman she is through her sins, and that she is her own immaculate conception. She suggests that the ‘crippleness’ of her physicality ‘spread roots of sensuality’ and provided her with her own ‘personal recipe for lust’. In the middle of the performance, Palacios touches herself sexually while recounting a sexual experience. For example, while she remembers someone’s lips kissing her ‘Ave Marias and the delicate flesh of her past’, she fondles her breasts. Later on, she also runs her hands up and down her thighs, recollecting memories of having an orgasm with a lover:

I want him to carefully part my waters and kiss my mouth silent of words, humid with prayers of desire baptismal fountain of my femininity. I want him to swim in my Pacific Ocean moving from south to north then back and forth until we both drown.

The performance concludes with Palacios turning back away from the audience to face the statue of the Virgin Mary. In prayer, she implores the Virgin to give her the strength to never forget what being a woman and what being a lover feels like – Hail Mary, full of grace.

The third piece is titled Vagina Manifest and was performed by Palacios in 2009 (Palacios, 2009a). At the start of the performance, Palacios wheels out onstage wearing a pure white (virginal) blouse and skirt. She begins by facing the audience and questioning, ‘Is there such a thing as a crippled vagina? Is there such a thing as the weaker gender?’ Palacios then shifts, making an ethno-cultural reference to la Llorona, one of the reintegrated mythic figures in feminist Chicana ideologies:

She hollers my name, como la Llorna, the weeping ghost of my temple. That is who my vagina becomes when poems invade her lips. But, for a while, my vagina was silent. She was hiding, I guess … hiding from the ignorance and the hatred. Hiding from the anti-vagina propaganda that tells us that a vagina is this ugly, dark, stinky hole where all sins are born.

Palacios goes on to say that she is ‘tired of the Victoria’s Secrets underwear’ and ‘the distorted politics of female genitalia’. Within the context of her piece, she recovers her vagina’s power and exclaims to the audience that ‘we must end this era of fear, this era of vaginal incarceration’. Additionally, Palacios links her identity as a disabled woman to the reclaiming of sexuality by stating ‘a disabled daughter is no longer mourned but celebrated, not dreaded, but anticipated as a blessing and a gift’.

Palacios ends her performance with a prayer to her vagina, figuratively linking her vagina to a goddess. She states the following:

My vagina will go out dressed in feminist metaphors. She’ll come out of the closet transformed. She’ll become Woman Warrior, Priestess, Peacemaker, Mother River between my legs that shall baptize and bless my words.

With this finale, several ideologies collide, informing the construction of Palacios (and her vagina) as a coalitional subject. The phrasing ‘coming out of the closet’ is representational of a queered identity, as well as an immigrant identity if read as a reference to undocumented status. The use of the label ‘Woman Warrior’ is a verbal recognition of past and present women of color activists. Closing comments relating to the name of her vagina as a goddess and peacemaker who will bless her words alludes to an Indigenous Latina melding of mindbodyspirit.

The fourth performance analyzed in this study is Hunger, and it was performed by Palacios in 2009 as well (Palacios, 2009b). The title comes from a phrase in the spoken-word piece describing Palacios as being in ‘desperate lover mode’ where memories bring out the masochist in her in the form of a wild beast and distressed lover. She expresses this mode as experiencing sex with a consuming hunger and fire, fostering the kissing and clawing of a lover’s flesh over and over. This is compared to routine or ‘twice a week sex’ that is had with lovers who stay and bring peaceful love with the absence of passion. However, this peaceful and routine sex makes Palacios question why she craves the security of being in someone’s arms. Approximately halfway through the performance, she beseeches the audience to understand her reality as a disabled Latina:

As the black sheep of the family, the one with a dark past, and a dark side. The one who has loved more than once and lived intensely, the hot-blooded Latina whose very body broke the mold of the perfect daughter, and the perfect wife, the perfect woman, perfect this and that I was never expected to be. Somehow I managed to squeeze my battered identities into yet another outfit of preconceived ideas.

She finishes this portion of the performance implying that she has learned to survive on her own, and that she’s learned about sex and love, although she has ‘confused the two at times’ being forced to ‘wear labels that define womanhood in the white, able-bodied, heterosexual socially acceptable way’. Toward the conclusion of this piece, Palacios reasserts her empowerment through her disabled sexuality by referring to herself as a ‘feminista, revolucionaria, Pancha Villa, female Che Guevara, disabled woman of color who has grown poems and children in her womb’. In essence, she is a revolutionary feminist embodying genderqueered Chicano/Latino icons, Pancho Villa (leader in Mexican Revolution) and Ché (leader in the Cuban Revolution).

The fifth and final onstage piece reviewed in this study is Palacios’ 2010 production, My Sexy Disability. Facing the audience, Palacios initiates the performance by singing a line from a famous Spanish ballad penned in 1977 by Alejandro Jaén, ‘Acariciame’. ‘Acariciame’ is translated as ‘caress me’ and the line she sings is the first line in the song. ‘Acariciame, con manos locas enloqueceme, con uñas y sonrisas amame, amor de amar, amor de piel’ (Caress me, with crazy hands drive me crazy, with nails and smiles love me, love of love, love of skin).

While singing she caresses herself and moves to the music. Her monologue then begins with the following:

My disability is sexy, sexy like Incan sunsets that paint oceans and skies and awaken the moon in your eyes when you are with me.

My disability is sexy, sexy like the uneven curves of South American mountains; Sexy like rose petals and red lips; Fields of eucalyptus and pine

Dreams of a derailed spine, and the smell of sex between my poems.

In this passage, Palacios presents herself as an embodied landscape of her home country, openly naming her disability and linking it to her sexuality and to her creative works. She further likens her disabled sexuality to her work by stating that she is ‘Sexy … Go ahead and turn my page. Read me. My words are dragonflies and shooting stars, the ridges of my scars and the grand canyon of my cleavage.’

Palacios bluntly outlines to audience members the realities of her disabled sexuality by ending the first portion of her performance with the following words. She also identifies herself as sensuous and empowered in ways not related to physicality:

I am sensuality and everybody’s strength. I cannot wrestle you, not in bed.

In bed I am feather and wind, the imperfection of bones that speak of beauty

in quiet tones. And don’t get loud, until you love them.

Palacios then breaks into song, another verse from ‘Acariciame’ stating that she wants to be caressed and stolen like a diamond, dominated like a lover – slowly, constantly (Jaén, 1977). Again, while singing, she caresses herself and sways her body to the rhythm of the song.

The performance tapers off with her declaration of self as being her ‘own Ave Maria, Catholic girl gone bad, 21st century Frida Kahlo who paints her “sexiness with words”’. This piece connects other onstage works by Palacios referencing her Catholic upbringing, while at the same time critically disrupting patriarchal religious dogma. Moreover, by likening herself to Frida Kahlo, she represents her coalitional subjectivity of being a disabled queer Latina, or woman of color, who embodies feminist ways of being by enacting theories in the flesh. Palacios ends the piece by sharing ‘my sexiness scares you, I know, but I don’t bite unless you want me to because the sexiness is me’.

This study implements an analysis of coalitional subjectivity, as demonstrated through complex embodiment, in Palacios’ creative work, both written and onstage. As a member of multiple communities, including communities of color, immigrant communities, queer communities and disabled communities, she represents the embodiment of a coalitional subject. In particular, as an activist in many arenas concerning social justice issues and equity, her politics are expressed using an intersectional framework. Palacios’ coalitional subjectivity, as a disabled queer woman of color, is also the product of experiencing theory of the flesh. Chicana playwright Cherrié Moraga (1983: 23) describes theory of the flesh as ‘where the physical realities of our lives – our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longing – all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity’. For Palacios, theory of the flesh extends to disability and her politicized work as an artist and activist.

The value of enacting her theory of the flesh in her poems and performances is by adding a ‘new realism of the body’ and ‘making the body visible’ via ‘connecting complicated body images to socio/political realities’ (Smith Rainey, 2011: 108). Audience members observe the praxis of feminist and queered crip futurity in Palacios’ work, which demonstrates embodied contestations to asexual and white-identified heteronormative representations of people with disabilities. Additionally, she assists in critically locating disability in queer spaces, thereby undermining compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness philosophies (McRuer, 2006). Palacios identifies as a crip artist to oppose systemic oppression and uses critical crip language within her presentations of self as a coalitional subject with complex embodiment. For example, she announces herself as a crip, Latina, Spanish-speaking immigrant from a low-socio economic background.

Overall, as a writer and performer, Palacios demonstrates her multiple subjectivity in her work, thereby providing audience members with fantasies centered in new realities. In turn, these realities develop new avenues for exploring what it means to be a person who faces marginalization from an intersectional perspective. Her sense of self as a disabled Latina and sexual ‘Goddess on Wheels’ through her creative endeavors provides viewers with an awareness of the ways passion, erotica and desire combine with disability. Furthermore, Palacios disrupts hegemonic notions of disabled sexuality and disabled women of color, specifically Latinas, by continually developing and sharing her counter-narratives. The impact of her work and ability to bring her identities together in coherent and fluid ways creates openings in how disability and sexuality are envisioned. By articulating an empowered and embodied persona, she engenders the potential for others to follow her lead and witness their own progress of self-decolonization.