Summary:
The short film “Sins Invalid” showcases a performance project by the same name, created by disabled artists Patty Berne and Leroy Moore. This collection of performances by a collection of artists of all disabilities, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities focuses on the nuances of navigating sex, desire, and relationships while existing in a world that is incredibly hostile to any displays of sexuality in disabled people. The first performance by ET Russian shows them removing their prosthetic legs for the night and rubbing lotion on their legs while a narration plays over the scene describing a past sexual experience with another disabled person who was injured in a car crash. Next, Maria Palacios explains her relationship with sexuality as a wheelchair user and how she was taught that she would never have sex, get married, have children or even grow up. Palacios also describes the horrible medical treatment she experienced in her youth that dehumanized her. After these introductory performance, Sins Invalid co-founder Patty Berne comes onto the screen and explains why she wanted to create this performance troupe with Leroy Moore, highlighting the way she was paraded around her elementary school naked for doctors to analyze. This performance project is a way for these disabled performers to own their bodies and display them for an audience in a way that is empowering for themselves and others.
Next, the film explores the United States’ past of eugenics, beginning by listing the “5 D’s of types of people who should not reproduce”: Degenerate, Dependent, Deficient, Delinquent, and Defective. Performer Seeley Quest takes on the story of a woman named Carey whose mother was in colony of people that fell under the 5 D’s. When she was young she was assaulted and became pregnant, but was forcibly sterilized on the basis of her family history of disability. One of the most difficult performances to watch came next, with the co-founder Leroy Moore on his knee in the nude while another performer pulls a long list of insults from his mouth, symbolizing how the words of the world are easily internalized. After that, deaf dancer Antoine Hunter explains the experience of non-deaf people telling him he shouldn’t dance because he can’t hear music. We see Hunter dance without any soundtrack, exploring an internal rhythm he seeks to share with the audience. Next, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explains how poets and writers like her too are able to join Sins Invalid and shares a poem she wrote about the love between herself and another disabled individual and how pure and strong their devotion to taking care of each other is.
Later, Leroy Moore performs a scene of going to the doctor in sexual bondage attire and then performs a scene with Juba Kalamka where they play dominos and joke with each other until it turns to hugging and kissing. Then, performer Matt Fraser conducts a sensual bath scene where he shows the audience how he cleans himself, making use of his legs to reach areas his arms are unable to, and invites the audience to see his beauty in the way shower scenes in movies and television often sexualize the love interests of the protagonists. Right afterwards we watch Fraser in a new scene being beat up and eventually killed by an invisible assailant which we find out is an embodiment of the microaggressions he faces in day to day life. The most moving performance for me came next, where artist Nomy Lamm dressed in feathers and wings sings an eerie wordless song atop a nest of limbs. Nearing the end of the showcase, Piepzna-Samarasinha orates another of her pieces, which is a story about the experience of flirting with another disabled individual online and dreaming about their possible life together. Finally, the last performance Sins Invalid gives us is a dramatic chain of events between performer Rodney Bell and Seeley Quest where at first they are in an intimate and tender moment that turns violent when Quest attacks Bell, trying to use his vulnerabilities as a wheelchair user against him. In the last few minutes of this scene, Bell rises up into the air with his wheelchair, twisting and turning and is displayed in front of a red cross, reminiscent of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Quotations and Observations:
From “Disability and Sex” in Keywords for Disabilities, Margrit Shildrick writes, “…disabled people, like everyone else, understand their sexualities in multiple different ways, which do not fit easily with the convenient models of social management” (Shildrick pg. 164). I thought this quote is depicted very nicely in Sins Invalid because inherent to the production is the fact that each of these disabled performers have different experiences and stories based on their lives as people of color, queer people, and each of them utilizes different mediums in which they choose to perform their stories. I think one of the reasons why Sins Invalid is so good, is because one of their goals as a production is to essentially scrap the “convenient models of social management” in favor of showing the world who they truly are, safe within their community of people who support and cherish their art.
Another quote from Keywords for Disabilities from the chapter “Sexuality” by Robert McRuer says, “Disabled people often have been discursively constructed as incapable of having sexual desires or a sexual identity, due to their supposed “innocence” ” (McRuer, 168). I connected this quote to Sins Invalid in particular to a section where a performer is expressing her frustration with societies inability to allow disabled people the experience of seeing people like themselves on the screen getting to experience sex just like non-disabled people are allowed to. Sins Invalid is a way for people to show off “An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of invisibility” as stated on their website.
Review:
I found the short film Sins Invalid to be incredibly moving in the way the performers were able to get down to the nitty-gritty feelings of pain, weakness, love, and strength that have experienced and continue experience in their lives. Before I wrote this post, I watched it one more time in order to catch the detail I may have missed in our class viewing, and each performance so aptly contends with the oppressive power structures they face, wrought with symbolism and humor. I really would like to see a live performance of Sins Invalid if I ever get the opportunity because only seeing snippets of many different performances, I would assume, pale in comparison to the real experience of getting to see it live. I rate Sins Invalid a 5 out of 5, because of the masterful attention to detail of the camera work, as well as the finely chosen scenes that moved me in such a short amount of time.