Saints are not truly saints until they are dead. As Brigitte Cazelles writes, ‘the death of the saint is […] the first stage of the hagiographic phenomenon […]. Interest in the dead person ignites the desire to know more about their life’. A saintly death simultaneously produces and confirms saintly identity. The perfection associated with sanctity thus draws on a notion of completeness: the saint's life is over; we can tell the whole story. We can be sure that this individual is a saint, since they are not alive to fall from grace through a human act. We can possess them completely – in memory, in narrative, and in relic form. Yet the phenomenon of sanctity simultaneously troubles any notion of completeness. Saints do not only exist in the past: their continued presence, bridging earth and heaven, is what makes them valuable as intercessors. The narratives that relate their lives are multiple and variable, and fluid enough to cross generic boundaries. And holy relics, in the words of Caroline Walker Bynum, offer completeness ‘either through reunion of parts into a whole or through assertion of part as part to be the whole’. This equivocal and protean relationship to completeness marks and shapes saints’ embodiment, as well as their disembodiment.

In this chapter, I explore the ways that perceptions of sacred, disabled, and transgender embodiment(s) are structured by reference to similar notions of wholeness, perfection, and cure. ‘Disability’, of course, is a broad umbrella term.