Eli Clare

[susanstinson]

It's been a long time since I've spent half of a presentation with tears on my face but last night, I did.

If you follow the link, you'll find this description:

Disabled people, trans people, fat people, and people of color all know what it's like to be stared at. Through words and images, Eli Clare will explore the internal experiences of living in marked bodies and the external meanings of oppression and bodily difference.

It started at 7:30, and I needed to catch an 8:30 bus home but I missed the bus because I just couldn't bear to leave. It was that powerful.

Eli opened with an acknowledgment that this talk was happening in a time of war, and spoke of all of the soldiers and all of the Iraqui people who were becoming and have become abruptly newly disabled – and, it was made very clear, this was not about symbols, but about very specific bodily experiences – and what that might mean for them in a year, in five years, in twenty years.

The talk included the best discussion of fat oppression and fat liberation by an ally that I'd ever heard, with images of the cover or poster from SuperSizeMe projected alongside the cover of Size Queen, complete with the web address in big, easy to read letters), and a careful, critical analysis of how fat bodies are used in that movie.

Beautiful quotes and images from Marlon Riggs and Craig Hickman and the painter Riva Lehrer -- including a stunning portrait of Eli. Intersexed people portrayed as medical objects with black boxes over their eyes in medical literature -- fat kids get presented that way among obesity researchers, sometimes, too -- and, to use language that Eli was using, from the inside out, in images from within those communities, and others.

Since I needed to leave early, I was lucky to talk with Eli a little before the presentation. While we were speaking, someone, whose later conversation made clear that she'd been told that Eli was transgendered, came up to us and said to me, "Are you Ellie?"

I gestured to Eli (who had been quite visible at the front of the room, working with the technology, etc.), who gave a welcoming smile, and said, "It's Eli."

I haven't carefully or consistently articulated that the hair on my face makes me visibly gender variant in a way that creates powerful barriers and connections for me, both, but it does.

I've just started Eli's book of essays, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, which includes complex meditations on class and environmental activism. I wish everyone who reads this would buy it and read it, too. (I know that some of you already have.) It's so good, and so important. And, it's true, Eli also read a poem last night that rose like a song.