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Loading... Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cureby Eli Clare
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. In this (dare I say) brilliant book, author Eli Clare examines the notion of "cure"--"the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed" (back cover)--in the context of queer and disability theory. Well-written, relatable, and not too hard to read, despite the heavy subject matter. This was so, so, so fucking good. Clare does so much in such little space, drawing all these narratives and ways of thinking together, and it's so challenging to think about cure alongside all the tensions he highlights. He also delves into so many areas of thought to pull it all together--obviously disability studies and crip theory, but also environmental studies and history and all of it is so thoughtful and written with so much obvious care. I'm going to be chewing on this book for a long time, and definitely need a copy of my own so I can return to it as frequently as I want. It's also a book I want to share with so many other people. Just so, so good (and might be available through your local public library system--the copy I read was!) no reviews | add a review
"[In this book, the author] 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. [The author] 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 [the author] tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, [the author] weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, [the author] adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure. Ultimately [this book] 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."-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.9Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people People by occupation and miscellaneous social statusesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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