Exile and Pride - by Eli Clare

About the Book

Over the course of several personal essays, genderqueer activist/writer Eli Clare weaves together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home, all the while providing an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually experience the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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"

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.