Exile and Pride

Rating:
Summary: exquisitely powerful
Review: Clare weaves personal experiences with politicalideologies--clarifying connecting issues and pointing out thesimilarities and challenges that we face in working through them. Thisbook struck me at emotional and mental levels and has left me with a great deal to think about. One excellent aspect is how to she explains that solutions may never be as simple as we want them to be, but taking the time to understand multiple stories and multiple levels of truth will help us to reach new heights of achievement and equality. I would also strongly recomment Pushing the Limits, ed by Shelley Tremain and Restricted Access, ed by Victoria Brownworth--both collections of works by a diverse group of queer women with disabilities.

Rating:
Summary: Invitation into Experience
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: wow! great book
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Invitation into Experience
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a good title...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: This book changed my life
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Heartbreaking and Fiercely Optimistic
Review: Wistful and full of longing, Clare unflinchingly addresses the contradictions of this human incarnation. She grew up in a village of loggers who cut down the forests they know and love better than any urban environmentalists do. She is indebted to her father for teaching her masculinity and construction skill, yet he also ... her repeatedly. She loves to hike and build, even as she does not want to attempt to transcend her disability and try to be something she's not. She is an eloquent writer, flipping off a childhood misdiagnosis of mental ... . She moved away to find ... community in the city and discovered that, while urban liberals talk the talk, ... often find more real acceptance in cozy rural towns. She does not know if she is man or woman. She wants to love her body but does not know how to begin.

Clare's anecdotes and theories are rather loosely connected. To bring it together, I thought this book asked the question between the lines, "How can we save what we love?" Part of Clare's answer is that we must begin by being honest about what we love and what we hate, and about how we sometimes love and hate the same thing (for example, pornographic images of a paraplegic woman, finally represented as attractive, but only because she fits the paradigm of a white, blonde sex object). Another part of her answer is that we must begin to love the only body we will ever have: our raped, transgendered, disabled, strong, anxious, and proud bodies.

This was the first book on disability theory I have ever read, and it made me want to read more. I liked how Clare worked with with another theorists' idea that "impairment" refers to physical limitation, while "disability" is caused by society's rejection, ignorance, and discrimination against people with physical impairments. She did a good job of illustrating the difference in her own life. Impairment is why she cannot reach the summit of most mountains; disability is why people stare at her in the grocery store. Her unquenchable desire to reconnect with the sensuality, love, and lust that is her birthright inspires me to work on reconnecting with my sexuality as well.