Eli Clare

Eli Clare (born 1963; Oregon, USA) is a writer, activist, educator, and speaker.

Quotes

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (1999)

  • In many trans and queer communities today, my particular gendered story is not all that unusual. But outside those communities, the reality of a white guy having a long, prideful lesbian past can be totally disorienting. Rather than explain myself in the face of cultural confusion, anger, and/or hatred, I yearn for the day when all the rules that confine and constrain gender, that punish gender transgression - rules shaped by misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and shaped again by white supremacy, capitalism, ableism - come crashing down. I want my gendered story to be one of many stories that defy, bend, smash the gender binary. But in the end, what I really want is for all the many gendered possibilities in the world to be, not normal, but rather profoundly ordinary and familiar. (from "A Note about Gender, or Why Is This White Guy Writing about Being a Lesbian?")

preface to the 2009 edition: A challenge to single-issue politics: reflections from a decade later

  • How is wartime violence brought home, in which nightmares and flashbacks, in what rage and addiction? All the answers depend upon naming disability and committing to a multi-layered analysis of how white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, and ableism work in concert.
  • Building a politics that reflects all the multiplicity in our lives and in the world isn't optional, but rather absolutely necessary. Exile and Pride is one small part of that building project. When I'm asked, "Tell me, what is your book about?" I always pause. The request seems straightforward. But how do I sum up a book that ranges from the clearcuts of Oregon to the history of the freak show, from the complexities of queer rural working-class organizing to the disability politics of sexual objectification? Inevitably, I answer, "Home." I mean place, body, identity, community, family as home. I mean the hay pastures, trees, rocks, beaches, abandoned lots, kitchen tables, and sunflowers out back that have held and sustained us. I mean how we have fled from and yearned toward home. In the end, I mean a deeply honest multi-issue politics that will make home possible.
  • 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 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?
  • The work of stopping US bombs from being dropped and bringing the US troops home, of ending war and creating lasting peace with justice requires a fundamental commitment to multi-issue organizing. At an anti-war protest not long ago, I saw a placard announcing "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." This slogan is one of many that turns disability into a metaphor, reinforces that disability means broken and is fundamentally undesirable, and ignores the multitude of actual lived disability experiences connected to war. For folks who know blindness/disability as a consequence of crushing military force, the "eye for an eye" slogan offers a superficial rationale for nonviolence but no lasting justice. In response, I'd like to stand next to those anti-war activists and hold a placard that reads "Another crip for peace," or maybe, "Blindness is sexy; military force is not." Because disability is one of the major consequences of war, we need an anti-war politics that doesn't transform disability into a symbol of either patriotism or tragedy, a politics that thinks hard about disability. Who gets killed, and who becomes disabled? Who profits from that killing and disabling? Whose bodies are used as weapons, and whose are treated as expendable? What happens to the countless people shattered, broken, burned, terrorized?
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