Brilliant Imperfection

Autorentext

Eli Clare

Klappentext

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.

Zusammenfassung
Drawing on memoir, history, and theory, Eli Clare complicates the understanding of cure, seeing it as an ideology that serves contradictory purposesfrom saving lives to social controlwhile critiquing cure rhetoric and the drive to cure disabled people through an insistence of the value of disability.

Inhalt

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