Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
A 2009 finalist for a ForeWord’s Book of the Year Award.
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First published in 1999 by South End Press (a second edition came out in 2009 and was republished by Duke University Press in 2015), Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare’s revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation.
With a poet’s devotion to truth and an activist’s demand for justice, Eli unspools the multiple histories from which our sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance.
At the root of Eli’s exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone.
Excerpts
from 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 it, failed up there, lived its shadow? We’ve hit our heads on glass ceilings, tried to climb the class ladder, lost fights against assimilation, scrambled toward the phantom called normality.
We hear from the summit that the world is grand from up there, that we live down here at the bottom because we are lazy, stupid, weak, and ugly. 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 probably not. And the price we pay is huge.
Up there on the mountain, we confront the external forces, the power brokers who benefit so much from the status quo and their privileged position at the very summit. But just as vividly, we come face-to-face with our own bodies, all that we cherish and despise, all that lies imbedded there. This I know because I have caught myself lurching up the mountain.
from: The Mountain - II: A Supercrip Story
I am a gimp. a crip, disabled with cerebral palsy. The story of me lurching up the mountain begins not on the mountain, but with one of the dominant images of disabled people, the supercrip. A boy without hands bats .486 on his Little League team. A blind man hikes the Appalachian Trail from end to end. An adolescent girl with Down syndrome learns to drive and has a boyfriend. A guy with one leg runs across Canada. The nondisabled world is saturated with these stories: stories about gimps who engage in activities as grand as walking 2,500 miles or as mundane as learning to drive. They focus on disabled people “overcoming” our disabilities. They reinforce the superiority of the nondisabled body and mind. They turn individual disabled people, who are simply leading their lives, into symbols of inspiration.
Supercrip stories never focus on the conditions that make it so difficult for people with Downs to have romantic partners, for blind people to have adventures. for disabled kids to play sports. I don’t mean medical conditions. I mean material, social, legal conditions. I mean lack of access, lack of employment, lack of education, lack of personal attendant services. I mean stereotypes and attitudes. I mean oppression. The dominant story about disability should be about ableism, not the inspirational supercrip crap, the believe-it-or-not disability story…
From the 2009 preface: A Challenge to Single-Issue Politics
In the decade since the initial release of Exile and Pride, I’ve often been asked, “What do you want readers to take away from your book?’ The answer has become one of my activist mantras: “I want nondisabled progressive activists to add disability to their political agenda. And at the same time I want disability rights activists to abandon their single-issue politics and strategies.” My answer remains as true in 2009 as it was in 1999.
It’s only been ten years, but I must say I’m impatient for my mantra to lose its relevancy. How long must we wait, for instance, before ADAPT and Critical Resistance join forces? As an identity-based, disability rights organization, ADAPT organizes direct-action protests to shut down nursing homes and stop the institutionalization of disabled people. In the last two decades, hundreds, if not thousands, of disability activists have been arrested while blockading doors, occupying offices, and stopping traffic. During the same period of time, Critical Resistance has organized grassroots opposition to the prison-industrial complex, rejecting prison reform as a viable strategy and building support for prison abolition. How would a vision of liberation be reshaped if these two groups understood and acted upon the connections between different ways of locking people up and between the different institutions profiting from these incarcerations?
Unfortunately, not many disability or nondisabled progressive groups engage in multi-issue thinking and organizing that deeply embeds disability politics into an agenda that includes race, class, gender, and sexuality. At an ADAPT demo recently, I saw a flyer that read “You think prison is bad, try a nursing home.” In one simple slogan, disability activists advanced a hierarchy of institutions and oppressions, defined disability as their sole focus, and revealed profound ignorance about the ways being locked up in prisons cause bone-crushing damage, particularly in communities of color. This slogan and the disability politics behind it leave little chance for making connections and addressing the daily complexities of folks who know the grief and outrage of both prisons and nursing homes…
Podcast
Listen to the 2017 podcast “Lit Review” about the book. (Thank you Alison Kopit, Monica Trinidad, and Page May.) There is no transcript.
Praise
"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 Tweet
"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 Tweet
"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 Tweet
"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 Tweet
"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 Tweet