“Stereotypes and lies lodge in our bodies as surely as bullets. They live and fester there, stealing the body.
\nThe body as home, but only if it is understood that the stolen
\nbody can be reclaimed.” (Clare 13)<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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\u2014all it takes\u2014to 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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“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 … Continue reading Living from the Bones<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5017,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5017"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}