Bay City News / P360P
The performance ?We love like barnacles, Crip Lives in Climate Chaos?, presented by Sins Invalid, is a show that explores the impact of climate change on the disabled community.
According to the Sins Invalid performance project's website, the show is "a performance that centers our communities amidst climate chaos and our dying planet."
“From storms battering our shores to wildfires threatening our homes, the social, political, and economic disparities faced by disabled queer and trans people of color put our communities on the front lines of ecological disaster.”
For Mar Palacios, who performs under the name Goddess on Wheels Goddess, climate change has brought more hurricanes and fires, and disabled people are being left behind.
“Mother Nature is angry,” he explains. “For this year’s programme, the narrative has become one of survival. It has transformed into resilience. It has become a realisation that our lives are in danger, that disabled people are in danger of dying when the world around us comes to an end.”
According to Palacios, the word “crippled” in the title of the program is controversial, even within the disabled community itself, due to the negative connotation of the word, as it has been used as an insult.
But "in the world of disability culture, especially among people who are artists or activists, and who have felt comfortable enough with our disabled bodies, we embrace the word crippled as something powerful, something that represents our reality, as something that represents and explains the oppression we have survived."
When we say crippled as part of our identity, we do it with power; we do it with love. We may have to explain the word crippled to others, but we don't have to deny it. We do it without shame.