She rose to fame with the monologue Feminism for the Clumsy and hosts several successful podcasts, including We Will Come Out Better with Inés Hernand. The propeller of a ship severed his right leg in 2023. Now he pours his experience into Fantasma (Alfaguara), an essay on the politics of disability.
Three years after the accident that cost him the amputation of his right leg, he published Fantasma, a testimonial book. What has it meant to pour your experience into a physical object, beyond the ethereal nature of the networks?
Writing is my job and also my vocation. So when something happened to me that was top-notch literary material, how could I not write it? I realized it almost at the moment, in the hospital I already started handling it and wrote some things, although all that is in the trash. This book is not therapeutic; If it were, I would have to pay the people and not the other way around. I had to wait, make something worth printing. I didn't want to make suffering porn but rather create something literary valuable and that contained important messages.
How does one say goodbye to a part of their body? Does it become assimilated, or is it always a ghost?
It is metabolized. We are all constantly digesting losses: of people, aspirations or capabilities. The difference is that mine is very visible, and the incomplete body awakens radical terror in us.
Today, when you look in the mirror, what does your own body suggest to you?
I am so carried away by everyday life that I have to reserve moments on the beach, in the shower or in the mirror to calmly observe myself. I have the absence very naturalized, but sometimes I look at myself and there is still strangeness. Three years seems like a long time, but it is a short time.
Analyze different perspectives towards disability: pity, compassion, admiration... Which one bothers you the most?
All this stuff about self-improvement disgusts me... Compassion annoys me, but the look of admiration annoys me even more when I climb the subway stairs. Stop looking at me avoiding obstacles like a wild boar and look angrily at those stairs, ask yourself why there are still stations without an elevator in the Madrid Metro because sooner or later this is going to come to you too: old age, dependency, an illness or a baby stroller. The city is very hostile, look around you.
It took him six years to come out of the homosexuality closet and two months to come out of the disability closet. Is the second a closet in which it is impossible to stay?
It's almost more complicated to be inside that closet than outside because it's so uncomfortable. There are many invisible disabilities that no one pays any attention to. When I claim my reserved seat on the subway, I always ask: "Do you need it?", because maybe that 22-year-old girl sitting there looking at her cell phone has horse endometriosis. It's okay to get out of your self-absorption and live by looking at others a little more.
We live in a paradoxical society: we constantly look at others, but perhaps we don't see them...
No self-help movement, no new age sect of the microbiota or any cryptocurrency that makes you rich saves you from living in society. Elon Musk breathes the same air as us, which he himself is turning into poison. As you earn money, the illusion of separating yourself from others is stronger: you start at the adults-only hotel, from there you go to an isolated villa, and from there to Mars, like this bastard, but nothing saves you from the others. A virus, pollution or climate change arrives and it kills you anyway.
As in Feminism for Dummies, in Fantasma he also resorts to irony. Is humor still your main demolition tool?
Comedy is a natural impulse for me, even a tool of cowardice, although the humor in Ghost is more bitter. Maturing involves understanding that you cannot use humor for everything, certain things have to be faced with drama.
Are we still clumsy with feminism, 10 years later?
We have taken a couple of steps back, the reaction is strong, but it has much more powerful tools: this little device that we all carry in our pockets is controlled by deeply anti-feminist people. It is a miracle that we continue to move forward.
In the book he talks about crip time, crippled time, which analyzes the different relationship with the clock in the face of different needs. In times of hurry and efficiency, is disability a way to sabotage the system?
It could be, yes, I have heard it from some anti-ableist activist. When you have a disability, all you have to do is pay attention to the rhythms of your body, and you would all do well to pay attention to how we organize ourselves because capacity is two minutes of life, we are all going to run out.
Has having a suffering body led you to become even more politicized?
I don't notice that much difference in myself, but I do notice in the attention I receive. People have made me a symbol of certain things, and I take advantage of that attention to ask questions that interest me. I said the same thing before, but now it works better because it is no longer theoretical, I live it in the body and we have to take advantage of that.
Are you worried about the reaction or violence in public spaces to your political positions?
I don't receive a lot of hate, I'm lucky in that. Furthermore, I am a grown-up lady, it is very difficult to put me down. I do worry about young communicators or the politicians who wait in the doorway. The tolerance for verbal violence in networks is so high that they need to take to the streets. They're tired of calling us whores on Instagram, now they want to give us shit.
