Episode 41
February 7, 2021
Exile and Pride
Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari
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. This I know, and yet the question remains: where to start?
We start off the year (a bit late) by reading a book that pushes us in some new directions. Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride is half memoir, half analysis of the intersections of queerness, disability, gender, race, and the environment. Chris and Suzanne explore its many devotions: to lists, to intersectionality, and especially to the desire to never let things be simple, but always striving to consider the world in its full complexity.
Show Notes.
Eli Clare: Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. [Bookshop.]
Other books by Eli Clare: Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure; The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion.
Thomas Browne: Religio Medici.
An in-depth interview with Clare from 2009.
And a recently online talk given by Clare.
Next: Laxdæla Saga. [Bookshop.]