Will be writing one post for each section within Eli Clare's sections of the book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
I. “The Mountain”
Clare writes about
“mountain as metaphor”:
“We've hit our head on
glass ceilings... scrambled toward that phantom called normality”
The mountain is where
mainline society calls down to us, telling us that we should go up
there and be normal like them. Intersectionality tells me,
personally, that it is hard to only have one mountain in your life
and sometimes you end up with several.
Society wants us fixed.
Clare calls it like it is, saying, “we... decide to continue
climbing only to have the very people who told us how wonderful life
is at the summit booby-trap the trail.”
Do these people at the top
of our mountains want us there, to normalcy, or just close enough
that we won't be an embarrassment, but never on the same level? Never
on the same level of equity? It would not matter how hard we tried to
be their normal. “Maybe we get to the summit, but probably not,”
Clare goes on, “and the price we pay is huge.” Energy spent,
never recovered.
(Clare, 1)
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