“Stereotypes and lies lodge in our bodies as surely as bullets. They live and fester there, stealing the body.
The body as home, but only if it is understood that the stolen
body can be reclaimed.” (Clare 13)
In this chapter Clare describes the tension between his queer, disabled identity and his rural upbringing in the backwoods of Oregon. The first sentences that I selected conclude a bleak paragraph detailing the ways in which various bodies–queer, disabled, impoverished–are stolen from the people who inhabit them. He highlights “Leonard/Lynn Vines, walking through his Baltimore neighborhood, called a ‘drag queen faggot bitch’ and shot six times. Matt Shepard–gay, white, young–tied to a fence post in Wyoming and beaten to death,” displaying a nationwide trend of violence towards queer people within their own communities (12-13).
Despite this, Clare’s following paragraph attempts to remedy this paradigm and assert the body’s capability for reclamation. He encourages a revolution against biases and lies that have been weaponized against marginalized bodies, and it feels as though these acts of revolution/reclamation are central to the ways in which LGBTQ+ authors write about their experiences. I’m reminded of Sedgwick’s “Queer and Now” where she posits this hypothesis: “there are important senses in which ‘queer’ can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes—all it takes—to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person,” (9). Allowing the body to be a home requires it to be lived through the first person, not through the stereotypes of others; for Clare, it must be lived from a perspective “that comes close and finally true to the bone,” (13).
One of Clare’s main ideas that you point out is about the body being capable of being reclaimed from being stolen. One way that I noticed he supports this retrieval of the taken body
was by going into the different labels that are applied to marginalized groups and how they have come to be reclaimed by the people they were meant to offend. These were words like crip, gimp and especially queer. I think that Clare makes it clear that when people take these harsh words and accept them it is a sign of pride. To Clare it is not just about the simple reclaiming of the body but it’s about the pride that comes with it. Reclamation is about the removal of the shame that was put on the marginalized groups. Reclamation is pride.
The phrase “Stolen bodies, reclaimed bodies” got me thinking about what should be considered an acceptable, or “normal” bodies. The idea of “normal” bodies, at least in today’s context, is quite complicated, because in my assumption, everybody – one way or another, always got something wrong in the body, which could potentially be abnormal – not just exclusive to gender aspects. It seems to me that Clair was trying to imply that “normal” people, aimed specifically at the marginalized group to define their normal bodies by pointing out the different, or “wrong” in others’ bodies, to ultimately justify the “normal”.
I thought of the “body” in this case being “identity”. I define my queerness, in part, by the homophobia and hatred I have faced because of it. It reminds me of the concept of “the mountain”. Along with what we discussed in class, I also view the mountain as identity. Clare states that the mountain won’t let him go (forgive me for lacking page numbers, I don’t have my book with me); even if he were to overcome the mountain, it would always hold on to him. In ways, the trials and hardships we must overcome because of our identities *become* part of our identities.