Exile and Pride | 
 enlarge | Author: Eli Clare
Publisher: South End Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $7.00
You Save: $7.00 (50%)
New (23) Used (17) from $5.36
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 122198
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.4
ISBN: 0896086054
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.48916
EAN: 9780896086050
ASIN: 0896086054
Publication Date: September 15, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
At long last, an essay on the politics and poetics of queer disability. Eli Clare, a poet with cerebral palsy, movingly describes her attempt to climb Mount Adams--not, she points out, as a "supercrip," like the boy without hands who bats .486 on his Little League team, but just as an impaired person who loves to hike: a story about ableism rather than disability. Avoiding easy answers and journalistic sunshine, she recounts the story of the fight for disabled access, touching on the history of the freak show. She tracks the origins of her own tenacity and self-knowledge to her rural Oregon upbringing and the conflicting personality of her father--who sexually abused her, but also taught her how to frame a house, how to use a chainsaw. "I think of the words crip, queer, freak, redneck," Clare remarks. "None of these are easy words. They mark the jagged edge between self-hatred and pride, the chasm between how the dominant culture views marginalized peoples and how we view ourselves, the razor between finding home, finding our bodies, and living in exile, living on the metaphoric mountain." --Regina Marler
Product Description
ContentsThe Mountain
1. Place
Clearcut: Explaining the Distance
Losing Home
Clearcut: Brutes and Bumper Stickers
Clearcut: End of the Line
Clearcut: Casino
2. Bodies
Freaks and Queers
Reading Across the Grain
Stones in My Heart, Stones in My Pockets An Excerpt from Exile and Pride By Eli Clare Draft Version: Please do not quote THE MOUNTAIN I: A Metaphor The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism,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 the mountain, failed on the mountain, lived in the shadow of the mountain, hit our heads on glass ceilings, tried to climb the class ladder, lost the fight against assimilation, struggled our way toward that phantom called normality? We hear from the summit that the world is the best from up there. Hear that we are lazy, stupid, weak, ugly, that we live at the bottom precisely because we are those things. 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 p
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Brings the hybridity of living... September 2, 2007
This book was required reading for a class on countering oppressions. It is a beautiful story of the mixity of living with multiple marginalized ways of being in the world. In particular, it relays the story of oppression through looking at embodied ways of existence. What does it mean to live in the world and how do we heal from systems that continually go against the embodied experiences of so many of us. Zi is a powerful author with great descriptive imagery. I highly recommend this book!
This book changed my life December 6, 2004
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book for disabled queers like myself, and the author, Eli Clare. The book is easily read--Clare uses language that is not pretentious, but establishes a voice that is eloquently compelling. "Exile" masquerades as autobiographical but contains a powerful critique of the social constructions of class, disability, sexuality, race, gender, the environment and just about everything else you could imagine (I know this might seem impossible--but Clare accomplishes it in this wonderful book). I highly recommend this book.
Invitation into Experience February 4, 2002
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Clare writes her autobiography in word paintings. Clare explores the multiple differences of disability, queerness, transgenderism, abuse, socioeconomic class, and gender with reflection that empowers rather than victimizes or blames. While considering how the history around her has shaped the world and affected who she is, she considers how she has shaped the world. Clare refuses to collapse the intricate complexities of life into something more managable.
 a good title... March 9, 2001
1 out of 9 found this review helpful
I read this book in an 'images of women' course, and i found the title very interesting....but little else. I felt that this book was predictable and, while it contains a nice story, did not relete well to me. It was dense and hard to follow.
wow! great book February 18, 2001
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found this book really interesting. Her writing style is beautiful, and she has an almost poetical style in places.Eli is a disabled woman. She has cerebral palsy. She talks about the exclusion she experienced - the exile - in a rural town in Oregon. She also talks about being abused, and this deeply personal story is very powerful. Eli also feels in exile because she is an environmentalist - from a rural background. Among environmentalist, she feels an outsider, since most of them are city people. Eli is also a lesbian. She has felt excluded from that community too. Although I haven't done it justice by listing all the things she feels exile from, this is not a negative book. It is actually a very positive book - it talks abuot developing pride in who you are, accepting yourself, being a preson with lots of layers to their personality, etc Eli also talks about wider issues - like the social model of disability, pressure to be a "supercrip", disclosing rape and being rejected by your family when you do so, etc. When I finished the book, I decided to read it again, straight away so that I didn't forget what it said. (I have memory problems). I live in Australia, and this woman lives in Oregon. But after reading this book, I just wished I could meet her. And I think that's one of the best recommmendations you can give a book!
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