Beautiful Imperfection: Wonderful Wednesday Reading

[jesse_the_k]

Eli Clare is a disability activist, an environmental activist, and a philosopher whose writing I can actually understand. His latest book Beautiful Imperfection looks long and hard at the meaning of "cure."

http://eliclare.com/books/brilliant-imperfection

I read it slowly to cherish his insights. He examines both the oppressive and liberating qualities of "the cure." He believes that living with disability enables us to contribute a particular, useful way of life: this is the "brilliant imperfection" of the title.

begin quote
The ideology of cure would have us believe that whole and broken are opposites and that the latter has no value.
[...snip...]
Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks, and seams. Its promise holds power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I’m curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?
quote ends

Yet he's willing to challenge himself: weren't the physical changes he chose similarly a "cure"?

begin quote
I thought I understood self-acceptance and love—definitely not a simple practice but nonetheless guided by a certain set of principles—until my gendered and sexed self started speaking. When I listened, I discovered an unshakable desire to reshape my body-mind using medical technology—first with chest reconstruction surgery and later with hormone replacement therapy.

All of our body-minds are in motion from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Ask anyone in the throes of puberty or old age. Ask the U.S. soldier back from Afghanistan, dealing with a recent traumatic brain injury; the Afghan civilian whose leg has been shattered in a bomb attack. Ask the person who has lost or gained a hundred pounds; the woman leaving her fifteen-year heterosexual marriage because she’s fallen head over heels in love with another woman. Ask the family who over three or four generations climbs out of poverty, maybe through luck or white privilege, education or marrying up.
quote ends

Eli Clare blazes trails worth following.