Brilliant Imperfection

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.

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

"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 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) "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 powerfully intersectional in its approach to body-mind difference: disability, as an identity, process, and means of interacting with the world, cannot be disentangled from other facets of identity like race, sexuality, class, and gender." - Travis Lau (Wordgathering) "This book will quickly become a classic, cited for Clare's careful analogies that examine cure through the notion of ecosystem restoration; his harsh critique of 'case files' and the work that scholars and artists do with them; and his deeply-nuanced exploration of the shame, grief, loss, and yearning in relation to bodymind difference. Brilliant Imperfection is beautifully written, with the insight and poetic clarity that readers have come to expect from Clare." - Ryan Cartwright (Disability Studies Quarterly) "Clare's Brilliant Imperfection provides a well-researched, thoroughly thought-out project that grapples with multiple relevant discourses surrounding disability and PwDs. In highlighting historical, personal, and anecdotal evidence, Clare's text is an articulate, poignant narrative - a mosaic of stories, histories and experiences - that invites much debate and analysis." - Heather Lacey (Journal of Gender Studies) "Brilliant Imperfection is a provocation-one that spotlights how crucial disability studies continues to be, particularly as scholars, activists, and artists make room for more nuanced conversations about rehabilitation, cure, and diagnosis." - Julie Passanante Elman (Feminist Formations) "As lawmakers present some lives as worth less than others, we need voices like Clare's: the voices of those who see worth in the most devalued lives but who also recognize that a simple critique of medical technology is inadequate when so many people around the world desperately need access to that technology. Brilliant Imperfection is therefore timely and necessary for our current political moment-and it will prove a critical resource as we seek to create a better world." - Julie Avril Minich (QED) "Accessible and poetic. Brilliant Imperfection will be valuable to students in introductory medical anthropology courses as well as anthropology courses on the body and human-nature interactions." - Michele Friedner (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "[Brilliant Imperfection] wasn't a how-to on overcoming grief and injury. It was permission to be who the accident made me: a disabled dyke. It was a permission to rage against the abelist and lesbiphobic shame I'd internalized. Clare was the only person who told me my worth was not dependent on my ability to get better or to disappear my pain. I cried as I read and re-read." - Sara Youngblood Gregory (Vice)