Exile and Pride

Content Warning: The guide and source text reference rape and sexual abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, anti-gay bias, anti-trans bias, racism, ableism, classism, and medical abuse/neglect. The author also reclaims and utilizes a number of slurs and derogatory terms, which are referenced and quoted in context throughout this guide. These terms include: “cripple/crip,” “dyke,” “gimp,” “freak,” and “queer.”

Intersectionality is at the core of Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride. Clare explores a number of social issues that all twine together. As Clare writes at the beginning of “stones in my pocket, stones in my heart,” “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” (143). The body is the vessel that carries the many identities of a person; Clare, for example, is disabled, gay, genderqueer, white, and “mixed-class.” No one singular thing comprises his entirety, but each contributes to the complexity of his personhood and—thanks in part to systems of oppression organized along axes of identity—his experience of the world. 

Clare often conceptualizes the way his experiences of oppression intersect in terms of exile, as when he writes, “My displacement, my exile, is twined with problems highlighted in the intersection of queer identity, working-class and poor identity, and rural identity” (48).