Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

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Description

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is very important to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare’s revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/creator established him as one of the vital leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet’s devotion to truth and an activist’s demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the more than one histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we in truth live with the day by day hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare’s exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are in point of fact accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can also be realized, loved, and embraced.

In the end, an essay on the politics and poetics of queer disability. Eli Clare, a poet with cerebral palsy, movingly describes her attempt to climb Mount Adams–not, she points out, as a “supercrip,” like the boy without hands who bats .486 on his Little League team, but just as an impaired person who loves to hike: a story about ableism slightly than disability. Avoiding easy answers and journalistic sunshine, she recounts the story of the fight for disabled access, touching on the history of the freak show. She tracks the origins of her own tenacity and self-knowledge to her rural Oregon upbringing and the conflicting personality of her father–who sexually abused her, but also taught her how to frame a house, how to use a chainsaw. “I think of the words crip, queer, freak, redneck,” Clare remarks. “None of these are easy words. They mark the jagged edge between self-hatred and pride, the chasm between how the dominant culture views marginalized peoples and how we view ourselves, the razor between finding home, finding our bodies, and living in exile, living on the metaphoric mountain.” –Regina Marler

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