ABSTRACT

This chapter begins from the premise that an intersectional understanding of disability, race, gender, and sexuality benefits students with diverse career goals, academic experiences, and cultural backgrounds. Alex Espinoza's remarkable 2007 novel Still Water Saints includes characters with a wide range of bodily conditions relevant to disability studies: fatness, infertility, polio, drug addiction, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder; these characters are all clients of La Botanica Oshun, a store outside of Los Angeles run by the faith healer Perla, and each is the narrator of a short vignette about an encounter with Perla and the botanica. Chicana writer Helena Maria Viramontes's story "The Moths" depicts a gender-nonconforming teenage girl who is called upon to care for her dying grandmother. Within the defamiliarized body of Oscar de Leon, in other words, Diaz gives us a perspective from which to reimagine our social world.