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Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
“Eli Clare works a vital alchemy. . . . Using the language of the elemental world, he delineates a complex human intersection and transmutes cruelty into its opposite—a potent, lifegiving remedy.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
First published in 1999, Exile & Pride established Eli Clare as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability. With this critical tenth-anniversary edition, the groundbreaking publication secures its position as essential to the history of queer and disability politics, and, through significant new material that boldly interrogates and advances the original text, to its future as well. Clare’s writing on his experiences as a genderqueer activist/writer with cerebral palsy permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation, and yet Exile & Pride is much too great in scope to be defined by even these two issues. Instead it offers an intersectional framework for understanding how our bodies actually experience the politics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the heart of Clare’s exploration of environmental destruction, white working-class identity, queer community, disabled sexuality, childhood sexual abuse, coalition politics, and his own gender transition is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible for everyone.
Blending prose and theory, personal experience and political debate, anger and compassion, Exile & Pride provides a window into a world where our whole selves in all their complexity can be loved and accepted.
An award-winning poet and essayist, Eli Clare is also the author of The Marrow’s Telling.
First published in 1999, Exile & Pride established Eli Clare as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability. With this critical tenth-anniversary edition, the groundbreaking publication secures its position as essential to the history of queer and disability politics, and, through significant new material that boldly interrogates and advances the original text, to its future as well. Clare’s writing on his experiences as a genderqueer activist/writer with cerebral palsy permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation, and yet Exile & Pride is much too great in scope to be defined by even these two issues. Instead it offers an intersectional framework for understanding how our bodies actually experience the politics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the heart of Clare’s exploration of environmental destruction, white working-class identity, queer community, disabled sexuality, childhood sexual abuse, coalition politics, and his own gender transition is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible for everyone.
Blending prose and theory, personal experience and political debate, anger and compassion, Exile & Pride provides a window into a world where our whole selves in all their complexity can be loved and accepted.
An award-winning poet and essayist, Eli Clare is also the author of The Marrow’s Telling.
147 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1999
132 people are currently reading
8880 people want to read
About the author
Eli Clare
21 books297 followersWhite, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in occupied Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of essays, the award-winning Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion. Additionally he has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies.
Eli works as a traveling poet, storyteller, and social justice educator. Since 2008, he has spoken, taught, and consulted (both in-person and remotely) at well over 150 conferences, community events, and colleges across the United States and Canada. He currently serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center and is also a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow (funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference.
When he's not writing or on the road, you can find him reading, camping, riding his recumbent trike, and otherwise having fun adventures.
Eli works as a traveling poet, storyteller, and social justice educator. Since 2008, he has spoken, taught, and consulted (both in-person and remotely) at well over 150 conferences, community events, and colleges across the United States and Canada. He currently serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center and is also a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow (funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference.
When he's not writing or on the road, you can find him reading, camping, riding his recumbent trike, and otherwise having fun adventures.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 237 reviews
April 10, 2007
Exile and Pride changed my life and transformed my political outlook at age 23. It provided a critical analysis of ableism that helped me finally understand how my experiences as a queer with cerebral palsy fit into a radical social justice framework. His writing on language, the body, history, class, and the environment is engaging, hopeful and personal. I felt his race analysis was problematic overall, though the chapter on the freakshow is excellent. A must-read for everyone concerned with social justice.
June 16, 2009
Exile and Pride reads like two books in one. The first, a personal unraveling of experiences growing up poor and genderqueer with cerebral palsy in a rural white logging town in Oregon, and the second, a deeper and more theoretical analysis of ableist oppression, cultural constructions of disability, and disability activism for self-determination, also grounded in thoughtful examination of Clare's personal experience.
Clare writes ambivalently about his ties to rural land and the values espoused by the white rural poor he grew up with. He finds freedom in urban dyke culture but experiences loss of community and connection to land amongst wealthy people in the city. The first part of his book, on exile, searches for a way to create rural queer community, queer community that isn't based in the middle and upper classes. Exiled by abuse, education and political philosophy, and need for a community that would both accept and embrace his gender exploration and identity, he misses the trees and hard work of home.
I connected to Clare's emotional attachment to place and how he incorporated social ecology into a book about gender, class, disability. So many books about identity politics, written by urban academics, leave out place, forget about the earth; Clare's love of climbing trees and building with wood was refreshing and hopeful. I felt inspired by his refusal to allow any one part of his identity overwhelm any other: though he may not have found it yet, he yearns to build space that embraces gender self-determination, that is made accessible so it doesn't turn physical impairment into disability, that unites environmentalism with economic justice led by the people who live closest to the environment.
It's rare that I've found books on class that take an intersectional approach, grounding class status within experiences of race, gender, location. Exile and Pride reminded me of Where We Stand by bell hooks, where hooks describes her experiences growing up poor and Black in the south, learning to navigate a college full of rich people and an education that planted her firmly in the middle class.
The first section of Clare's book is arguably the less important, the story of negotiating childhood a necessity to write on paper. But the new ground that he breaks, the new theoretical places to which he takes his readers, begins in the second part of the book, pride. Here he embraces the identities that helped exile him from home, and weaves an argument against that exile. Clare quite masterfully connects queerness (sexuality, gender) with disability. He explains the ways that society creates queerness by defining and enforcing binary gender norms. In the same way, society creates disability by refusing to adapt to the differences in human bodies and minds, enforcing a single normal body type. Clare uses the history of freak shows to demonstrate the different ways Western culture has related to people with differing bodies, whether because of impairment or race or even height. He explores how ableist and racist oppression forced many "freaks" into freak shows, at times by force and at times because of economic necessity. He also explores how many of the "freaks" were able to exploit an audience's willingness to be duped into making successful careers for themselves, comparing the job to some sex workers' ability to navigate patriarchy for material gain.
The "pride" chapters are full of unanswered questions, and the reader can tell Clare is just now teasing out answers for himself. That makes this book hard to read on one's own, and I wish I had a class of brilliant fellow students to highlight the insights I'm missing. I need to read more books on disability theory, fill in the gaps of experience and learn more about bodies and the construction of ability. I need to learn specifically and broadly how to be in solidarity with those struggling for self-determination.
His last chapter returns to the topic of exile and asks the dangerous question many queer people fear to approach: how his father's sexual abuse affected his gender identity. Clare poses a theory that the abuse was, consciously or not, a tool to uphold the norms and binaries he described in previous chapters. "Child abuse is not a cause of but rather a response to-- among other things-- transgressive gender identity and/or sexuality... My father raped me for many reasons, and inside his acts of violence I learned what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy well."
Clare writes ambivalently about his ties to rural land and the values espoused by the white rural poor he grew up with. He finds freedom in urban dyke culture but experiences loss of community and connection to land amongst wealthy people in the city. The first part of his book, on exile, searches for a way to create rural queer community, queer community that isn't based in the middle and upper classes. Exiled by abuse, education and political philosophy, and need for a community that would both accept and embrace his gender exploration and identity, he misses the trees and hard work of home.
I connected to Clare's emotional attachment to place and how he incorporated social ecology into a book about gender, class, disability. So many books about identity politics, written by urban academics, leave out place, forget about the earth; Clare's love of climbing trees and building with wood was refreshing and hopeful. I felt inspired by his refusal to allow any one part of his identity overwhelm any other: though he may not have found it yet, he yearns to build space that embraces gender self-determination, that is made accessible so it doesn't turn physical impairment into disability, that unites environmentalism with economic justice led by the people who live closest to the environment.
It's rare that I've found books on class that take an intersectional approach, grounding class status within experiences of race, gender, location. Exile and Pride reminded me of Where We Stand by bell hooks, where hooks describes her experiences growing up poor and Black in the south, learning to navigate a college full of rich people and an education that planted her firmly in the middle class.
The first section of Clare's book is arguably the less important, the story of negotiating childhood a necessity to write on paper. But the new ground that he breaks, the new theoretical places to which he takes his readers, begins in the second part of the book, pride. Here he embraces the identities that helped exile him from home, and weaves an argument against that exile. Clare quite masterfully connects queerness (sexuality, gender) with disability. He explains the ways that society creates queerness by defining and enforcing binary gender norms. In the same way, society creates disability by refusing to adapt to the differences in human bodies and minds, enforcing a single normal body type. Clare uses the history of freak shows to demonstrate the different ways Western culture has related to people with differing bodies, whether because of impairment or race or even height. He explores how ableist and racist oppression forced many "freaks" into freak shows, at times by force and at times because of economic necessity. He also explores how many of the "freaks" were able to exploit an audience's willingness to be duped into making successful careers for themselves, comparing the job to some sex workers' ability to navigate patriarchy for material gain.
The "pride" chapters are full of unanswered questions, and the reader can tell Clare is just now teasing out answers for himself. That makes this book hard to read on one's own, and I wish I had a class of brilliant fellow students to highlight the insights I'm missing. I need to read more books on disability theory, fill in the gaps of experience and learn more about bodies and the construction of ability. I need to learn specifically and broadly how to be in solidarity with those struggling for self-determination.
His last chapter returns to the topic of exile and asks the dangerous question many queer people fear to approach: how his father's sexual abuse affected his gender identity. Clare poses a theory that the abuse was, consciously or not, a tool to uphold the norms and binaries he described in previous chapters. "Child abuse is not a cause of but rather a response to-- among other things-- transgressive gender identity and/or sexuality... My father raped me for many reasons, and inside his acts of violence I learned what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy well."
February 22, 2014
This book saved my life.
October 12, 2019
Clearly a seminal work for a reason; Clare is so insightful, and so doggedly determined to hold onto and sit in places of tension in ways that are really productive and honestly also inviting. The first half, focusing on the sites of his childhood and the tensions between environmental protection and economic possibility for those living there, is insightful and has been foundational I'm sure for thinking about the binaries of queer life. The second half is similarly productive as Clare explores the lines and boundaries of his own life, and where pride and witness overlap and rub together. There's obviously a lot to chew on here, and the work is so insightful and thoughtful; every part has been clearly worked over with a lot of care.
I will say I think if you've read other stuff around crip culture and queerness, you may feel like there's not much new here; Clare's work has been so heavily cited (for good reason!) that ymmv on how familiar all of this feels/if it truly feels new. I think obviously you should still read it if you haven't, but it's something to keep in mind when you're approaching the text.
I will say I think if you've read other stuff around crip culture and queerness, you may feel like there's not much new here; Clare's work has been so heavily cited (for good reason!) that ymmv on how familiar all of this feels/if it truly feels new. I think obviously you should still read it if you haven't, but it's something to keep in mind when you're approaching the text.
September 12, 2024
I trust Eli Clare and I trust his writing. Throughout the book (I read the 2009 edition), he looks back at his own writing and recognizes the faults in his logic or representations of other groups. Every moment I thought I might have a criticism, he spoke on it first and I appreciated that. It reminded me of who I wish to be. So ready to take critique and thoughtful.
I also just generally thought the work was amazing. Eli Clare is a beautiful writer, and his work was suffused with wondrous prose alongside incredibly serious information. There's a lot here that I can use in my own writing, activism, and everyday life, and I think this will be a book I come back to often.
I also just generally thought the work was amazing. Eli Clare is a beautiful writer, and his work was suffused with wondrous prose alongside incredibly serious information. There's a lot here that I can use in my own writing, activism, and everyday life, and I think this will be a book I come back to often.
October 10, 2024
CW: SA
I put this off for too long. It’s excellent so far. Very intersectional. If you like this I highly recommend Feminist Queer Crip. I’m surprised that I didn’t read this in college. It’s truly excellent. 4.5 stars
I put this off for too long. It’s excellent so far. Very intersectional. If you like this I highly recommend Feminist Queer Crip. I’m surprised that I didn’t read this in college. It’s truly excellent. 4.5 stars
February 13, 2025
This book both saved and changed my life when I read it so I don't really feel equipped to review it as anything but incredible
July 31, 2021
Took a long break in the middle of this which threw off my sense of the overall effect, but this was really good! Defies genre in that it has aspects of memoir and essays and theory, I enjoyed how it was all weaved together though sometimes I struggled a bit to make all the connections. Also, this was originally published in 1999 and I read the 2009 version and really appreciated Clare’s footnotes calling himself out on things he wrote a decade ago that might have been problematic or lacking nuance. Major content warning for rape, sexual assault, and torture. Doesn’t go into a ton of detail, but still very heavy and difficult.
March 22, 2025
“how do i reach beneath the skin to write, not about the stones, but the body that warmed them, the heat itself?”
March 7, 2023
A review of exile and pride
I have a hard time reviewing this book because a large part of the reason I didn’t like it was due to how much it conflicted with my own political views.
I’ll do my best to separate my own personal political leanings from what I think are inherent weaknesses in this book and what it tried to accomplish
This is written as a memoir with a political agenda, but I think too often it devolves into a political agenda pretending to be a memoir, which is unfortunate.
Well written memoirs are uniquely able to connect individual people with more abstract political goals (like broader acceptance of LGBTQ communities in ritual communities). Stories of personal struggles, tragedies and triumphs can communicate to readers the day to day life of marginalized communities and peoples.
However, the author of Exile and Pride doesn’t feel like a real person. They seem to only exist against the backdrop of some broader narrative or agenda. Every aspect we learn of Eli Clare as a person only serves to drive a commentary of social justice and change. For example, the author reflects on the necessity of cutting trees with his father to build a house when they were a child, only to serve as an example for why logging is a morally ambiguous industry, even for a self proclaimed environmentalist.
In this way, I think an opportunity was missed for readers to understand Eli Clare, the person, rather than the activist. If that’s the case, why interweave personal experiences at all? At best it is ineffective and at worse, disingenuous.
My own personal conflicts with this book is primarily rooted in the identity politics the author engages in. I've tried not to let this aspect of the book affect my score of the book.
There is a pervasive undertone of identity that runs through this book. The author exhaustively reminds readers that they are white, queer, disabled, transgender, rural as if these are the words that define his rather than his love of hiking, his hunger love of nature, his challenging relationship with his father.
She also pointedly contrasts his own identity to that of other people who are urban, middle class, heterosexual, abled, etc.
The undertone also suggests that she is more able to understand certain issues because of his identity. For instance, she mentions that urban folks simply don't understand the forests she grew up in, implying they wouldn't be able to comprehend destruction that is taking place.
Ironically, she also feels qualified to comment on classism and poverty but never acknowledges his own potential ignorance to such issues, having never grown up in the desperate poverty that many urban kids do.
However, I don't think any of this is a particularly useful exercise, if we are to bridge the divides in understanding the author calls for, more care needs to be taken to understand people as individuals rather than collectives.
I have a hard time reviewing this book because a large part of the reason I didn’t like it was due to how much it conflicted with my own political views.
I’ll do my best to separate my own personal political leanings from what I think are inherent weaknesses in this book and what it tried to accomplish
This is written as a memoir with a political agenda, but I think too often it devolves into a political agenda pretending to be a memoir, which is unfortunate.
Well written memoirs are uniquely able to connect individual people with more abstract political goals (like broader acceptance of LGBTQ communities in ritual communities). Stories of personal struggles, tragedies and triumphs can communicate to readers the day to day life of marginalized communities and peoples.
However, the author of Exile and Pride doesn’t feel like a real person. They seem to only exist against the backdrop of some broader narrative or agenda. Every aspect we learn of Eli Clare as a person only serves to drive a commentary of social justice and change. For example, the author reflects on the necessity of cutting trees with his father to build a house when they were a child, only to serve as an example for why logging is a morally ambiguous industry, even for a self proclaimed environmentalist.
In this way, I think an opportunity was missed for readers to understand Eli Clare, the person, rather than the activist. If that’s the case, why interweave personal experiences at all? At best it is ineffective and at worse, disingenuous.
My own personal conflicts with this book is primarily rooted in the identity politics the author engages in. I've tried not to let this aspect of the book affect my score of the book.
There is a pervasive undertone of identity that runs through this book. The author exhaustively reminds readers that they are white, queer, disabled, transgender, rural as if these are the words that define his rather than his love of hiking, his hunger love of nature, his challenging relationship with his father.
She also pointedly contrasts his own identity to that of other people who are urban, middle class, heterosexual, abled, etc.
The undertone also suggests that she is more able to understand certain issues because of his identity. For instance, she mentions that urban folks simply don't understand the forests she grew up in, implying they wouldn't be able to comprehend destruction that is taking place.
Ironically, she also feels qualified to comment on classism and poverty but never acknowledges his own potential ignorance to such issues, having never grown up in the desperate poverty that many urban kids do.
However, I don't think any of this is a particularly useful exercise, if we are to bridge the divides in understanding the author calls for, more care needs to be taken to understand people as individuals rather than collectives.
January 6, 2008
melodie got me this book for chanukah. i've been hearing about it for years and finally got to read it. eli is a deep thinker and takes readers along with his train of thought (from what i know, eli uses masc. pronouns now - at the time of the writing he was butch-dyke identified). the theme of exile has to do with the home he loved and left for lots of reasons - queerness, abuse, general lack of options. the descriptions of his lost rural northwest logging town are full of emotion but not sentimental and idealized - he talks about colonization, clear-cutting, class and environmentalism without trying to prove a point, instead stretching and expanding to include a whole heart, a whole picture, a whole reality. he's so smart. i was especially moved by his exploration of the term "freak" being used by disabled people - aligning with people in freak shows, some of whom were able to access some degree of empowerment and self-determination, and many of whom were not. which aspects of this tradition call for pride and reclamation, and which simply ask us to bear witness ? this book makes my heart full. my only critique is that a lot of these pieces were published separately before the book came out, so it definitely reads as a series of essays, and because of that there's some repetition that could have been avoided if it had been written as a cohesive book. i just found out that eli has a new book out, i'm excited to read it.
November 19, 2016
I read this at the wrong time. The focus on having empathy for the white working class was unexpected and something that I'm having difficulty with right now.
November 25, 2024
Is this book important? Yea. It's got some important things to say about disability, queerness, and land stewardship. But it also took away my love for reading. It's a short book but it made me stop reading for 4 months and I couldn't bring myself to finish it. I think the writing style just isn't for me. The essays are too meandering for me I think. This review is for my posterity and in no way is meant to deter others from reading it...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 21, 2024
the intersectional analysis in this book is fucking insane and eli clare is SUCH a good writer who really peels apart ableism and supercrip narratives
March 27, 2025
This book has started so many conversations and questions among friends and in my own head. Clare is such a wonderfully personal and precise writer who deeply explores topics of identity, disability, intersectionality, etc. I feel grateful to have been introduced to this book by my amazing professor, Anne Finger, who is mentioned in the book! I read the first half of this book online and enjoyed it so much that I paused to purchase the physical copy.
June 21, 2025
Theory that reads like poetry 😭
the intersection of disability, queerness, class, the environment, the body is a messy place but it feels good to inhabit the contradictions for once. deeply illuminative…. i will continue to talk about eli clare’s writing to anyone who cares to listen
the intersection of disability, queerness, class, the environment, the body is a messy place but it feels good to inhabit the contradictions for once. deeply illuminative…. i will continue to talk about eli clare’s writing to anyone who cares to listen
February 9, 2017
I am very grateful for this text for a variety of reasons. I read it in 2016, and it is still relevant despite being written in 1999. It is poetically well written. It tackles issues and perspectives all too often left out of the focus and politics of young middle class white suburb and city dwelling folks.
This book also helped me see how much internalized ableism I deal with. I constantly apologize for my existence and struggle with my identities. It does focus a lot on visible disabilities, but there are footnotes in the newer edition that mention this.
I really appreciated the last essay in the book that touches on many things but in particular- the intersections of being disabled, queer, trans, butch, sensitive, introspective, radical, working class, and a major sexual trauma survivor. I have honestly never met or read anyone that touched on all of these parts of themself (and of me) at the same time. That essay, also beautifully written, is something I've needed and searched for for many years.
This book validated and mentored me on many things I really needed someone to teach me. I'm a city and suburb kid, so it also taught me quite a bit about bias against rural communities and intersections with environmental and other movements.
This book holds so much for how very short it is. Definitely recommended.
This book also helped me see how much internalized ableism I deal with. I constantly apologize for my existence and struggle with my identities. It does focus a lot on visible disabilities, but there are footnotes in the newer edition that mention this.
I really appreciated the last essay in the book that touches on many things but in particular- the intersections of being disabled, queer, trans, butch, sensitive, introspective, radical, working class, and a major sexual trauma survivor. I have honestly never met or read anyone that touched on all of these parts of themself (and of me) at the same time. That essay, also beautifully written, is something I've needed and searched for for many years.
This book validated and mentored me on many things I really needed someone to teach me. I'm a city and suburb kid, so it also taught me quite a bit about bias against rural communities and intersections with environmental and other movements.
This book holds so much for how very short it is. Definitely recommended.
January 20, 2018
This is such a powerful, important book. It was recommended to me by a disability studies professor who knew I was interested in the intersection of disability and queerness, but it is so much more than I was expecting. I wasn't anticipating the deep reflection on place and the author's childhood in rural Oregon, but I found this part especially unique and insightful. The discussion had a great deal of relevance to the current political conversations regarding rural America, but it was also specifically resonant for me, as a queer city-dwelling woman who still carries personal and family ties to forests and forestry in the Northwest.
I was also very appreciative of the reflection on the distinction between having pride and bearing witness, and the importance of both. This book has a lot of very valuable things to say about disability and queerness, but this was one of the things that stood out the most for me. I'd be very interested to see what the newest update of the text adds (I read the 2009 edition), and what further comments the author might make on these topics in the era of Trump.
I was also very appreciative of the reflection on the distinction between having pride and bearing witness, and the importance of both. This book has a lot of very valuable things to say about disability and queerness, but this was one of the things that stood out the most for me. I'd be very interested to see what the newest update of the text adds (I read the 2009 edition), and what further comments the author might make on these topics in the era of Trump.
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March 18, 2023The age of this book doesn’t stop a lot of it feeling incredibly relevant.
Felt like a relief to read when I see so much queer activism that still doesn’t fully engage with class or consider disabled people at all. A few parts about disability were so close to home they felt like a gut punch; others were completely outside my experience and reading felt essential. The tone also felt like a thoughtful and impressive demonstration in making points clearly and with feeling, while also avoiding divisive thinking - even in impossibly difficult circumstances.
(warnings for discussions of CSA, abuse of disabled & gnc people, racism, ableism.)
Felt like a relief to read when I see so much queer activism that still doesn’t fully engage with class or consider disabled people at all. A few parts about disability were so close to home they felt like a gut punch; others were completely outside my experience and reading felt essential. The tone also felt like a thoughtful and impressive demonstration in making points clearly and with feeling, while also avoiding divisive thinking - even in impossibly difficult circumstances.
(warnings for discussions of CSA, abuse of disabled & gnc people, racism, ableism.)
October 15, 2021
Huge thank you to rocky for recommending this book it was soooooo good.
May 26, 2021
cw: CSA, racism
Beautiful introduction that left me even more excited to read this.
The first part is about exile. Exile from the body as home, exile from home communities and cultures, exile from environment. Quite a lot more about the environment than I was expecting, but after finishing I can see how it clearly ties into power.
The second part is about pride. Who gets to have it, how pride differs from witnessing (pairing rage and grief with remembrance), and for why pride is important.
on freak shows, which were comprised of four groups: disabled people of various races, nondisabled people of color - brought over from other colonized countries or acquired locally, nondisabled people of various races with visible differences:
on the medicalization of disability, and progressive myths about how things get better over time:
"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."
"Pride works in direct opposition to internalized oppression.... To transform self-hatred into pride is a fundamental act of resistance.... [to undercut] the power of those who want us dead."
"What better way to maintain a power structure.. than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children... inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy well."
Beautiful introduction that left me even more excited to read this.
The first part is about exile. Exile from the body as home, exile from home communities and cultures, exile from environment. Quite a lot more about the environment than I was expecting, but after finishing I can see how it clearly ties into power.
"We didn't ask because we were children taught not to question."
"Of course rural LGBT communities exist, but the people and institutions defining queer identity and culture are urban."
The second part is about pride. Who gets to have it, how pride differs from witnessing (pairing rage and grief with remembrance), and for why pride is important.
on freak shows, which were comprised of four groups: disabled people of various races, nondisabled people of color - brought over from other colonized countries or acquired locally, nondisabled people of various races with visible differences:
"the differences among the various groups of people who worked as freaks remain important to understanding the freak show in its entirety. But whatever differences, all four groups held one thing in common: nature did not make them into freaks. The freak show did, carefully constructing an exaggerated divide between 'normal' and Other"
"Freaks were not supercrips. They did not overcome disability, they flaunted it."
on the medicalization of disability, and progressive myths about how things get better over time:
"for the century in which the freak show flourished, disability was not yet inextricably linked to pathology, and without pathology, pity and tragedy did not shadow disability to the same extent they do today"
"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."
"Pride works in direct opposition to internalized oppression.... To transform self-hatred into pride is a fundamental act of resistance.... [to undercut] the power of those who want us dead."
"What better way to maintain a power structure.. than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children... inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy well."
February 15, 2023
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectionality and identity—but frankly, I recommend it to everyone. In really superb writing, Clare unpacks his experiences as a white, disabled, once-butch-lesbian, genderqueer trans activist and writer who has had to cope with his many identities and their intersections and contradictions. He gives us an incredible framework for thinking about ourselves and about radical issues moving forwards in a way that is more inclusive, thoughtful, and complex.
Through analysis of media and his own fraught relationship with his body, Clare unpacks the idea of finding home in our bodies, and of exile—losing home, whether in ourselves or externally. He talks about living in small towns and the essential urban-ness of modern queer communities, and how we can't leave rural communities behind. He talks about the ways that environmental movements too often leave real, working class people out of their equations, alienating them in the process. He unpacks ableist media and the "supercrip" story, looks back at the history of freak shows, and more, to analyze how disability is misunderstood, and how that impacts how disabled people see themselves and navigate communal spaces. He makes a strong, blistering case for intersectionality in all activism, and fights against the commercialization and cooption of protest, disability, and queerness.
This book has so much in it that I can't possibly address it all with my cold-addled brain—just know that I covered every page of this book with underlining, highlighting, and annotations, and that I'm adding this book to my shelf of books that shifted my mindset for good. In refusing easy answers to his questions, Clare gives us all a valuable gift: a way of analyzing, checking ourselves, listening to our own bodies, interrogating our own outlooks and approaches to activism. The newest edition also includes updates from the author in the footnotes and in the introduction, as well as two excellent essays by Aurora Levins Morales and Dean Spade. All around, this is a must-read for activists, and I'm so glad I finally got to it.
Content warnings for sexual violence, child abuse, discussion of ableist, homophobic, and racist language and slurs.
Through analysis of media and his own fraught relationship with his body, Clare unpacks the idea of finding home in our bodies, and of exile—losing home, whether in ourselves or externally. He talks about living in small towns and the essential urban-ness of modern queer communities, and how we can't leave rural communities behind. He talks about the ways that environmental movements too often leave real, working class people out of their equations, alienating them in the process. He unpacks ableist media and the "supercrip" story, looks back at the history of freak shows, and more, to analyze how disability is misunderstood, and how that impacts how disabled people see themselves and navigate communal spaces. He makes a strong, blistering case for intersectionality in all activism, and fights against the commercialization and cooption of protest, disability, and queerness.
This book has so much in it that I can't possibly address it all with my cold-addled brain—just know that I covered every page of this book with underlining, highlighting, and annotations, and that I'm adding this book to my shelf of books that shifted my mindset for good. In refusing easy answers to his questions, Clare gives us all a valuable gift: a way of analyzing, checking ourselves, listening to our own bodies, interrogating our own outlooks and approaches to activism. The newest edition also includes updates from the author in the footnotes and in the introduction, as well as two excellent essays by Aurora Levins Morales and Dean Spade. All around, this is a must-read for activists, and I'm so glad I finally got to it.
Content warnings for sexual violence, child abuse, discussion of ableist, homophobic, and racist language and slurs.
November 6, 2020
Giving 4 stars mostly for what it is, but in terms of personal enjoyment I put it more around a 3*. I couldn't help but find a lot of the writing overly dated, particularly as it related to being a white person from a rural area. So much of his analytic, especially about an urban/rural queer divide, breaks down if you just take time to think about queer/trans/working class people and people of color in the south and urban areas. (Like, the piece on slurs and reclamation is SO bad as he compares "queer" and "freak" to the n-word and literally uses it. Or the part on the freak show that tries to reckon with human zoos of Black and Native people and the wealth/fame that some white disabled people were able to get from their acts.) I recognize that this book has been incredibly formative on the intersections between queerness, disability, class, and environmentalism, but maybe in coming to it later in life, or because of who I am, I found it less resonant; in looking retrospectively 20+ years later, a lot of things have simply changed (even as so many stayed the same) and many of the ideas in the book weren't new to me. What did resonate with me were the bits about one's relationship to a rural/conservative community -- and one that has engaged in harmful, destructive, settler colonial acts for uhhh decades -- as I try to reconcile more with growing up in the military and parts of the south. I do think, however, that Clare didn't push that topic enough past a "yes, this is Bad, but not Wholly, yes, this is my Home, even as I'm in ~exile~, and Yes, the people are pretty Racist on the whole, but not Evil incarnate." The writing was very artful at times and reminded me of Stone Butch Blues, so I would definitely recommend it if you enjoy that style of queer memoir.
P.S.: I also had to lead class discussion on this book on Election Day, and have to say that I find it interesting that my classmates loved this book so much when last week they DESPISED Lethabo King's Black Shoals. Hm. Inch resting. Particularly when I didn't it like this book that much at all. Though, of course, they barely answered my basic questions about it so maybe they didn't do the reading fully...
P.S.: I also had to lead class discussion on this book on Election Day, and have to say that I find it interesting that my classmates loved this book so much when last week they DESPISED Lethabo King's Black Shoals. Hm. Inch resting. Particularly when I didn't it like this book that much at all. Though, of course, they barely answered my basic questions about it so maybe they didn't do the reading fully...
July 21, 2024
I wish this book had been a memoir! It blends elements of memoir, as the first part is a description of the author growing up disabled and queer in rural logging country, and thoughts on rural activism and history. In the second half, the author discusses what various derogatory words mean to them and the history behind them (including history of freak shows); the connection between queerness and disability in how sexuality is perceived in disabled individuals, how queerness was once considered a psychiatric illness, how bodily rooted both identities are, the pride in both; and the need for capitalism to be dismantled for disabled people to have proper supports. We get some pro union discussion! The author does a really good job at situating his own identity in the movement, connecting the individual to the community, and linking things like institutionalization and nursing homes to the prison industrial complex or discussing how war is disabling. The writing felt like it could have thrived better in a narrative form that incorporates elements of theory and it currently feels like the other way around. For example the story of not finishing the hike and the responses he got were very educational. Nevertheless, I think this book was extremely revolutionary for its time. I liked the afterword by Dean Spade a decade later and the footnote that were added in the 2009 edition. My favorite quote: "For me the path from stolen body to reclaimed body started with my coming out as a dyke." (153)
November 1, 2020
Class, gender and disability politics are so difficult to engage without fragmenting a whole person into unidimensional identity artefacts. Yet, Clare deftly weaves all together.
Two decades later and on a separate continent, much of Clare’s writing still resonates. During my own transition commencing in 2018 I developed a self-protective hostility, informed by imagined oppositions bearing little resemblance to reality: urban/rural, progressive/conservative, professional/working class etc, shaping who I assumed unsafe. This kind of divisiveness just made me feel more alienated when the supposedly-progressive professional middle-class electorate I grew up in swung from Labour to Liberal (conservative), voting in a vocally homophobic/transphobic MP and screwing working class people in one swoop.
Messy experiences of being/feeling poor, then rich, then poor and trans don’t lend themselves to the myth that urban elites are overwhelmingly accepting, in contrast to a sinister and backwards rural other, but this remains the most visible version of queer politics (at least in Melbourne). Stigmatising working class people doesn’t help anyone, least of all trans people.
Anyhow, my miscellaneous thoughts aside, class, race, disability and queer politics are meaningless in isolation of each other, ya know — something Clare makes all too clear.
Two decades later and on a separate continent, much of Clare’s writing still resonates. During my own transition commencing in 2018 I developed a self-protective hostility, informed by imagined oppositions bearing little resemblance to reality: urban/rural, progressive/conservative, professional/working class etc, shaping who I assumed unsafe. This kind of divisiveness just made me feel more alienated when the supposedly-progressive professional middle-class electorate I grew up in swung from Labour to Liberal (conservative), voting in a vocally homophobic/transphobic MP and screwing working class people in one swoop.
Messy experiences of being/feeling poor, then rich, then poor and trans don’t lend themselves to the myth that urban elites are overwhelmingly accepting, in contrast to a sinister and backwards rural other, but this remains the most visible version of queer politics (at least in Melbourne). Stigmatising working class people doesn’t help anyone, least of all trans people.
Anyhow, my miscellaneous thoughts aside, class, race, disability and queer politics are meaningless in isolation of each other, ya know — something Clare makes all too clear.
July 27, 2019
Eli Clare does an amazing job of mixing story and theory in their writing. I really identified strongly with the stories in the book from growing up in a small town to being queer and having a body that works differently than other bodies. It was the first book that really gave me a structure for mixing story and theory and allowed me to see how they feed each other. And in my mind, it is a theological book, partly because it was used in a queer theology class that I co-taught and well, how else does one explain concepts like "witness" and "pride". Thanks, Eli!
March 23, 2019
This book was so much more than I expected it to be. Eli Clare develops an intricate yet clear retelling of his childhood and the way that his many identities shape how he sees the world. This book defies any one category of writing in a way I haven't quite experienced before, and it kept me excited to read more of his experiences, thoughts and theories. This book made me think harder about both Clare's experience and my own identities and the ways the overlap and differ. This book was great and (after we discuss it at book club) I will definitely be recommending it to friends.
June 2, 2020
A painstakingly slow read as it is written by someone with limitations to be able to write. It’s also very difficult to get through as the author recounts with painstaking detail the abuse and oppression he/she experienced.
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February 26, 2023a wonderful exploration of the intersections and contradictions between disability, class, gender, sexuality, race and location
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