Category: Fall 2025

In Eli Clare’s autobiography, Exile and Pride, Clare explores the intersectionality between class and sexuality. During this exploration, Clare discusses the narrative between rural versus urban communities, especially how rural communities are typically associated with rednecks, which are then associated with homophobia, bigotry, and so on; whereas, urban communities are associated with open-mindedness, the cultural salad bowl metaphor, and queer enclaves. This idea is summarized in metronormativity. While, on occasion, these stereotypes can be proven true, it is never good to generalize and assume based off what you have heard, rather than what you have experienced.

I grew in a very similar socioeconomic status to Clare. Both of my parents have worked their whole lives, and we have always straddled the line between lower and middle class. I also grew up in a rural community; a cow farm, to be more specific. Location is one of the most important factors in determining one’s socioeconomic status, and living in a rural area often coincides with being lower or lower-middle class. That being said, urban areas typically consist of those in the middle- and upper-class. Besides the obvious difference in land use in rural and urban communities, the concentration of wealth in urban areas and lack thereof in rural areas must be addressed. While it’s true that money can’t buy happiness, according to the cliché, it can buy accessibility to education, healthcare, and more. A lack of accessibility is at the root of the villainization of rural communities, and we as a society must learn to share and spread our resources equally if we ever hope for equality.

One poem that stuck with me after I read it was Cherríe Moraga’s The Slow Dance, which itself is a part of the larger text: Loving in the War Years. It starts off placing us in the head of our perspective character, presumably Moraga, watching two other people, Elena and Susan, dance. She is envious of the two, describing how they navigate the dance floor and each other’s bodies with ease.

She enters the dance floor, remembering how her mother described how a “real man” holds a woman. Moraga writes, “I am my mother’s lover. The partner she’s been waiting for. I can handle whatever you got hidden. I can provide for you,” (Line 28-29). This highlights this sense of heteronormativity, which is almost explicit in the poem. You are either a provider or you’re not. In simple heteronormative terms, you’re either the man or the woman of the relationship.

She searches for Elena, stating, “I am ready for you now, I want age. Knowledge,” (Line 34), but she finds her still dancing with Susan. Moraga writes, “I am used to being an observer. I am used to not getting what I want. I am used to imagining what it must be like,” (Lines 43-45)

To me, this poem isn’t like a lot of the other ones which we’ve read, which seem to ease in to being about queerness. I read this poem as a kind of sequel to those poems, as it begins explicitly queer but does not end there. Moraga is desperate for, as she puts it, age and knowledge. In terms of Saeed Jones, she wants to know where she goes after she punches a hole to daylight. We see her place herself into regressive heteronormative dynamics in order to cope, and in the end she doesn’t get what she wants. Being openly queer is not treated like a victory, here it is just another reality. Here, the struggle of being queer is ongoing, and not simply something that ends at daylight.

In “Place,” Eli Clare describes his nature-filled childhood in rural Oregon as he reconciles with the contradiction between the way he was raised and his urban, metronormative, reality as a queer adult. Clare’s writing takes a deeply personal tone as he describes his connection to the land he was raised on, which was both immersed nature and at odds with the natural environment through the town’s logging industry. Clare serves as an environmentalist in this section, identifying the ways in which his perspective on what was “good” for the environment shifted as he got older. He separates his “old self,” a child who believed the environmental propaganda taught to him in his hometown, and his “new” self, an activist who questions that propaganda. By interweaving ideological arguments about class, race, and sexuality with vignettes from his childhood, Clare encourages readers to have empathy toward his childhood self and the propaganda-based environmental beliefs common in his hometown.

The relationship between Clare’s sense of nature and his sense of self is complex, which is partially caused by the feeling that he cannot return “home” to the place he was raised. This tension between childhood and adulthood has many causes for Claire, but his queerness and conflict between rurality and queer identity is an undercurrent to this section. Although he misses the connected nature of his childhood environment, he can also identify with the stereotypically urban, visible queerness in his future. Queerness was one of many reasons Clare left the environment of rural Oregon, allowing him to discover new perspectives contrary to the propaganda he was raised within.

“disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account for people who have physical and or cognitive intellectual impairments and thus excludes them from mainstream society.” (Eli Pp.6) This really hit home for me as I recently have been once again comparing my own “cognitive disability” to a system not made for cognitive diversity. One that questioned why I should be given different tools in school than others. Teachers assumed I didn’t prepare or study. I am not unable or helpless, you are just trying to force a system not made for my learning on to me. I can answer the question you are asking, but I can also do so much more than answer the question once I understand it. I can apply and remember things in ways that confuse me. I can see pictures and worlds within my mind, but your previous system finds me incapable because I can’t do it in the constrictions you believe to be a judgment of intellect and ability.

This piece really enabled me to connect to how others might think or feel when it comes to subjugation. I think about in Loving In The War Years, Moraga purposefully and unapologetically writes in a way that is just wholly herself. She did not write in a way that is a “normal AP standard”. This was her breaking from the system. It made me think about what my writing or art or studies could look like if I explored them outside of the ideals of what people expect from me. Moraga’s usage of mixed language and a journal-like set up led me to thinking about what my personal, physical writing would look like outside of the standard writing expectation. What would writing or poetry look like if it was made just for me? I would play with punctuation like an artist, spacing would seem random and unusual, my thoughts would be like a cloud connected by parenthesis because all of the ideas are connected and tied in my mind, and it would be a mess, but not to me. I never thought about what my own writing would look like in my “language”. I’m not trying to insinuate that I am in any way better than anyone else. I’m trying to explain that everyone can do something someone else can’t in a way that works for them, so why are we all trying to do things in a way that work best for one group of people.

Disability theorist Michael Oliver defines impairment as “lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defect limb, organism or mechanism of the body”(Eli pp.6) I am not lacking there is nothing wrong with being the way I am and normal is propaganda. 8 billion people and not one of them is exactly the same as the other so how did we all come to believe that one specific way was the right one or one specific way to do something was the right way to do it. Even in science just because one experiment is more successful than another you continue to study other methods because there are endless changes in technology and techniques. How could we forget how complex and unique our world truly is?

I chose to go with Susan Stryker and boy… did it make me reflect. I think the idea that Stryker is a part of a minority (transgender) as well as being a non-oppressed race (white) makes her walk a fine line between communities. The idea of recognizing that, while oppressed, she is ultimately safe from the burdens of society and can pass through life more easily because of her whiteness. On page xxi, “I do as a transsexual experience the injustice of being targeted for structural violence through being labeled a kind of or type of person who is not as deserving of life as other people, within a social order that tries to cement me into that often death-dealing hierarchy based on some of my body characteristics” (Stryker, xxi). She then later on says how her struggle and identity of transness will never fail to be removed from her, though she is white. She knows that her gender and identity can lead to an allyship with BIPOC, and she can bring her experiences and contribute them to the larger and harder struggle of freedom for identity, race, etc. To deepen that idea, she says “transgender issues have been presented as personal issues,” and I do believe that citizens do play a role in that fault (Stryker, 2). Trans issues are collective and built on shared experiences, pains, and uprising moments. I think she makes a great point on how we sometimes also look towards people in our community as the blame instead of shifting our collective efforts to ‘sticking it to the man’ and making definite strategies to combat social oppression.

Para Scisscors………OUT!

#stickittotheman #fuckthepatriarchy

Saeed Jones’ Boy Found Inside A Wolf has lived rent-free in my head since we first talked about it in class. This is partly because I was scared to share my reading of the poem, and I think it’s important to notice that. Simply put, I interpret this poem as a record of, the insidious consequences of, and a reckoning with the memory of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a father figure. It is only in certain lines – and callbacks from later poems such as the last poem in the collection – that I am able to see hope in this piece.

So much of this poem comes alive to me through its use of enjambment. Every single line leads from the next, and specific words are carefully held separate for brief moments.

“Red is at the end of black. Pitch-black unthreads / and swings garnet” – this line was the hardest for me to decipher. The repetition of black and pitch-black conjures up a nighttime scene, something bottomless and unknowable taking place at night. The threads may refer to clothing being undone, or certain concepts (familial) coming undone. The red will come up later, and the garnet is especially interesting. In The Blue Dress, Saeed Jones mentions “crystal bowls and crystal cups” in an antique room. I believe that this is a room of memory, or the past. Red is a color associated with danger and with blood.

“in what I thought was home. I’m climbing / out of my father. His love a wet shine” – here we see familial ideas being tainted, a home no longer being a safe place, and a character climbing – at night and up the stairs. This paints a very grim picture, however, the choice of “climbing” and “out” alludes to this being over and done with, and that the character is ascending from their negative place. “His love a wet shine” is our first use of both word choice and enjambment that heavily implies sexual themes. I’d note, also, that it paints the picture of metamorphosis as well. Here, Saeed Jones holds sexually charged imagery with the act of transformation. A wet shine is what coats you when you are born, or when an insect is coming out of its cocoon. It also unfortunately alludes to his father’s semen.

“all over me. He knew I would come / to this: one small fist” – I mean these are lines you just can’t ignore. “come” is emphasized through enjambment. The choice of “he knew” and the fist being “small” are twisted.

“punching a hole / to daylight.” – is this a positive ending about the main character’s eventual rise from a traumatized past, transforming, and creating a new life for themselves? Yes! Is it also alluding to the sexual assault that continued until daylight when the main character was finally allowed to rise from their own, tainted bed, go downstairs, and continue on to school or wherever the day took them? I’d argue that that isn’t a reading we can ignore, despite how brutal it is.

I have run out of space to connect this to other poems, but I really wanted to go line by line here. Briefly, the motif of wolves shows up again in Last Portrait as Boy, stalking the character at the edge of the forest. I believe one of the things these wolves represent is dangerous, toxic, potentially codependent love between damaged individuals in the queer space. The first wolf is here, in Boy Found Inside a Wolf, the wolf is the father, and the main character is the little boy, the hurt inner child who has struggled, as seen in Insomniac, lines 8 and 9; and as corroborated by the unvoice “no” in Closet of Red, to create boundaries and to experience truly positive and fulfilling love.

 

 

The sentence begins with a metaphor of the body as home. (Clare 11) When I first read it, the idea felt comforting since home feels like safety and belonging. However, the feeling shifts in the next line with “but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.” (Clare 11) Your body is not just yours because it is never singular. It is shaped by all of the other bodies that surround you and touch you and leave their marks.

The repetition of “body/bodies” makes me think about what the body really entails. Instead of a person existing alone (singular) , our existence is always connected to others (collective). The words haunted, strengthened, and underscored make this idea even more refined. Being haunted by other bodies means that we carry our memory, inheritance, or trauma. To be strengthened by other bodies suggests that we support and uplift. To be underscored by other bodies implies others making us feel invisible.

I love that this passage doesn’t make us imagine the body as a perfect, closed off home. It tells us that the body’s walls are thin and made of relationships, history, and experiences. In some ways, it is an unsettling idea in the sense that we are never alone in our bodies. It does have a reassuring feel that we carry more than just ourselves.

Thinking of the body as home in this way reshapes how I think of identity. It disagrees with total independence and reminds us that we are always surrounded by others. Living in a body is about living with others.

 

 

In “Losing Home” by Eli Clare, he mentions how the difficulties of leaving his so called ‘home’ caused some major complications that go beyond his identity. At first, he shows great appreciation towards the exposure of queer communities in the city which he has some flaws with it. He finds issues with queer organizations and support groups that advocate for gay and lesbian rights in cities. He says, “…leaving our roots to live in cities; living fearful invisible lives in our rural communities…” (Clare 44), which insulates how someone of his background had two options which generally presented themselves as the worst internal outcomes. It brings some questions if these queer organizations ignore these parts of society because of “…straight rural people, the same folks urban people call rednecks, hicks, clods, and bigots…” (Clare 44), which are usually ignored because they tend to hold conservative views of queer individuals. 

    However, there is the possibility that these queer organizations, mostly individuals, likely are afraid of confronting an unknown territory or ignore due to the negative perception of these isolated places. There are a lot of assumptions that these small-town individuals should move into the city to create “…queer visibility and acceptance by building community among queer people…” (Clare 44), which is normally not possible in rural areas for queers. In addition, these organizations direct their attention to the naturally progressive cities because there are a lot of working class to upper class individuals. Stuff like “…unemployment, inadequate food and housing, unaffordable and inaccessible health care and education…” (Clare 44) are the norm for rural areas, showing how closeted individuals continue to be a challenge to a narrow-minded community. 

    For that reason, this reading expresses similar topics regarding the complications of coming out in a small town to this Japanese manga. It received an adaptation called, “The Summer Hikaru Died” on Netflix. The main character of this show goes through the struggles of hiding his identity from this small town as well as dealing with the loss of his first crush, and this entity who takes the form of his dead crush.