The Classics Edition of
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness & Liberation
A 2009 finalist for a ForeWord's Book of the Year Award
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First published in 1999, Exile and 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. Yet the book 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.
• Buy it from South End Press or Powells.
• Read excerpts.
• Download it as free audio files
How pleasurable it is to pick up a book that merely intrigues you because of its title and find that it is a gem well beyond its cover. This rare phenomenon happened when I came across Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride. Only a maestro of a writer can adroitly weave together her own story plus environmental, political, disability, and lesbian issues into a cohesive whole, coming out with such clarity that you find yourself identifying with many parts and muttering, ‘But of course.’ This thin volume is so thick with thought that you almost feel you have just devoured an oversized piece of key lime pie—indeed a rich treat to digest.
–-—Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources
The books that move us most are the ones that help us make sense of our experience, that take pieces of what we already know and put it together with new insights, new analysis, enabling us to form a fresh vision of ourselves and our lives. For me, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence were such books, and there were significant others along the way. And now there’s Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride.
—-Suzanne Pharr, author of Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism
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 of Dangerous Intersections
Eli Clare writes with the spirit of a poet and the toughness of a construction worker. The passion and skill of her writing will draw you inside a complex life and more deeply inside yourself.
—Jewelle Gomez, author of 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
Free Audio Files
• To listen to the following audio files (mp3s) within your web browser, simply click on the links.• To download them to your computer, right click (or control click) on the links and then choose "Save link as...."
• Exile and Pride Audio File #1 (“Preface to the 2009 Edition,” “A Note About Gender”)
• Exile and Pride Audio File #2 (“The Mountain”)
• Exile and Pride Audio File #3 (“Clearcut: Explaining the Distance”)
• Exile and Pride Audio File #4 (the first part of “Losing Home”)
• Exile and Pride Audio File #5 (the second part of “Losing Home”)
More to come soon!