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Exile and Pride: Disabilty, Queerness and Liberation

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Synopsis

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.

Review

Exile and Pride is a look at the poetics and politics of queer disability--something many of us have never thought about. Eli Clare is a poet who has cerebral palsy and here she writes about her attempt to climb Mount Adams as a person who is impaired and loves to hike. In other words she writes about being able to do something rather than having a disability. She writes about the fight for rights for the disabled and she writes about herself--having been sexually abused by her father, growing up in rural Oregon and learning how to use a chainsaw and to frame a house. She shows the lines between self hatred and queer pride and how culture looks at those with disabilities and marginalizes them. She looks at how we look at ourselves and how we find out who we are--how we live in exile--on the mountain but not on the mountain. Clare's view of the world is quite full and she lives her "hidden" life openly unlike many others. She shows us that we must examine who we are so that we can connect to as well as alienate ourselves from society, our environment, our sexuality and each other. She looks at class, the environment, gender, politics and the consciousness of disability in ways that few have dared to do and her writing is sharp and original. It's an easy book to read yet it has a great deal to say. It is a must read so that we cab counter oppression and shows us what it is like to live in a world that is in great need of healing.

-- Amos Lassen