Eli Clare > Quotes

“Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“I want to sharpen my pride on what strengthens me, my witness on what haunts me. Whatever we name ourselves, however we end up shattering our self-hatred, shame, silence, and isolation, the goal is the same: to end our daily material oppression.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“Let me remind all of us--disabled and nondisabled--that every time we defend our intelligence, we come close to disowning intellectually disabled people. We imply that it might be okay to exclude, devalue, and institutionalize people who actually live with body-mind conditions that impact the ways they think, understand, and process information.

The only way out of this trap is to move toward, not away from, intellectually disabled people, to practice active solidarity.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“Sometimes disabled people overcome specific moments of ableism—
we exceed low expectations, problem-solve lack of access, avoid nursing
homes or long-term psych facilities, narrowly escape police brutality
and prison. However, I’m not sure that overcoming disability itself is an
actual possibility for most of us. Yet in a world that places extraordinary
value in cure, the belief that we can defeat or transcend body-mind
conditions through individual hard work is convenient. Overcoming is
cure’s backup plan.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“But in today’s world, being seen as intellectually, cognitively, or developmentally disabled is dangerous because intelligence and verbal communication are entrenched markers of personhood.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“Pride works in direct opposition to internalized oppression. The latter provides a fertile ground for shame, denial, self-hatred, and fear. The former encourages anger, strength, and joy. To transform self-hatred into pride is a fundamental act of resistance.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks and seams. Its promises hold power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I'm curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“Simply put, diagnosis wields immense power. It can provide us access to vital medical technology or shame us, reveal a path toward less pain or get us locked up. It opens doors and slams them shut.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“The brutal consequences of "monkey" arise because that word removes some of us from humanity, placing us among nonhuman animals in the natural world. "Monkey" strengthens racist, ableist, and speciesist hierarchies. Once a person is deemed not human, then all sorts of violence become acceptable.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race…everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze.”
― eli clare

“Our body-minds tumble, shift, ease their way through space and time, never static. Gender transition in its many forms is simply another kind of motion. I lived in a body-mind assigned female at birth and made peace with it as a girl, a tomboy, a dyke, a queer woman, a butch. But uncovering my desire to transition—to live as a genderqueer, a female-to-male transgender person, a white guy—challenged everything I thought I knew about self-acceptance and love.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“If the U.S. government and nonprofit organizations, private corporations and university laboratories are going to dedicate money and time to the future, they also need to do so for the present. They need to fund accessible buses, schools, classrooms, movie theaters, restrooms, housing, and workplaces. They should support campaigns to end bullying, employment discrimination, social isolation, and the ongoing institutionalizing of disabled people with the same enthusiasm with which they implement cure research. I want money for accessible playgrounds, tree houses, and sandboxes so that wheelchair-using kids aren't left twiddling their thumbs in the present while they dream of running in the future.

If we choose to wait for those always-just-around-the-corner cures, lavishing them with resources, energy, and media attention, we risk suspending our present-day lives.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“The stolen body, the reclaimed body, the body that knows itself and the world, the stone and the heat which warms it: my body has never been singular.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“Pride is not an inessential thing. Without pride, disabled people are much more likely to accept unquestioningly the daily material conditions of ableism: unemployment, poverty, segregated and substandard education, years spent locked up in nursing homes, violence perpetrated by caregivers, lack of access. Without pride, individual and collective resistance to oppression becomes nearly impossible. But disability pride is no easy thing to come by. Disability has been soaked in shame, dressed in silence, rooted in isolation.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“Simply put, the DSM is a highly constructed projection placed on top of particular body-mind experiences in order to label, organize, and make meanings of them from within a specific worldview.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“I wont write the details or try to capture the error and pain in wors. But believe me: what they did broke my body-mind. It shaped every part of my life. This is not a hyperbole, not a claim to perpetual victimhood nor a ploy for sympathy, but rather, an enraging truth.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“The mannerisms that help define gender - the way in which people walk,swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space - are all based upon how non disabled people move…The construct of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also on the non disabled body.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

“People who have lived in shame and isolation need all the pride we can muster, not to mire ourselves in a narrowly defined identity politics, but to sustain broad-based rebellion. And likewise, we need a witness to all our histories, both collective and personal. Yet we also need to remember that witness and pride are not the same. Witness pairs grief and rage with remembrance. Pride pairs joy with a determination to be visible. Witness demands primary adherence to and respect for history. Pride uses history as one of its many tools. Sometimes witness and pride work in concert, other times not. We cannot afford to confuse, merge, blur the two.”
― Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation