Quotes from Eli Clare

The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.

I want to sharpen my pride on what strengthens me, my witness on what haunts me. Whatever we name ourselves, however we end up shattering our self-hatred, shame, silence, and isolation, the goal is the same: to end our daily material oppression.

Let me remind all of us--disabled and nondisabled--that every time we defend our intelligence, we come close to disowning intellectually disabled people. We imply that it might be okay to exclude, devalue, and institutionalize people who actually live with body-mind conditions that impact the ways they think, understand, and process information. The only way out of this trap is to move toward, not away from, intellectually disabled people, to practice active solidarity.

Pride works in direct opposition to internalized oppression. The latter provides a fertile ground for shame, denial, self-hatred, and fear. The former encourages anger, strength, and joy. To transform self-hatred into pride is a fundamental act of resistance.

But in today's world, being seen as intellectually, cognitively, or developmentally disabled is dangerous because intelligence and verbal communication are entrenched markers of personhood.

The brutal consequences of "monkey" arise because that word removes some of us from humanity, placing us among nonhuman animals in the natural world. "Monkey" strengthens racist, ableist, and speciesist hierarchies. Once a person is deemed not human, then all sorts of violence become acceptable.

Our body-minds tumble, shift, ease their way through space and time, never static. Gender transition in its many forms is simply another kind of motion. I lived in a body-mind assigned female at birth and made peace with it as a girl, a tomboy, a dyke, a queer woman, a butch. But uncovering my desire to transition—to live as a genderqueer, a female-to-male transgender person, a white guy—challenged everything I thought I knew about self-acceptance and love.

Simply put, diagnosis wields immense power. It can provide us access to vital medical technology or shame us, reveal a path toward less pain or get us locked up. It opens doors and slams them shut.

Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race…everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze.

The mannerisms that help define gender - the way in which people walk,swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space - are all based upon how non disabled people move…The construct of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also on the non disabled body.

The stolen body, the reclaimed body, the body that knows itself and the world, the stone and the heat which warms it: my body has never been singular.

Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks and seams. Its promises hold power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I'm curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?

I wont write the details or try to capture the error and pain in wors. But believe me: what they did broke my body-mind. It shaped every part of my life. This is not a hyperbole, not a claim to perpetual victimhood nor a ploy for sympathy, but rather, an enraging truth.

Simply put, the DSM is a highly constructed projection placed on top of particular body-mind experiences in order to label, organize, and make meanings of them from within a specific worldview.