The female body is central to the performance art, poetry and blog site interventions of Guatemalan Regina Jos´e Galindo. While Galindo is best known for her performance work, this article compares the hereto overlooked, distinctive and often shocking representations of the female body across her multimedia outputs. Lavery and Bowskill first consider the ways in which, in all three media, Galindo presents an ‘excessive’, carnivalised, grotesque and abject female body. They then analyse representations of the female body that has been subjected to violence at a private and public level. In so doing, the authors show how Galindo not only contests hegemonic visions of gender and (national) identity but also challenges the viewer/reader to engage with, rather than look away from, the violence to which women are subjected in patriarchal society.