A part I find especially notable about Eli Claire’s “Pride and Exile” is the section that involves doctor’s treatment of kids with disabilities. Particularly, how the pursuit of a supposed “cure” or “answer” can lead to individuals being harmed. In the text Claire states, “take for instance public stripping, the medical practice of stripping disabled children to their underwear and examining them in front of large groups of doctors, medical students, physical therapists, and rehabilitation specialists. They have the child walk back and forth. They squeeze her muscles. They watch his gait, muscle tension, footfall, back curvature. They take notes and talk amongst themselves about what surgeries and therapies they might recommend” (Claire 103).
Disabled kids are treated like a spectacle; as if they are oddities or animals. They are forced to expose themselves to the judgmental glances of people who will only see them as people who need to be changed or “fixed.” They are meant to bend to the wills of superiors who only want to mold them in their image. In a similar fashion, people in the LGBTQ+ community are meant to prove their queerness. They break down their walls of protection and sacrifice their comfort to appease an audience. They must prove their otherness is real, but at the same time get judged for their otherness due to it not being socially conventional. Both disabled and queer people are seen as malleable. Whether it is with a miracle cure, physical force, or conversion therapy, institutions, the public, or higher ups only want to see marginalized communities be the “same as everyone else.” Even if there is no such thing as an ideal human being, there will always be notions made that everyone should fit into that box to preserve years of humanities built-up fragility and sensitivity.
It’s also interesting how he compares the “public stripping” and “freak show” as they both simply show how people observe the abnormal. With the doctors further understanding how the human body works, and figuring out this “cure” to almost eliminate the disabilities one can have. Whereas, freak shows signify the entertainment of human observation and how they divide their groups of normality. It’s why Claire was adamant on individuals treating disabilities like it’s normal, hence the overall sentiment of feeling accepted after leaving the countryside to have this level of acceptance of all intersectionality.
Reading about how people with disabilities went from being exploited on stage for entertainment to how they were poked and prodded on stage in search of cure they didn’t ask for was revealing of the sympathy and lack of boundaries people in this generation possess. I think a sentiment shared across many marginalized groups is a desire to be accepted as they are, rather than having people sympathize or pity them for not fitting with what they perceive as ideal. Clare explicitly expresses that he does not want a cure, he does not want to be poked at and pitied by strangers, he just wants to be accepted.
This post made me instantly think back to the speech Eli Clare gave at a university. He made his position very clear: if a cure existed for his condition, he would not take it. This is possibly one of the underlying facts to his belief, because when everyone is treating you as an oddity and a spectacle that you know you are not, part of you might rebel against that thought and I think Eli Clare rebels against it. Eli Clare knows he is not a spectacle and he refuses to bend to what other people might assume is best for him. This is part of who he is and it does not need to be “fixed” because of other people’s perception of it.