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Exile and Pride
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Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
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BetaPart 2-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “bodies”
Part 2, Essay 1 Summary: “freaks and queers”
In the first part of the essay, titled “Naming,” Clare interrogates the term “handicapped.” As European and American economies and cities began to industrialize, people with disabilities had to beg for money to survive, caps in hand for people to put money in. He describes a man in 1989 Seattle, suffering the negative effects of ableism and being unhoused, still begging with a cap in hand. He moves on to discuss the term “disabled” and its meaning of “unable.” Clare questions where his inability lies and what terms should be used for people without disabilities—e.g., whether they are “enabled” or “able-bodied” (the term Clare generally uses). He then meditates on “cripple,” a term he has reclaimed, though it has often been cruelly used against him and other people with disabilities. The disability rights movement also uses the term, as in “crip culture” (82). “Gimp” is a term that means “to limp” and comes from the 18th-century term “gammy,” which unhoused people used to refer dangerous places. Clare views “gimp” as a word of solidarity that can be used to greet others with disabilities. “Retard” is a word that Clare has yet to feel comfortable reclaiming, as it still stings when he hears it. Before his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, Clare was assumed to be “mentally retarded” because of a speech delay. The school initially tried to put him in the special education program, though he was capable of “regular” first grade. At school, the other children hurled many slurs at Clare while throwing rocks and erasers at him. The words, he says, hurt more than the objects.
While interrogating the words used to describe people with disabilities, Clare considers the term “differently abled.” He argues that it sanitizes disability, painting the world as a place where ableism does not drastically and negatively impact the lives of people with disabilities. “Freak” is another term for people with disabilities that Clare is uncomfortable with, unlike the word “queer,” which he has worked to reclaim and believes describes his lesbian identity. He views “queer” and “cripple” as two sides of the same coin: “words to shock, words to infuse with pride and self-love, words to resist internalized hatred, words to help forge a politics” (84). “Retard” and “pervert” are words that Clare has not reclaimed, as they “burst with hurt” (84).
In “Freak Show,” Clare considers the freak show and its origins, such as the court jester of medieval times and the human exhibits of the Renaissance. The freak show reached its peak popularity in the mid-1800s through the mid-1900s. “Rubes,” or paying customers, flocked to circuses and carnivals to gawk at the so-called “freaks,” who fell into four categories. People with disabilities became “Armless Wonders, Frog Men, Giants, Midgets, Pinheads, Camel Girls, Wild Men of Borneo” (86). People of color from outside the United States became “Cannibals and Savages,” while Indigenous Americans became “Natives from the Exotic Wilds” (86). Finally, people with visible differences, such as bearded women, very thin men, and those with many tattoos, became “wondrous and horrifying exhibits” (86). Despite their vast differences, these groups were lumped together under the banner of the word “freak” by the people who came to stare at them.
Clare gives the example of Hiram and Barney Davis, two white brothers with cognitive disabilities who were advertised as “Waino and Plutano, the Wild Men of Borneo” (87). Offstage, they were quiet and reserved, but onstage they acted wildly, snapping and snarling. Ann Thompson, a white woman born without arms, became the “Armless Wonder,” signing autographs with her toes. William Johnson, a Black man with a cognitive disability, performed as “the missing link” and “the Monkey Man” (87). Possibly purchased by P. T. Barnum at a young age, Johnson died wealthy and liked by his community, dubbed “the dean of freaks” (87). Charles Stratton and Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump were two people with dwarfism whose wedding was publicized by Barnum and made into a spectacle with over 2,000 people in attendance. The couple then went on a European tour. Congolese men and women were advertised as “Genuine Monster-Mouthed Ubangi Savages World’s Most Weird Living Humans from Africa’s Darkest Depths” (88). The word “Ubangi” was selected randomly off a map of Africa, and the men were forced to wear loincloths while the women were given only gunny sack skirts in an exploitative and racist display.
Clare explains that the “freak” status attributed to such performers was socially constructed around the goals of profit and entertainment. Ableism and racism worked in tandem to oppress the performers, though some, like Stratton and Johnson, were able to leverage their performances into wealth. Some white, able-bodied managers worked with the performers to dupe the audience. The question of exploitation, of both the audience and the performers, is difficult to answer. Ward Hall, a freak show manager, claimed to have “exhibited” and “exploited” the freak show performers. Though he did not intend the word “exploit” to have negative connotations, it is telling in light of the ableism and racism that made freak shows popular. Hall’s goal was profit, and he viewed his relationship with his performers through the lens of business, complete with contracts and payments. Regardless of the financial circumstances of the performers, the freak show business agreements were built on racist and ableist foundations that relied on the gap between constructed ideas of normality and abnormality to create a profit.
At the same time, performing in freak shows was often the only employment option for people with disabilities, who would otherwise have had to beg or live in abusive and neglectful care facilities. He likens it to sex work, another job that was often chosen by people with no other option for supporting themselves financially. People working in both roles were exploited by an exploitative world, but they tried to find a way to make the exploitation benefit them. However, this was harder for people with cognitive disabilities and for people of color, as they were often less able to make their own decisions about their lives and their performances. Some such performers were also used to “prove” the theory that people with disabilities represented a “genetic link” between primates and humans. For example, two brothers with cognitive disabilities who were kidnapped from San Salvador were stripped naked and photographed without any care for their dignity and humanity.
Clare then explores the dominant contemporary model of disability, which centers on medicine. The medicalization of disability began in the 1930s-1940s, prior to which disability was generally regarded as evidence of some moral or religious failing. During the era of the freak show’s popularity, pseudoscience played a large role in shaping views of people with disabilities, especially as doctors became more involved in assessing the “authenticity” of one’s “freakishness.” However, this medicalization did not influence the audience’s view of the performers. They were not pitiable displays to raise money for a cause, nor where they “supercrips” overcoming their disabilities; rather, they displayed their disabilities for the voyeuristic pleasure of the audience. Clare then points out the racial/imperialist politics of the freak show and its associated pseudoscience. Framing people of color as “savages” served as justification for imperialism’s “civilizing” mission. The “missing link” theory was also applied to people of color and utilized to justify slavery and other racist, unjust treatment of Black people.
Freak shows declined in the early 20th century. Voyeurism became unacceptable as disability became a medical issue, and the exhibition of people of color became societally unacceptable as the civil rights movement gained traction. However, while freak shows are often considered relics of an oppressive past, Clare argues that the freak show is not entirely dead. He gives the example of a 1992 performance art piece by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, in which they dressed themselves as members a newly discovered tribe, touring different locations in a cage. Though they believed the audience would realize it was satire, many did not, though they did find the art piece disturbing and disgusting.
However, Clare challenges the notion that freak shows were always terrible. He gives two examples of people with disabilities, a man with gigantism named Robert Wadlow and a set of conjoined twins named Violet and Daisy Hilton, who believed the medical community and doctors to be more predatory and invasive than the freak show managers. The end of freak shows, Clare explains, meant the end of jobs available to people with disabilities, who by the 1930s were unemployed and given small stipends by the US government, though many still wanted to work. He gives an example of Otis Johnson, a Black man with a disability who works in one of the last remaining freak shows. His show was banned in New York in 1984, and he questioned what those who disapprove of freak shows would have him do for employment.
In “Pride,” Clare postulates that his discomfort with the word “freak” as compared to his comfort with the word “queer” comes from the transition from freak show to medicalization and the corresponding shift from voyeuristic curiosity to pity. He describes the practice of public stripping, in which doctors strip a child with a disability and examine them in front of a room of medical professionals. Clare compares this practice to the San Salvadorian brothers who were photographed naked and questions which practice is more degrading. Clare states that “today’s freakdom” takes place in hospitals, in charity telethons, and in nursing homes where people with disabilities are kept against their will. It also occurs on the street when people gawk at those with visible disabilities; this is still voyeurism, but spectators do not have to pay the people they ogle. Meanwhile, people with disabilities struggle to find gainful employment due to employer discrimination.
The disability rights movement sought to address the problems caused by ableism. The movement founded Centers for Independent Living across the US to help keep people with disabilities out of nursing homes. Organizations like ADAPT and Not Dead Yet agitate for change, including a 25-day protest in San Francisco that led to the passage of the first civil rights legislation for the disability community. The movement is also working to create a strong disability culture with its own literature, theory, theater, and more, while some activists are also working to break into mainstream, “abled” culture. The work of the movement helped secure the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which drew on the framework of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. All of these things help create pride in disability culture, combatting ableist shame and oppression.
When Clare entered “regular” first grade, none of the adults knew how to handle or acknowledge the needs of a child with disabilities, so they acted like nothing was wrong. He was not given special accommodation, like extra time to write his assignments, nor was he protected from the cruel taunting of his classmates. He tried to distance himself from the special education students, trying to fit in, and even developed an adversarial relationship with Mary, a girl who was deaf and shared Clare’s speech therapist. This attempt to distance himself from other people with disabilities illustrates his internalized shame at being disabled. As an adult, he developed friendships with other people with disabilities while cultivating pride in his cerebral palsy. Pride has allowed him to proudly reclaim “cripple” and “queer,” though he acknowledges that those in the disability or LGBTQIA+ communities who feel uncomfortable with those terms are not lacking in pride, as the relationship between each individual person and language is unique.
Clare himself cannot grow comfortable with the word “freak.” He still grapples with his experience of “freakdom” as a child and his desire to be normal. He also wrestles with the history of the freak shows and the exploitation and suffering the performers endured. He struggles to place his personal history in this history and poses a question about pride versus the act of witnessing, wondering if there are painful parts of “freakdom” that require witnessing instead of pride. Clare gives the example of the LGBTQIA+ community finding “pride” in the word “queer” versus “witnessing” the history of the Holocaust with the symbol of the pink triangle, which designated non-Jewish gay men imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. Clare explains that witness “pairs grief and rage with remembrance,” while pride “pairs joy with a determination to be visible” (115). They can converge, but they do not always and should not be blurred together.
Returning to “freak,” Clare meditates on pride versus witnessing. Clare questions whether those who have reclaimed the word “freak” do so with pride or because they fail to witness the pain and exploitation associated with the word and the shows. He wonders what the word means to people with different histories, including those who acquire a disability as adults or those who have cognitive disabilities. He acknowledges the same questions can be asked about the use of the word “queer” in the LGBTQIA+ community. Finally, he circles back to his question: why he is comfortable calling himself a “cripple” and “queer” but not “freak.” He has no answer but wants to learn from the history of the freak show performers to shatter his self-hatred, to sharpen his pride, and to reconfigure the world to abolish ableism.
Part 2, Essay 2 Summary: “reading across the grain”
Clare introduces three images that center on disability. The first is a public service advertisement from the Muscular Dystrophy Association that features an empty wheelchair with the phrase “A Business Deal So Good It’ll Have People Getting Up and Walking Away” (119). The second is an image of Ellen Stohl in a black bustier, fishnets, and stiletto heels sitting sideways across a wheelchair on the cover of New Mobility, a disability community magazine. Last is an advertising image of four white people of various ages holding hands, alongside the phrase, “A mental handicap is there for life. So is Mencap,” and, in smaller letters, “Without your help we’re handicapped” (120).
Each of these images tells some sort of story about disability. The first demonstrates the MDA’s fixation on finding a cure to the exclusion of supporting individuals with muscular dystrophy and or advocating for civil rights for people with disabilities. The second illustrates sexuality while also hinting at the objectification and forced sexlessness of people with disabilities. The third shows the infantilization of people with disabilities and the able-bodied fixation on charity.
Clare explains that Stohl posed in Playboy magazine in 1987, with the words of her spread describing her everyday life and activities, like being a student, riding horses, and driving a car. Inset small photos showed her performing these activities, which Clare says “titillates” the nondisabled audience, as they cannot conceptualize people with disabilities leading ordinary lives. While the article and smaller photos focus on Stohl “overcoming” disability, the larger photos are soft core pornography, showing Stohl posed half naked with no indication of her disability.
Her appearance in the magazine caused controversy. Some activists were upset that her disability was not visible in the sexualized photos. Other activists praised the portrayal of a disabled woman as sexy and desirable, as often people with disabilities are not viewed as sexual beings. Some feminist activists railed against the pornography of Playboy, seemingly pitying and admonishing Stohl more than they did models without disabilities. Other feminist activists tried to understand the nuances of the objectification of a disabled woman given the typical depiction of people with disabilities as sexless, comparing the apparent absence of disability in the pornographic photos to the “supercrip” depiction of Stohl in the article’s text. The arguments overwhelm Clare, so he pivots to considering Stohl’s article and photos in the context of the MDA and Mencap advertisements. He imagines Stohl, so vibrant and full of color and sexuality, staring down Mencap’s camera, which turns people with disabilities into children.
The MDA ad with the empty wheelchair implies that all people with disabilities are simply waiting for a cure. For Clare, his cerebral palsy is as much a part of him as having red hair or blue eyes. Like these features, his disability has been a part of him his whole life, but unlike his cerebral palsy, his blue eyes do not cause him to experience discrimination when forming relationships or applying for jobs. His disability is not just a medical condition, as he does not receive any medical treatment for his cerebral palsy, instead using adaptive equipment. He acknowledges that other people with disabilities have greater medical needs, but even that does not make them “sick” or “diseased.” It is not disabled bodies that are the problem, but ableism. It is not a cure that people with disabilities seek (though in a footnote from 2009, Clare admits that some people with disabilities may want a cure, depending on their quality of life). They seek civil rights and equal opportunities.
The MDA often utilizes telethons to raise money that they funnel toward a cure, spending most of the funds on research rather than providing respirators or wheelchairs to people with muscular dystrophy. These telethons cast people with disabilities as pitiable and tragic. Clare argues that feminists and gay rights activists would not support telethons that cast women and LGBTQIA+ people as requiring pity or needing a cure for their ailments, especially since homosexuality used to be categorized as a mental illness. Telethons would be less detrimental to the disability community if there were more nuanced and realistic depictions of people with disabilities living their authentic lives—in relationships, with jobs, with families, etc. However, the telethon is the dominant model of disability depiction, which is what makes Stohl’s appearance in Playboy stand out. She is not sitting in her wheelchair raising money for a “cure” but posing across her wheelchair seductively, the wheelchair a prop rather than an emblem of her disability.
The Mencap ad represents the infantilization of people with disabilities, which Clare himself has experienced. People with disabilities are kept in a sort of permanent childhood: Many never leave their parents’ house, never hold jobs (or are relegated to assembly line jobs that bring home only a few dollars a day), or are kept in nursing homes and deprived of their freedom. Prior to the 1970s, many people with cognitive disabilities were also forcibly sterilized, as the government deemed them incapable of raising children. The state makes marriage between people with disabilities difficult, as some lose their state benefits if they marry even if their spouse cannot make enough to support them financially. People with disabilities who have children are not supported in their parenthood journeys, and the government can threaten to take away a child if it deems the parents “unfit.” Jerry Lewis, a comedian who often ran MDA-supported telethons, referred to the people who featured as “Jerry’s Kids” into their late adulthood. Clare imagines Stohl as one of the adults in the Mencap ad, posed to look passive and childlike.
Clare does not mean to glorify Stohl’s Playboy appearance by comparing it to the MDA and Mencap ads. Instead, he uses the three images to start a conversation about disability, sexuality, and objectification. Objectification can have many facets as it pertains to people of different races, genders, and orientations, but Clare focuses on the intersection of objectification and disability. Often, medical textbooks feature photos of naked people with disabilities to illustrate the “deformities” of their bodies, using only black rectangles over their eyes to “hide” their identities. Though these subjects are naked, they are not sexualized but medicalized. Similarly, when people with disabilities appear in telethons, they are objectified but not sexualized, made into objects of pity. When people with disabilities are forced to live in nursing homes, they are often abused and objectified but not sexualized. Objectification plays many roles in the lives of people with disabilities, but it is rarely sexual in nature. Clare recalls a female friend who in high school would get catcalled; however, the men would apologize to her after seeing her crutches and leg braces. The friend felt conflicted about this experience, and as an adult lesbian, she wants to experience sexual desire and be desired by other women regardless of her wheelchair or crutches. Clare acknowledges the double-edged sword of sexual objectification, as it can reinforce and maintain traditional power structures that harm marginalized groups. However, it can also allow people to express their sexual urges and desires.
Clare then examines the role of sex in society and the societal depiction of sex and objectification. Pornography in particular is complicated; the feminist “sex wars of the 1980s pitted pro-sex and pro-porn activists against anti-violence and anti-porn activists but came to no definitive conclusions. Society hates sex and yet teems with it, but people with disabilities are rarely depicted sexually, as the social understanding of gender differences is often based on the way nondisabled bodies move and exist. Clare gives the example of Connie, a lesbian woman with a disability who went to a gay bar with her attendant. Her attendant was asked why she brought her “patient” to the bar, completely oblivious to Connie’s desire for community. Another woman, Bree, became pregnant and was criticized for having a child who could potentially inherit her condition. Both women are criticized for expressing their sexuality as women with disabilities.
Clare is glad that he does not have to endure sexual harassment, but sometimes he does feel the pain of the lack of sexual agency and expression. Sexual objectification can be degrading, but the absence of it is also powerfully felt. This complexity reflects the complexity of feminist conversations around pornography, violence, and erotic power: The myriad conversations during the sex wars did not generate new frameworks to discuss and conceptualize sex and objectification. Still, Clare argues that Stohl’s appearance in Playboy represents an important “fault line” in the conversation about disability and sexualization, as she bucks the typical depiction of disabled women. However, this depiction is complicated by the look of Stohl’s photos, and Clare wonders if a person with visually unavoidable disabilities would have been sought after for a Playboy spread. Clare also argues that publications like Playboy are not the place for nuanced depictions of disability, as he does not want people without disabilities to define sexuality for people with them.
Clare connects his disability to his lesbianism, explaining that pornography made by lesbians for lesbian consumption is difficult to find. At the same time, he quotes Susan Stewart, who explains that though lesbians know inauthentic lesbian porn is not real, it still can turn them on. Stewart says, “It is all part of what some theorists call ‘reading across the grain.’ Some of us have been reading across the grain for so long that our eyes have splinters” (135). Clare advocates for more authentic and nuanced depictions of people with disabilities and offers examples of poems, art, and plays created by people with disabilities and for people with disabilities. He hopes more such art will reach the edges of the disabled community, like the injured loggers and the people trapped in nursing homes, so they can see their bodies as something other than worthy of pity.
Clare introduces a fourth image, a picture of disability rights activist Ed Roberts sitting mid-conversation. He was paralyzed by polio as a child and had to use a wheelchair and occasionally an iron lung. He attended UC Berkeley despite institutional roadblocks to his education and founded the Rolling Quads, a group of students with disabilities. This in turn led to the Physically Disabled Students Program (PDSP), helping other students achieve educational success. The group founded Centers for Individual Living (CILs), and Roberts eventually became the head of California’s Department of Rehabilitation, reforming the very institution that had tried to declare him unemployable. Roberts and the Rolling Quads began the disability rights movement. However, independent living is still contentious in the legislative discussion about disability rights. Clare imagines Roberts in a nursing home, deprived of his freedom and self-determination.
Clare compares the photos of Stohl and Roberts, questioning the differing goals of the two: Stohl wanted to break into the mainstream, while Roberts wanted to reform the world. Though the images are different, Clare argues that they both constitute responses to the MDA and Mencap ads.
Part 2, Essay 3 Summary: “stones in my Pockets, stones in my heart”
Clare argues that to write about gender, disability, class, abuse, orientation, race, and the body, one must navigate the complex intersections between the issues. Clare questions where to start in writing about his body.
At age 13, Clare began questioning his gender. He often wanted to cut his hair short, though his mother would not let him. He wore flannel shirts and work boots and helped his father saw lumber to build their house. He asked his mother if he was feminine, but he does not remember what his mother said or why he asked the question. He sometimes attempted to perform traditional girlhood, watching his mother pluck her eyebrows, listening to other girls talk about kissing boys, joining the Girl Scouts, and attending slumber parties. He can’t remember if he wondered whether he could be a girl as he was, but he did not have a strong attachment to the idea of femininity, as his closest and most important relationships were with nature; he collected stones from the creek and kept them in his pocket. He wonders how to write about the heat that kept the stones warm.
Clare traces how his parents have stolen his body from him. He cannot remember how young he was when his father first began to rape him. His father treated him like a son in the woods but committed heinous acts of gendered violence against him indoors. His mother claims not to have known it was happening, and Clare believes her because “her spirit vacated the premises, leaving only her body as a marker” (145). He worries, though, that if he starts the narrative of his body here, people will ascribe his lesbian identity to the abuse he experienced, as many conservatives do to discredit members of the LGBTQIA+ community. He returns to the question of femininity that he posed to his mother. His mother does not remember him asking the question but reminds him of a carnival they went to where a caricature artist drew Clare as a boy, believing him to be assigned male at birth. This filled him with joy, making him grab the stones in his pocket and smile secretly for weeks.
Clare poses a series of questions about his trauma and gender identity. He wonders how his father’s sexual abuse influenced his gender identity, especially given that his father treated him more like a son when he was not abusing him. He also wonders how watching his father abuse other children, both boys and girls, complicated what he knew about gender. He questions how his mother’s willful ignorance of his father’s abuse impacted his view of femininity and masculinity.
As an adolescent and an adult, Clare was and is often referred to as a man by strangers. When he is referred to as “ma’am,” he finds it strange, uncomfortable, and unsettling. He feels safer walking at night because of his somewhat masculine gait. He acknowledges that some lesbians and gay men feel they must emphasize their womanhood or masculinity to be perceived as their gender, and Clare questions whether that is the only response to the “heterosexist” world that challenges queerness and gender expression.
Clare then dives into an explanation of the trans liberation movement that began gaining traction in the 1990s, pushing back against the gender binary system. Clare notes that intersex people are born with or develop sex organs or secondary sex characteristics that are not standard for men or women, and he questions where they fall in the binary. If some people require surgeries to conform to the binary, the binary itself seems illegitimate. The transgender rights movement advocates not for an end to men and women but to the exclusionary binary. Clare emphasizes that the LGBTQIA+ community is finding new ways of being—ways that there are no pronouns for yet.
Clare worries that starting his story of gendered embodiment with the details of his father raping him will confirm that he is a “transgender butch” because of the abuse. However, it is not that simple. Child abuse is an epidemic in the United States, and Clare argues that the sexual and physical violence is not only a “personal tragedy” but also a sign of systemic oppression. Adults who harm children, especially based on marginalized aspects of their identities, reinforce and uphold oppressive power structures. Clare explains that his father did not rape him because he was a “queer” child unsure of his “girlness” but for “many reasons,” and through those acts of violence Clare learned what it meant to be a girl, to be a child, and to live under societal power structures.
Bodies are not blank slates; as much as the abuse Clare endured shaped his perception of his gender identity, he also states that there was something innate within him that whispered “not boy, not girl” (150). Listening to his body has been hard for Clare. He was ashamed for many years of the tremors of his hands and crookedness of his gait. As a teenager, because of his disability and his masculine presentation, he did not experience the pressure to conform to typical displays of femininity. Though the assumption that he was a boy better matched Clare’s internal sense of gender, he wonders what would have happened if it had not. The lies that his abusers told him may have hurt him even more.
Though bodies can be stolen, reclamation is possible. Clare began to reclaim his body when he came out as a “dyke,” the word he uses to refer to the intersection of his lesbian and transgender identities. When he was 12, he met a lesbian couple who were friends of his parents. Though he suppressed the realization, he knew he was like them. When he was 18, he started to investigate the “dyke” community, though it would be four more years until he kissed a woman. The importance of the “dyke” community and of different expressions of gender, from butch lesbians to femme lesbians, showed Clare that there are numerous ways to be a woman and that there are other genders and gender expressions to reach toward.
Clare’s experiences with women let him experience sexual desire outside of the context of sexual abuse, though it took several years for the memories of rape to return and for him to understand his reticence toward sexual intimacy. Intimacy with women let him heal the hurt sexual violence caused. However, he has not always felt at home within the LGBTQIA+ community. Clare shares an anecdote about asking a fellow butch where she worked because he assumed her combat boots were necessary for a blue-collar job. The woman replied that they were a fashion statement, which made Clare feel out of place. His background, however, is integral to who he is—including his gender expression, which he learned emulating the men of Port Orford, the loggers and laborers in their flannel shirts.
Now, Clare spends Friday nights drinking a single Corona with his friends at his local queer bar, laughing, crying, and telling stories of bodies stolen and reclaimed. He holds a stone in his hand, warming it gently, accepting himself as a “not-girl-not-boy transgender butch” while acknowledging his connections to his past (159).
Afterword Summary: “afterword to the 2009 edition, David Spade”
David Spade reflects on the 10 years since Exile and Pride’s initial publication and Clare’s hopes for the 50th anniversary celebration of Stonewall in his essay “losing home.” With Stonewall’s 40th anniversary approaching, Spade questions what the LGBTQIA+ rights movement would look like if instead of advocating for marriage equality, the movement focused on income equality, universal access to healthcare, the passage of hate crime laws to protect members of the community from violence, and the end of sexist, classist, and anti-trans laws that separate queer parents and those with disabilities from their children.
Spade outlines the points of Clare’s analysis that are most important in 2009. Clare critiques progress narratives and binaries, exploring the difference between rural and urban LGBTQIA+ movements and challenging the assumption that rural areas are inhospitable for LGBTQIA+ people. Clare also questions whether the past is truly worse than the present, especially in comparing freak shows to present-day nursing homes and medicalization. He also dives deeply into the complexity of oppression, both externalized and internalized, and how it impacts relationships. Clare’s exploration of charity and individuality as they pertain to disability is also impactful, as it provides a model for understanding the importance of free will for people with disabilities. Spade locates Exile and Pride within the analysis and practice of various activists and groups working in the fields of disability, gender, and orientation politics. Spade states that this book is essential in the toolkit to create the world Clare wants to see: a more egalitarian and hospitable world.
Part 2-Afterword Analysis
The second group of essays that comprise Exile and Pride focus on the body, as Part 2’s title indicates. Clare’s first essay begins with an in-depth exploration of different terms that are typically used against marginalized people to further their oppression. Clare writes, “This profusion of words and their various relationships to marginalized people and politicized communities fascinates me. Which words get embraced, which don’t, and why?” (84-85). His use of rhetorical questions guides his audience toward his exploration of language and its impact on marginalized people—in particular, his exploration of the word “freak.” This word serves as the basis for an exploration of the history of disability, especially as it relates to freak shows and the people who either chose or were forced to perform in them.
In particular, Clare argues that the intersection of classism and ableism resulted in the construction of the idea of the “freak”: “The Davis brothers, Thompson, Johnson, Stratton, the now unknown African men and women […] did not slide into the world as infant freaks. They were made freaks, socially constructed for the purposes of entertainment and profit” (88). However, while Clare acknowledges that freak shows were immoral and exploitative, his argument that medicalization is no better illustrates the nuances present in his analysis. He writes, “Rather than moralize and condemn, I want freak show historians to examine the whole context, including racism, ableism, and classism, and begin to build a complex understanding of exploitation” (94). Clare wants to move away from a simplistic, black-and-white view of freak shows that label them as simply “bad” and toward further examination of the multifaceted reality of the disabled community’s past and present. For instance, his discussion of how doctors were called upon in later freak shows suggests a continuity between those shows and the current model of disability, while his discussion of performers finding their agency amid an exploitative system anticipates his discussion of Stohl.
Nevertheless, Clare struggles with the word “freak” and his inability to reclaim it in the same way he has reclaimed other words that have been used against him. He writes:
To infuse the word freak with pride, I would need to step through my personal history of freakdom into the larger collective history of the freak show. Stepping through the last slivers of my self-hatred, through the pain I’ve paired with gawking and the word retard, I could use Charles Stratton’s strut, Ann Thompson’s turning of the ordinary into the extraordinary, to strengthen my own resistance. I could name myself a freak alongside Daisy Hilton, William Johnson, and Otis Jordan. I want it to work (111).
This illustrates the overlap between the themes of The Intersections of Disability, Gender, and Sexuality and The Concepts of Exile and Belonging. He struggles to come to terms with his disability in the context of the historical community that he belongs to. He wants to align himself with the figures of the past, channel their strengths and precedents, and use their model of survival to create a model of his own, but his use of the conditional implies his ongoing reluctance to do so. Clare himself cannot fully explain that reluctance, but the above passage implies that the same historical baggage that makes the word potentially powerful also makes him wary of reclamation. Elsewhere, Clare stresses that the choice of reclamation must be a personal one, but the long and very public history of the term “freak” means that reclamation risks erasing a legacy of suffering.
Clare’s second essay shifts from words to images in considering how society conceptualizes disability. He examines four photographs that serve as models of different kinds of objectification, but also illuminate one another by juxtaposition. Clare writes, “Objectification plays many roles in the lives of disabled people, none of which sexualize us. In fact, medicalization, pity, and neglect do exactly the opposite” (128). However, Clare’s first evaluation of objectification, the photo of Ellen Stohl in Playboy, is sexual in nature—a pointed choice given how often people with disabilities are desexualized. As in Clare’s discussion of freak shows, Clare suggests that Stohl’s photos represent a form of resistance; if that resistance is problematic, it is because the system in which it takes place limits the means of resisting. Clare therefore argues that while feminist criticism of the photos “succeeded in bringing to the foreground what is degrading, humiliating, and dangerous about sexual objectification [it] failed to understand the complicated relationship between the self as subject and the self as object” (132). Stohl sought to participate in mainstream culture, while other people with disabilities seek to create their own culture outside of the ableist societal structure. Neither approach is perfect because (as Stohl stresses throughout the collection) systemic change is what is ultimately needed.
In the final essay, Clare dives deeper into his emotions as they pertain to writing about the body. He seeks to write about his experience being in his body, including the trauma and pain he’s endured, but again struggles to find words to do so: “There are a million ways to start, but how do I reach beneath the skin?” (143). The imagery demonstrates the intensity of the pain that the writing process causes Clare; he has to reach into himself to find the truth of his body and his body’s experience. The image of reaching beneath one’s skin also establishes a juxtaposition between surface and depth that the metaphor of the stones and body heat develops further. Clare used the stones that he gathered in the stream as a defense mechanism against the pain of life. He therefore repeatedly poses the question, “How do I write not about the stones, but the heat itself?” (149). Defense mechanisms protect Clare from the truth of his trauma, but it is this truth that he now seeks to write about.
Further complicating this effort is the trauma of anti-trans and anti-gay bias, as Clare worries that a searching discussion of his embodied experience of abuse will cause others to think that his gender identity or orientation resulted from it. Clare does not deny that abuse has shaped these facets of his identity, but he suggests that this is not quite the same thing: “My father raped me for many reasons, and inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy well” (150). In other words, the trauma Clare endured at the hands of his father is emblematic of broader issues related to disability, gender, and sexuality, but it was neither the cause nor the result of Clare’s gender identity or orientation. However, in reinforcing the reality of the sexist, heteronormative, ableist societal structure, that abuse has contributed to Clare’s belief that the system itself needs to be dismantled.
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