Overview

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.

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9780822362760

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Reviews

Eli Clare's <i>Brilliant Imperfection</i> 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. --Hanne Blank, author of <i>Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality</i>

Brilliant Imperfection is an honest, moving, and deeply thoughtful engagement with some of the most difficult and significant questions in disability, queer, and cultural studies. . . . Brilliant Imperfection is sure to become required reading for scholars of disability and queer studies, revealing the multiple, often contradictory meanings and consequences of cure and the importance of work for social justice. -- Laurel Daen * H-Disability, H-Net Reviews * Brilliant Imperfection is a clarion call, for changing the medicalized disability narrative, that of 'defective brokenness,' that often prevails in U.S. healthcare.... [It] provides empowering answers and guidance-contributing significantly to the evolving discourse on gender, queer, and disability studies. -- John R. Killacky * Gay & Lesbian Review * Vermont has many national treasures living quietly among us, and one of them is Addison County resident Eli Clare. His latest book, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, is revelatory, a clarion call for changing the medicalized disability narrative of defective brokenness. -- John Killacky * Vermont Public Radio * 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. -- Aurora Levins Morales, author of * Kindling: Writings on the Body * 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. -- Hanne Blank, author of * Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality *

Author Information

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.

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