Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation - Eli Clare - annotation
I was so immersed in this book i forgot to annotate most of it. but this would ideally contain many many more quotes. i will certainly reread it
2025-01-13 15:54 | Page No.: 15
In his introduction to the second edition of Exile and Pride, Eli
writes that this book is about home and clarifies: “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.”
Then he goes on to say:
Body as home, but only if it is understood that place and community
and culture burrow deep into our bones. . . . Body as home, but only
if it is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies and poison, torn
away from us. . . . Body as home, but only if it is understood that the
stolen body can be reclaimed.
Preface to the 2009 edition: A challenge to single-issue politics: reflections from a decade later
2025-01-13 16:00 | Page No.: 26
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
The mountain
2025-01-13 16:02 | Page No.: 33
nd 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.
2025-01-13 16:02 | Page No.: 33
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.
2025-01-13 16:09 | Page No.: 38
In large part, disability oppression is about access. Simply being on Mount Adams, halfway up Air Line Trail, represents a whole
lot of access. When access is measured by curb cuts, ramps, and
whether they are kept clear of snow and ice in the winter; by the
width of doors and height of counters; by the presence or absence
of Braille, closed captions, ASL, and TDDs; my not being able
to climb all the way to the very top of Mount Adams stops being
about disability. I decided that turning around before reaching the
summit was more about impairment than disability.
2025-01-13 17:19 | Page No.: 39
This frustration
knows no neat theoretical divide between disability and impairment. Neither does disappointment nor embarrassment. On good
days, I can separate the anger I turn inward at my body from the
anger that needs to be turned outward, directed at the daily ableist
shit, but there is nothing simple or neat about kindling the latter
while transforming the former.
2025-01-13 17:22 | Page No.: 40
To believe that achievement contradicts disability is to pair
helplessness with disability, a pairing for which crips pay an awful
price. The nondisabled world locks us away in nursing homes. It
deprives us the resources to live independently;3 It physically and
sexually abuses us in astoundingly high numbers.4 It refuses to give
us jobs because even when a workplace is accessible, the speech
impediment, the limp, the ventilator, the seeing-eye dog are read
as signs of inability.s The price is incredibly high.
2025-01-13 17:23 | Page No.: 41
I
never once heard, "You made the right choice when you turned
around." The mountain just won't let go.
2025-01-13 17:24 | Page No.: 42
The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies
are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored
by countless other bodies.
2025-01-13 17:32 | Page No.: 42
The body as home, but only if it is understood that place and
community and culture burrow deep into our bones.
2025-01-13 17:39 | Page No.: 43
Whatever our relationships
with these words--whether we embrace them or hate them, feel
them draw blood as they hit our skin or find them entirely fitting,
refuse to say them or simply feel uncomfortable in their presencewe deal with their power every day. I hear these words all the time.
They are whispered in the mirror as I dress to go out, as I straighten
my tie and shrug into my suit jacket; on the streets as folks gawk
at my trembling hands, stare trying to figure out whether I'm a
woman or man; in half the rhetoric I hear from environmentalists
and queer activists, rhetoric where rural working-class people get
cast as clods and bigots. At the same time, I use some, but not all,
of these words to call out my pride, to strengthen my resistance, to
place myself within community. Crip, queer,freak, redneck burrowed
into my body.
2025-01-13 17:40 | Page No.: 44
The body as home, but only if it is understood that the stolen
body can be reclaimed. The bodies irrevocably taken from us: we
can memorialize them in quilts, granite walls, candlelight vigils; remember and mourn them; use their deaths to strengthen our will.
And as for the lies and false images, we need to name them, transform them, create something entirely new in their place, something that comes close and finally true to the bone, entering our
bodies as liberation, joy, fury, hope, a will to refigure the world. The
body as home.
2025-01-14 18:50 | Page No.: 52
I watched for hours as gigantic blowing machines loaded
mountains of wood chips onto freighters bound for Japan. I reveled
in plant names: huckleberry, salmonberry, blackberry, salal, greasewood, manzanita, scotch broom, foxglove, lupine, rhododendron,
vine maple, alder, tan oak, red cedar, white cedar, Port Orford cedar. I wanted a name for everything. I still have a topographical
map of the Elk River watershed, each quadrant carefully taped to
the next.
2025-01-14 18:58 | Page No.: 55
like the way my arms feel, aching
but loose, at the end of the day. The sun is hot against my hard hat.
Sweat collects under its band. I can smell the woods on my skin.
2025-03-31 18:55 | Page No.: 59
I walk,
waiting for my bone marrow to catch up to my politics. I walk
numb, no longer in my body, unable to contain the tug-of-war
2025-03-31 18:57 | Page No.: 60
I have filled my house with photographs, maps, stones, shells, sand
dollars, fir cones, and wood to remind me of the landscape I still
call home, a landscape that includes the sights, sounds, and smells
oflogging and commercial fishing.
2025-03-31 18:58 | Page No.: 63
Exile. If queer is the easiest, then exile is the hardest.
2025-03-31 19:00 | Page No.: 64
queer invisibility. While I agree that it isn't the ideal relationship
between queer people and straight people, it is far better than the
polite and disdainful invisibility bestowed on us by many middleclass, liberal heterosexuals.
2025-04-01 18:14 | Page No.: 71
Our grandparents and great uncles and aunts were farmers, gravediggers, janitors, mechanics; our parents, teachers; and we were to
be professors, lawyers, or doctors. As I try to sort the complexity
out, I have to ask, does this upward scramble really work: this endless leaving of home, of deeply embodied culture and community,
in search of a mirage called the "American Dream"? Instead of professor, lawyer, or doctor, my brother is a high school teacher, my
sister, a low-level administrator, and I, a bookkeeper. Did my parents become middle-class in their scramble? Did my siblings and I?
2025-04-01 18:15 | Page No.: 72
, I found what I needed to come out
as a dyke: the anonymity of a city, the support of lesbian-feminist
activists, and access to queer culture.
2025-04-01 18:20 | Page No.: 75
The harder part will be understanding the alliances queer people-urban and rural-need to create with straight rural people,
the same folks urban people call rednecks, hicks, clods, and bigots.
Building and supporting these alliances will entail many different
kinds of organizing. At the heart of this work needs to be a struggle
against economic injustice, since most people-queer and
straight-living in rural communities (with the exception of resort
towns and retirement enclaves) are poor and working-class.
Stones in my pockets, stones in my heart
2025-10-15 13:02 | Page No.: 177
Finally after much confusion,
she asked, "Didn't I draw your son?" I remember the complete joy
I felt when my mother came home with this story. I looked again
and again at the portrait, thinking, "Right here, right now, I am a
boy." It made me smile secretly for weeks, reach down into my
pockets to squeeze a stone tight in each fist. I felt as if I were looking in a mirror and finally seeing myself, rather than some distorted
fun-house image.
2025-10-15 13:03 | Page No.: 178
When people stumble over their pronouns, stammer, blush, or apologize in embarrassment, I often think
ofRiki Anne Wilchins' description of her friend Holly Boswell:
Holly is a delicate Southern belle of long acquaintance .... S/he has tender features, long, wavy blonde hair, a soft Carolina accent, a delicate
feminine bosom, and no interest in surgery. Holly lives as an open transgendered mother of two in Asheville, North Carolina. Her comforting
advice to confused citizens struggling with whether to use Sir or Madam
is, "Don't give it a second thought. You don't have a pronoun yet for me.'"
2025-10-15 13:05 | Page No.: 180
I lose the bigger picture, forget that woven through and around the
private and intimate is always the public and political.
2025-10-15 13:06 | Page No.: 181
What better way to maintain a power structur~hite
supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, a binary and rigid gender
system-than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is
subordinate into the bodies of children.
2025-10-15 13:06 | Page No.: 181
And here is the answer to my fear. Child abuse is not the cause
of but rather a response to-among other things-transgressive
gender identity and/or sexuality. The theory I'm trying to shape
is not as simple as "My father abused me because I was a queer
child who-by the time I had any awareness of gender-was not at
all sure of my girlness," although some genderqueer and trans kids
do get raped specifically because of their gender. Rather I want to
say, "My father raped me for many reasons, and inside his acts of
violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child,
to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger
power structure and hierarchy well."
2025-10-15 13:07 | Page No.: 181
At the same time, our bodies are not merely blank slates upon
which the powers-that-be write their lessons. We cannot ignore the
body itself: the sensory, mostly non-verbal experience of our hearts
and lungs, muscles and tendons, telling us and the world who we
are.
2025-10-15 13:11 | Page No.: 183
All too often, the thieves plant their lies, and our bodies absorb
them as the only truth. Is it any surprise that sometimes my heart
fills with small gray stones, which never warm to my body heat?
2025-10-15 13:11 | Page No.: 184
How do I write not about the stones, but the body
that warms them, the heat itself?
2025-10-15 13:11 | Page No.: 184
My body became an empty house, one to
which I seldom returned. I lived in exile; the stones rattling in my
heart, resting in my pockets, were my one and only true body.
2025-10-15 13:13 | Page No.: 184
How do I mark this place where my body is no longer an
empty house, desire whistling lonely through the cracks, but not
yet a house fully lived in? For me the path from stolen body to reclaimed body started with my coming out as a dyke.
2025-10-15 13:14 | Page No.: 186
Watching them was like polishing my favorite stone to its
brightest glint.
2025-10-15 13:17 | Page No.: 187
1 turn my pockets and heart inside out, set the stonesquartz, obsidian, shale, agate, scoria, granite-along the scoured
top of the wall I once lived behind, the wall I still use for refuge.
They shine in the sun, some translucent to the light, others dense,
solid, opaque. 1 lean my body into the big unbreakable expanse,
tracing which stones need to melt, which will crack wide, geode to
crystal, and which are content just as they are.
2025-10-15 13:20 | Page No.: 190
I want to take the stone between my tremoring hands-trembling
with CPo with desire, with the last remnants of fear, trembling because
this is how my body moves-and warm it gentle, but not, as I have always done before, ride roughshod over it.