\u201cI\u2014like all of us\u2014am practicing my politics during a protracted time of war. \u2026 There is no foreseeable end to the war on terror, the war on drugs, the many wars of occupation funded by the United States. We live in a time of unrelenting war. \u2026 creating lasting peace with justice requires a fundamental commitment to multi-issue organizing\u201d (Clare xxiv).<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Clare discusses \u201cwar\u201d in his preface for the 2009 edition of exile & pride. <\/em>I believe that war can be a framework for understanding the argument Clare makes, as well as the connection to the class.<\/p>\n War<\/em>, for Clare, is not just about the unrelenting unjust war on terror fought abroad but also the wars fought against people at home\u2014the war on terror\/drugs. (I have purposefully included the war on terror within domestic wars because of how the United States treats its own citizens). War <\/em>is about the daily lived experience of everyone that war touches and the war touches everyone\u2014albeit in different ways (Clare xxiv).<\/p>\n To \u201cpractice politics\u201d is a decision one makes, and those of us who live outside \u2018normalcy\u2019 are forced to live a political life\u2014our bodies are political (Clare xxiii) For Clare, a queer and disabled theorist–his decision to practice multi-issue politics is in opposition to the current construction of the state and its definitions of disability and \u2018normalcy\u2019 (Clare xxiv). Thus, \u201cpracticing politics during a time of protracted war<\/em>\u201d (emphasis mine) illuminates that war<\/em> is not just fighting \u2018an enemy\u2019 but conceptualizing the larger framework that war operates in (Clare xxv).<\/p>\n In other words, by living in a state of constant protracted war, war<\/em> becomes a fundamental part of living in the United States\u2014as well as being affected by the interlocking systems of war, \u201cwhite supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, and ableism [that] work in concert\u201d (Clare xxv). For Clare, the just and political life is to be anti-war. And since being anti-war also entails being against all the interlocking power structures a broader construction of who we are fighting by being political is formed. To fight, Clare states, is to \u201c[create] lasting peace with justice,\u201d with \u201ca fundamental commitment to multi-issue organizing\u201d (Clare xxiv). To do this, we must understand these power structures and how they affect each part of our lived experience\u2014gender, race, religion, sexuality, and disability. War and its power structures create a politics of us and them and the only way to unite and fight is to have multi-issue organizing.<\/p>\n To state plainly the connection to the larger issues at play, in order to stop the war on our bodies\u2014we must identify and dismantle the \u201cinterlocking power structures\u201d that we have been talking about in class and realize how war, capitalism, ableism, and homophobia build off of each other to create a hostile world. Clare\u2019s works offer a roadmap to understanding how to address and dismantle each structure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI\u2014like all of us\u2014am practicing my politics during a protracted time of war. \u2026 There is no foreseeable end to the war on terror, the war on drugs, the many wars of occupation funded by the United States. We live in a time of unrelenting war. \u2026 creating lasting peace with justice requires a fundamental … Continue reading The War<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5030,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169404],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2022-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}