Exile and Pride

Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

By: Eli Clare

Narrated by: Maxwell Glick

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation.

With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here listeners will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone.

With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.

©1999, 2009 Eli Clare, Republished by Duke University Press 2015 (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Well worth a listen

Everyone should check out Eli Clare’s seminal work of essays dissecting intersecting oppressive systems, with a blend of personal recounts as a trans butch mixed-class white disabled person with CP growing up in the rural. Phenomenal.

wow, incredible

this book is a must read for folks wanting to understand the intersection of queerness and disability.

Spectacular

This is one of the most spectacular collection of essays I have heard. Eli Clare has the poetry of Walt Whitman and the prose of James Baldwin. Riveting. Insightful. Intersectional. This is phenomenal writing of the highest order. I recommend this book.

A Difficult But Important Listen

Eli's story is not as revolutionary today as it likely was when first published in 1999. The 2016 narration by Maxwell Glick is not good. It is sometimes nauseatingly dramatic and emotive. Eli Clare's brilliance today is not the suggestion of a life without a gender binary or the exposition of those who are physically different are just as sexual as those who are physically normative. If the reader hasn't been exposed to those truths, this is a particularly bright light. For me, however, Clare's brilliance today is the breakdown of other falsehoods or non-gender binaries. "Horizontal aggression," is a new term for me. So as not to belabor my point, Clare shows empathy and gives voice to loggers and environmentalists; they discuss "disabled" persons making their own living in a "Freak Show," but then marginalized by "medicalization." They break down thinner veils of bias about abuse, worth, ability, and marginalization. They are still here! We still carry them through our world. Clare sheds light on the subtleties and the glaring. This is worth the time to allow the adoption of a new lense on our own lives and surroundings. I'm glad I gave the time.

Eli Clare keeps it complicated and real

I loved this book but the overly dramatic narration drove me to distraction and competed with the author's voice for attention.

must read!

read in one day! I really enjoyed learning Eli Clate's story and path. I highly recommend this book.

This could have been written yesterday.

Even though this was written 21 years ago it's 100% still relevant, sad how little has changed in all that time. Powerful.

A book everyone should read

I feel as if I needed this book during the last week more than I ever would have before. Coastal elites and big city types have always tried to steer these conversations away from rural America.

Narrator Horror -- book outdated

What disappointed you about Exile and Pride?

Narrator Horror -- book outdated - Just because it is about our OUR community - does not mean it is Worth buying - very outdated. The narrator is too theatre for the purpose of the book - really..!!! do not buy it..

white author and narrator using n-word like it’s allowed bc it’s academic?

Look, as a queer, white, disabled anticapitalist desperately missing their roots in southern coastal Oregon I was pretty surprised to find absolutely nothing in this book that was relatable. I listened at 1.5 speed just so I could read it, and have some foundational modern disability activist reading under my belt. Except I stopped as soon as I was jolted by the use of a word that was beyond unnecessary to actually use. The intersectionality was already deeply lacking and that hammered home that this just isn’t the foundation I want.