Poet, writer and public speaker Maria Palacios describes herself as a natural flirt. She loves to flirt with others and, most importantly, with herself. When she prepared for her Thursday panel with Northwestern Sex Week, putting on dark burgundy lipstick and a sleeveless red top, she texted her coworker she wish she felt sexier. 

“But then I rolled by my reflection,” Palacios said. “‘And I’m like ‘Wow! OK … I feel sexy.’”

Along with two other members of disability performance arts project Sins Invalid, Palacios spoke about crip sexiness, self-love and nourishment at a NU College Feminists panel. The event, titled “The Art of Pleasure,” was part of the group’s annual Sex Week programming.

Following the panel, guests stayed for a community forum and resource share for the disabled community to ask questions and share knowledge about assistive and adaptive sex toys. 

At the panel, Palacios presented a written piece called “Flirting Lessons,” a piece she wrote about a decade ago. She said flirting is often seen as off-limits to disabled people. 

“Even to this day, people get shocked that disabled people have sexual bodies, and that we are sensual beings and that we have a sexual identity, that we have a positive identity of self to begin with,” Palacios said. 

Palacios said it’s important for her and others to be able to see disabled people through a lens of “love and sexy,” instead of the one of “pity and oppression” traditional medical models have historically assigned to them. 

For Shayda Kafai, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at California State Polytechnic University Pomona, crip sex helps people reimagine and reconstruct restrictive definitions of sex. 

“Crip sex distrubs the normative belief that nondisabled, heteronormative sex is always the default,” Kafai said. “In this new universe, crip sex opens futures of possibilities where we can hold the words ‘sex’ and ‘disability’ in our tongues without resistance.” 

Kafai said Sins Invalid, which she is also involved in, presents a place to unmake these oppressive frameworks by watching bodies in motion and bodies expressing desire. Stories range from performances that show masturbation as pain management and self-love to ones that highlight the art of the wheelchair striptease. 

Bianca Laureano, an educator, curriculum writer and founding member of Women of Color Sexual Health Network, read from a blog series she wrote in 2017, pulling together 30 things she learned from the death of her mother and exploring the place of grief in sexuality.

Out of her displacement and grief, Laureano said she started building physical altars to her sex life. 

“I built an altar to the sex that I wanted,” Laureano said. “I built an altar to my mother. I built an altar to orgasms and to knowledge.

In total, Laureano said she has seven altars in her home, which she hopes people can interact with. While most altars are meant to be observed, these altars provide a space for people to touch, explore and imagine, she said. 

For Palacios, disability justice extends beyond a frame of thinking. It’s a way of life, she said, and it’s how people nourish one another. She said “crip sexy” is all about self-love at its core. 

“I like to remind people that loving ourselves in a world that hates disabled people is one of the most revolutionary acts of advocacy that we can possibly ever do,” Palacios said. “Self-love automatically fights ableism.”

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