Abstract: In 2025, the Spanish government marked the 600th anniversary of the Roma people's arrival in the Iberian Peninsula by declaring it the "Year of the Roma People." Despite this symbolic recognition, the Spanish Roma continue to be marginalized and excluded from dominant national narratives, a condition that is exacerbated for Roma individuals with disabilities. This article argues that racial trauma itself operates as a disabling force, shaped by centuries of structural antigitanismo (anti-Roma racism) and sustained forms of historical erasure. Drawing on selected strands of critical disability studies that conceptualize disability as methodology, alongside critical trauma studies and a crip-of-color critique, the article examines how race, trauma, and disability are mutually constitutive in the lived realities of Spanish Roma communities. Epigenetics is approached here as a heuristic framework for thinking about the embodied and transgenerational transmission of racial trauma, rather than as a biological or deterministic claim. Through an analysis of selected artworks by Roma lawyer, author, and artist Séfora Vargas, the study foregrounds questions of access, visibility, silence, and cultural restitution, reading her work as a situated counter-archive that challenges hegemonic constructions of Spanishness. Ultimately, the article advocates for the re-centering of Roma epistemologies and for trauma-informed, antiracist approaches that move beyond purely symbolic recognition toward structural and epistemic forms of reparation.
Abstract: Fernando Franco's 2022 film La consagración de la primavera ( The Rite of Spring ) is the first Spanish mainstream film that portrays sexual assistance for people with disabilities. The movie focuses on the life of a college student, Laura (Valèria Sorolla), who assists a young man, David (Telmo Irureta), with cerebral palsy in masturbating. However, unlike previous representations of sexual assistance and crip politics in Spanish marginal productions, such as Yes, We Fuck! (Antonio Centeno and Raúl de la Morena, 2015) and Vivir y otras ficciones ( Living and Other Fictions ) (Jo Sol, 2016) La consagración de la primavera seems to reinscribe heteronormative conventions and turns its back on the radical possibilities of diverse relationalities. Laura stops seeing David and starts a relationship with her able-bodied, conventionally attractive classmate. In this article, I grapple with the ways in which the movie's final message could also be a radical proposal: a denunciation of an unjust society and a form of advocacy of diverse bodies and diverse pleasures. Fernando Franco said in an interview at San Sebastián Film Festival that he wanted to cast a "mirada más normalizadora" to counter "ciertos prejuicios." By adopting a coming-of-age romance framework, Franco manages to make publicly discussable topics that remain uncomfortable in Spain and to amplify the voices of disability activists, like actor Telmo Irureta. I ask what it means that a lighter storytelling register is required to render disabled sexuality discussable. In doing so, I study La consagración de la primavera not only in its aesthetic and narrative aspects, but also in its circulation in public forums, sparking conversations about disability justice, crip communities, and intersectionality.
Abstract: In Mar Coll's Tots volem el millor per a ella (2013), the life of Geni, a successful 38-year-old lawyer, comes to a halt after a car crash. Set a year after the accident, Geni feels trapped between home and clinics, suspended in a state of paralysis under the pathologizing gaze of her family and doctors seeking to restore a sense of "normalcy" without considering her own desires. While film critics and scholars have noted the protagonist's limp, her disability has remained largely undertheorized. Drawing on critical disability studies scholarship, this article examines the representation of disability in Coll's second feature-length film to demonstrate how Geni's disabled body articulates discursive, narrative, and visual possibilities that reframe disability not as a dead end but a catalyst of an agentic nomadic subjectivity. Far from functioning as a mere rhetorical device, Geni's difference offers an empowering portrayal of disability. Her limp unlocks a standpoint from where the protagonist sees her life anew, a tilted position to look awry at the world. From this vantage point, Geni retraces her past and delineates her future, defying normative spatio-temporal constructs to reassert her disabled identity through her crip walk.
Resumen: La violencia y la destrucción del cuerpo ajeno que marcan el contexto de México contemporáneo son frecuentemente estudiadas como indisociables de la lógica neoliberal y de los intereses del Estado. Estos justifican la violencia, la desposesión y la destrucción del cuerpo del otro usando como pretexto las narrativas de progreso y desarrollo. Aunque anterior a una serie de violencias que marcan el contexto actual de México, Diario del dolor (2004) retrata una violencia íntima que permite pensar un contexto de violencia más amplio. Este texto pone en el centro un cuerpo heterogéneo, mitad humano, mitad máquina, que se funde con el espacio y pide una revalorización de la vulnerabilidad y de las formas en que pensamos el cuerpo y su relación con el exterior. Este trabajo establece un diálogo entre las propuestas del nuevo materialismo planteadas por Karen Barad y Rosi Braidotti y propone considerar de qué manera la experiencia del cuerpo interviene en la distribución del espacio y proporciona nuevas herramientas para pensar la corporalidad y la relación con el otro y el espacio exterior. La propuesta de un cuerpo post-humano en la obra de Puga recupera la materialidad del cuerpo y la relación intrínseca con el exterior.
Abstract: Eduardo Casanova is a Spanish director and multimedia artist whose work is centered on exploring difference and individuals deemed by society as deviant. As a former child star exposed and scrutinized by the national gaze, particularly due to his queerness, his work shows a keen interest in the intrusive observation of people who are othered. In his provocative debut film Pieles (2017), Casanova explores the interconnected stories of several characters whose bodies are judged as abnormal due to their striking visible differences—such as physical disabilities, burn scars, or fatness. I argue that Pieles addresses questions of performance and spectatorship in relation to disability, considering the matter of the exhibition of disabled bodies for entertainment purposes. Pieles walks a tightrope between voyeurism and estrangement in the audience's relationship with the characters, moving away from prescriptive filmic representations of disability that elicit pity, superiority, or disgust. I contend that Pieles carefully balances the one-sided and voyeuristic intimacy of spectatorship while also eliciting an exercise in critical distancing and reflection, luring its audience to stare, but from a place of discomfort.
Abstract: This essay examines the life and thought of Juan González Arintero (1860–1928), Dominican theologian and Servant of God, through the lens of Disability Studies. Best known for restoring mystical theology in the early twentieth century and for advancing a universal call to holiness that anticipated Vatican II, Arintero insisted that all Christians, whether religious or laypeople, were invited to contemplative union with God. He disseminated this vision through publications, classes at the Angelicum in Rome, public lectures, and spiritual direction, influencing figures such as Ramiro de Maeztu, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and, indirectly, Pope John Paul II. While biographers have acknowledged his deafness, no study has explored how his disability shaped his theology, ministry, and networks. Drawing on concepts such as Deaf Gain, narrative prosthesis, freakery, misfitting, and crip time, this essay argues that Arintero's embodied difference disrupted the theological and institutional norms of his era and gave voice to spiritual women. Following Alison Kafer's suggestion to let questions take precedence over answers, I propose that testimonies about Arintero's difference open new possibilities for understanding mystical theology and Catholic reform.
Abstract: The fields of Disability Studies and Iberian Cultural Studies have intersected in recent research on Benito Pérez Galdós's Marianela (1878) and Tristana (1892) as well as in Ryan Prout's discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century film, however critics have not yet sufficiently connected the representation of disabled bodies in twentieth-century literature to the period's most important historical events of the Iberian Peninsula: The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the resulting dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939–75). In this article I will analyze the representation of the disabled body in Juan Marsé's novel Si te dicen que caí , discussing how disability is consistently mobilized in the novel's character Conrado Galán, a paralyzed war veteran, to depict the victimhood caused by both the Spanish Civil War and General Franco's authoritarianism. I argue that Marsé represents disability through Conrado's experience of staring, caregiving, and pain, which the author manipulates into a disturbing metonymy of the Spanish dictator through recurring descriptions of Conrado's body as both "putrefying" and "petrified." This article attends to the relative dearth of considerations of twentieth-century Iberian literature in conjunction with Disability Studies—in comparison to criticism on nineteenth-century literature and contemporary film—presenting a reading of representations of disabled bodies with explicit reference to the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship.
Resumen: Este texto analiza la poética de la alteridad en Las primas , de Aurora Venturini, centrándose en cómo su narradora, Yuna Riglos, transita desde una identidad definida por la patología clínica hacia la construcción de una subjetividad soberana. El estudio se estructura en tres ejes fundamentales basados en la materialidad del discurso y la vivencia corporal. En primer lugar, se aplica la teoría crip (McRuer) para examinar la de-composición gramatical y el rechazo al contrato rehabilitador como actos de resistencia. En segundo lugar, se analiza el sabotaje de la norma lingüística y el uso de la puntuación como una técnica de supervivencia. Finalmente, mediante los conceptos de heterogeneidad enunciativa (Authier-Revuz) y encarnación compleja (Siebers), se demuestra cómo Yuna desarticula el capacitismo discursivo de su entorno. Se concluye que la novela funciona como una operación discursiva donde la minusvalía extra-lúcida de la protagonista subvierte las categorías de normalidad, transformando el estigma en el fundamento de una libertad radical y una belleza política nueva.
Juan Van Halen y Sarti (1788-1864) fue un militar español y belga, de ideología liberal y masón, exiliado varias veces en América y Europa. Durante su trayectoria vital profundamente transnacional y marcada por la movilidad, escribió varios textos autobiográficos. El artículo utiliza sus memorias para reconstruir la nacionalización del sujeto. Se explica cómo la nación debe comprenderse en relación con otras identidades (especialmente la política) y con la trayectoria personal de los individuos. También se muestra cómo un análisis combinado de biografía y autobiografía permite abordar desde abajo un proceso más general como es la construcción de naciones.
