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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
Book Description
In these interconnected essays, Eli Clare vibrantly describes the "rednecks" and clearcuts she grew up among, the "freak shows" of the nineteenth century, and the"transgender warriors" of today. Her intelligence and wit illuminate her ruminations on cerebral palsy, child abuse, nature, pornography, sexuality, and class. Exile and Pride is grounded by Clare's childhood memories of playing in the Oregon mountains and of her increasing realization of the environmental destruction caused by the logging and fisheries industries that employed her neighbors. This disillusionment with trusted sources of safety and belonging echoes with the prejudice she experiences due to her cerebral palsy and with the terror of sexual abuse that filled her childhood. Her self-imposed exile from her hometown remains a tangle of grief and relief, but Clare highlights the pride she has built through participating in the liberation movements of disabled people and queers of all stripes. In Exile and Pride, Eli Clare uses her own multiple loyalties as a lens to examine identity politics and political agency in the face of systemic oppression and interpersonal abuse. Imaginative and engaging, Exile and Pride will appeal to a wide array of readers.
