Exile and Pride

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.”

Eli Clare is an American writer, activist, speaker, and educator. Born in 1963 in Coos Bay and raised in Port Orford, Oregon, Clare was initially diagnosed as “mentally retarded” before being diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Clare is an avid reader who grew up surrounded by books; his mother had a doctorate and taught composition at community college. Throughout much of his childhood, Clare was physically and sexually abused by his father and his father’s friends, as referenced in Exile and Pride. Trauma thus plays an important role in Clare’s conception of the body, identity formation, and conceptions of gender. After high school, Clare left Port Orford and enrolled in Reed College in Portland before transferring to Mills College in Oakland, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Goddard College. 

Clare is an eminent writer and activist within the second wave of the disability rights movement as well as in the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. In addition to Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, he is the author of Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion, a 2007 poetry collection that was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. In 2017, he published Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, which engages heavily with the idea of “bodymind,” an academic concept that Clare helped popularize alongside fellow scholar Margaret Price. Bodymind approaches the body and mind as one cohesive unit, rejecting the Cartesian dualism that has dominated modern Western thought and that posits that the mind and body are two separate things. Bodymind also rejects the corollary that the mind is superior to the body. In Brilliant Imperfection, Clare uses this concept to wrestle with the notion that there are bodies and minds that are “broken” and require “curing” or “fixing”—a concern that also animates “reading across the grain” in Exile and Pride. 

Clare identifies as genderqueer and a transgender man, though in Exile and Pride he refers to himself as a lesbian, as he previously identified as a woman. Much of Exile and Pride centers on his gender identity journey, explaining how he came to terms with the fact that he never felt comfortable under the label of “girl” or “woman.” Clare organized the first Queerness and Disability Conference in 2002 and has received a number of awards for his activism, including the Creating Change Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the LGBT Artist of the Year from Michigan Pride, and the Richard L. Schlegel Award from American University. He has also earned a Disability Futures Fellowship sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.