Exile and Pride

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation is a 1999 essay collection by activist and writer Eli Clare. Clare is white, disabled, and genderqueer, three identities that he explores throughout the essays in Exile and Pride. Originally published in 1999 and republished in 2009 by South End Press, the book has since been republished by Duke University Press in 2015. In his series of essays, Clare wrestles with themes of The Intersections of Disability, Gender, and Sexuality, The Impact of Environmental Degradation on Marginalized Communities, The Role of Personal Narrative in Social Justice Work, and The Concepts of Exile and Belonging. Clare utilizes a blend of personal narrative, research-grounded exposition, and persuasive arguments to engage with these themes. 

This guide refers to the 2015 Duke University Press Kindle e-book Edition. 

Content Warning: The guide and source text reference rape and sexual abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, anti-gay bias, anti-trans bias, racism, ableism, classism, and medical abuse/neglect. The author also reclaims and utilizes a number of slurs and derogatory terms, which are referenced and quoted in context throughout this guide. These terms include: “cripple/crip,” “dyke,” “gimp,” “freak,” and “queer.”

Summary

The 2015 edition of Exile and Pride opens with a foreword from Aurora Levins Morales, a bi, Puerto Rican, Jewish writer who lauds Clare for the quality of his writing and the depth of his personal reflection blended with salient analysis. She explores the similarities between her background and Clare’s background before diving into Clare’s intersectional analysis of themes related to identity, orientation, gender, and disability. 

After the Foreword, Clare includes two additional prefaces/notes. The Preface, from 2009, reflects on how the world has changed since the 1999 publication. In the Note, Clare self-reflects about gender, sharing that he now uses he/him pronouns and identifies as genderqueer, while he preferred to identify as a butch lesbian at the time of Exile and Pride’s composition. However, he wants to honor the time he spent as a woman and to push back against the gender binary. 

In the text’s original prologue, Clare constructs an extended metaphor utilizing a mountain as a symbol for people with disabilities “overcoming” their disabilities, though the idea of “overcoming” is something Clare pushes back against. Clare shares the story of his attempt to climb Mount Adams, which was difficult due to his cerebral palsy, a condition that affects his motor skills and mobility. He interrogates his own desire to climb the mountain and desire to “overcome” his cerebral palsy.

Part 1 of the collection is titled “places” and includes a number of essays with “clearcut” in the title. The first “clearcut” essay introduces Port Orford, Oregon, the town where Clare grew up, which shaped him meaningfully. Port Orford is a small town on the southern coast of Oregon near the Siskiyous National Forest, which Clare spent much of his childhood playing in and exploring. Clare then analyzes the practice of clearcutting in depth, from the propaganda he encountered about the timber industry in his school curriculum to the damage clearcutting causes. In the second essay, “losing home,” Clare dives more deeply into his disabled and queer identities and how those identities interact with his exile and absence from Port Orford. The other essays that comprise Part 1 explore the complexities of the timber industry’s destruction and economic support of certain communities throughout the United States, examining different paths toward environmental and economic justice.

Part 2 is titled “bodies,” and Clare spends the first essay, titled “freaks and queers,” exploring the history of disability in the United States, contrasting the freak shows of the 19th century with the medicalization of disability in the latter half of the 20th century. He questions if the present-day landscape is actually better for people with disabilities. He further explores disability and the disability rights movement in “reading across the grain,” an essay centered on four different images that depict people with disabilities. Clare considers ideas of objectification in the disability community, juxtaposing sexual objectification and sexual desire. The last essay focuses on Clare’s personal journey with struggling to write about his body and his experience in his body, including how abuse and disability shape his perceptions of his gender identity. 

The 2015 edition ends with an afterword by Dean Spade, a writer and trans rights activist. Spade, writing in 2009, contextualizes Exile and Pride within the 10 years that have passed since its initial publication, praising the book for its important contributions to the disability rights movement and the LGBTQIA+ rights movement, including its consideration of classism, racism, and the tension between urban and rural movements. Spade ends by challenging readers to use Exile and Pride to help change the world into a fairer and more welcoming place with greater economic, racial, and gender-oriented justice.