Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking 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 permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. 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 Clare'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. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.

"Eli Clare's Exile and Pride . . . challenge[s] us to think beyond identity politics. This set of nine interconnected essays defies categorization in its exploration not only of queerness and disability but also of class, race, urban-rural divides, gender identity, sexual abuse, environmental destruction, and the meaning of home. . . . Clare gives us a vision of a broad-based and intersectional politics that can move us beyond the current divisions of single-issue movements." Rachel Rosenbloom, Women's Review of Books

"Eli Clare writes with the spirit of a poet and the toughness of a construction worker. The passion and skill of [his] writing will draw you inside a complex life and more deeply inside yourself." Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories

"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

"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

About the Author

Eli Clare is a poet, essayist, activist, and the author of The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion. He speaks regularly at universities and conferences throughout the United States about disability, queer identities, and social justice, and his writing has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

Foreword to the 2015 Edition / Aurora Levins Morales xi

Preface tot he 2009 Edition. A Challenge to Single-Issue Politics: Reflections from a Decade Later xxi

A Note About Gender, or Why is this White Guy Writing about Being a Lesbian? xxvii

The Mountain 1

Part I: Place

Clearcut: Explaining the Distance 17

Losing Home 31

Clearcut: Brutes and Bumper Stickers 51

Clear Cut: End of the Line 61

Casino: An Epilogue 71

Part II. Bodies

Freaks and Queers 81

Reading Across the Grain 119

Stones in My Pickets, Stones in My Heart 143

Acknowledgments to the 1999 Edition 161

Afterword to the 2009 Edition / Dean Spade 165

Notes 173

Index 179

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

What People Are Saying

About the Author

Table of Contents