In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure-the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds. The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure. Ultimately Brilliant Imperfection reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time.
Eli Clare is a poet, essayist, activist, and the author of Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, also published by Duke University Press, and The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion. He speaks regularly at conferences, community events, and colleges across the United States and Canada about disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice, and his writing has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Writing a Mosaic xv A Note on Reading This Book: Thinking about Trigger Warnings xix Brilliant Imperfection: White Pines 1 1. Ideology of Cure 7 Brilliant Imperfection: Twitches and Tremors 19 2. Violence of Cure 21 Brilliant Imperfection: Maples 33 3. In Tandem with Cure 37 Brlliant Imperfection: Stone 49 4. Nuances of Cure 51 Brilliant Imperfection: Shells 65 5. Structure of Cure 67 Brilliant Imperfection: Hermit Crabs 81 6. How Cure Works 83 Brilliant Imperfection: Rolling 99 7. At the Center of Cure 101 Brilliant Imperfection: Myrtle 125 8. Moving Through Cure 127 Brilliant Imperfection: Drag Queen 147 9. Impacts fo Cure 149 Brilliant Imperfection: Survival Notes 169 10. Promise of Cure 171 Brilliant Imperfection: Cycling 189 Notes 191 Bibliography 201 Index 209
Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality - Hanne Blank
"Eli Clare's Brilliant Imperfection effortlessly twines history and memory, embodiment and document to bring the reader into a complex and deeply rooted dance with and among bodies, dis/ability, environment, power, medicine, love, and fear. This is theory and politics carefully contextualized, intimately experienced, brought forth with great heart, thoughtful scholarship, and fierce intellect."
Kindling: Writings on the Body - Aurora Levins Morales
"Brilliant Imperfection is a dazzling work of intellectually rigorous and wildly original thinking that challenges our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of cure, exposing its place in the ideologies of domination. Exquisitely poetic, intensely personal, and highly provocative, the 'messy story' Eli Clare draws us into ranges across a broad and contradictory terrain, revealing all the ways in which how we value mind-body difference is at the very heart of justice."
