Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation [Paperback]

Eli Clare (Author), Suzanne Pharr (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0896086054 | ISBN-13: 978-0896086050 | Publication Date: September 15, 1999

Contents

The Mountain
1. Place
Clearcut: Explaining the Distance
Losing Home
Clearcut: Brutes and Bumper Stickers
Clearcut: End of the Line
Clearcut: Casino
2. Bodies
Freaks and Queers
Reading Across the Grain
Stones in My Heart, Stones in My Pockets

An Excerpt from Exile and Pride By Eli Clare

Draft Version: Please do not quote

THE MOUNTAIN

I: A Metaphor

The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. How many of us have struggled up the mountain, measured ourselves against the mountain, failed on the mountain, lived in the shadow of the mountain, hit our heads on glass ceilings, tried to climb the class ladder, lost the fight against assimilation, struggled our way toward that phantom called normality?

We hear from the summit that the world is the best from up there. Hear that we are lazy, stupid, weak, ugly, that we live at the bottom precisely because we are those things. We decide to climb that mountain, or make a pact that our children will climb it. The climbing turns out to be unimaginably difficult. We are afraid; every time we look ahead we can find nothing remotely familiar or comfortable. We lose the trail. Our wheelchairs get stuck. We speak the wrong languages with the wrong accents, wear the wrong clothes, carry our bodies the wrong ways, ask the wrong questions, love the wrong people. And it's goddamn lonely up there on the mountain. We decide to stop climbing and build a new house right where we are. Or we decide to climb back down to the people we love where the food, the clothes, the dirt, the sidewalk, the steaming asphalt under our feet, our crutches all feel right. Or we find the path again, decide to continue climbing only to have the very people who told us how wonderful life is at the summit booby trap the trail. They burn the bridge over the impassable canyon. They redraw our topo maps so that we end up walking in circles. They send their goons-those working-class and poor people they employ as their official brutes-to push us over the edge. Maybe we get to the summit but p

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At long last, 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 rather 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

Review

"Eli Clare is a woman who writes because she loves to write, and in the doing she carries us into new terrain with strength, grace, and courage. Clare locates herself in her particular geography, body, and class, teasing out the power and the pain of crip, queer, freak, and redneck-the gift to us of this particular clear spirit finding her way home." -- Mab Segrest, author, Memoir of a Race Traitor

"Eli Clare writes with the spirit of a poet and the precision and toughness of a construction worker. Her view of the world is not modest or limited, but rather full of the hidden life that most of us miss because we haven't looked closely. The passion and skill of her writing will draw you inside a complex life and more deeply inside yourself." -- Jewelle Gomez, author, The Gilda Stories

"Eli Clare's Exile and Pride is a call to awareness, an exhortation for each of us to examine our connection to and alienation from our environment, our sexuality, and each other." -- Kenny Fries, author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience From The Inside Out

"Eli Clare's original work exploring the interstices between class, environmentalism, radical gender politics and disability consciousness moves beyond the false compartmentalization that has characterized progressive politics in the nineties, and toward a viable radical politics for the twenty-first century." -- Ynestra King, co-editor, Dangerous Intersections --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: South End Press (September 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896086054
• ISBN-13: 978-0896086050
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #482,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #29 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Lesbian
  • #72 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Activism

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explores disability, queerness, home---beautiful writing., November 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation (Paperback)

Eli Clare writes with passion, insight and a poet's sense of language. This is a difficult book to describe as it contains a series of interlinking essays which explore disability, environmentalism, being queer, being gendered, abuse and the meaning of home. As I read this description, I realize it somehow shrinks the real scope of the work and makes it sound like a dry discourse. The reality is that Eli talks about all of these issues through the lens of her own experiences as a lesbian with cerebral palsy who feels deep and abiding love for her childhood home on a river in Oregon. Reading this book, is like having the most delicious and thought provoking conversation with a good friend. It leaves one thinking for days. I've been passing it around my group of friends to rave reviews by all.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars exquisitely powerful, January 28, 2000

By 

Kelly Mack - See all my reviews

This review is from: Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation (Paperback)

Clare weaves personal experiences with politicalideologies--clarifying connecting issues and pointing out thesimilarities and challenges that we face in working through them. Thisbook struck me at emotional and mental levels and has left me with a great deal to think about. One excellent aspect is how to she explains that solutions may never be as simple as we want them to be, but taking the time to understand multiple stories and multiple levels of truth will help us to reach new heights of achievement and equality. I would also strongly recomment Pushing the Limits, ed by Shelley Tremain and Restricted Access, ed by Victoria Brownworth--both collections of works by a diverse group of queer women with disabilities.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book changed my life, December 5, 2004

By 

rlw2867 "Richard" (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Hardcover)

This is an excellent book for disabled queers like myself, and the author, Eli Clare. The book is easily read--Clare uses language that is not pretentious, but establishes a voice that is eloquently compelling. "Exile" masquerades as autobiographical but contains a powerful critique of the social constructions of class, disability, sexuality, race, gender, the environment and just about everything else you could imagine (I know this might seem impossible--but Clare accomplishes it in this wonderful book). I highly recommend this book.