Eli Clare is a disability rights and trans rights scholar/activist. His latest book is a hybrid work of poetry and creative-writing—Unfurl: Survivors, Sorrows and Dreaming, [Below he references disability scholar Margaret Price’s concept of the unified “bodymind.”]
Riki Wilchins: Before the recording started, we were saying that one of the things we both like about dogs and nature is that they don’t indulge in this toxic curiosity we get in from others in our lives. It reminds me of Perry Zurn’s 2021 book, Curiosity and Power The Power of Inquiry which talks about the power dynamics inherent in this intrusive and entitled curiosity often visited on minority bodies. Such as when random cis people ask me to explain my surgeries or the state of my genitals. Or when you write about how complete strangers come up and ask “What’s your defect?” You seem to have anticipated the emerging subfield of curiosity studies way back in 2003 with your piece Gawking, Gaping and Staring—which is a great title by the way. Were you prescient? Or just ahead of ahead of the curve?
Eli Clare: The experience of being gawked at and stared at is one of the first experiences I can remember. It started as soon as I was in public. And it was a long time before I was ready to explore what that experience meant to me and how those experiences are connected to wider histories of objectification and sensationalization. So I don’t think I was being prescient: I was simply exploring something that has so shaped my life.
RW: It’s interesting that some of the first writing we have about this comes not from the abled side of trans studies, but from the disabled side, in realizing that curiosity is not to be taken for granted but something trans studies needs to unpack.
EC: It’s not the curiosity in and of itself is a bad thing. But there are deep questions about power and marginalization, about what kind of information we feel entitled to and what is private, and about why people are curious about specific things. I often say that the center of my politics around curiosity isn’t about shutting curiosity off, but about quieting it. Let’s just quiet our curiosity and learn by observing and listening, rather than inserting ourselves in people’s lives.
RW: I was just asked by a little child last week, Are you a boy or a girl? Whie I’m never happy with the question, to me it was honest spontaneous curiosity—there was no malice there. At least not yet! To me it feels very different from some guy who walks up and demands, Hey, are you a man or a woman?To me that’s not curiosity, but a demand that I explain myself to them in a way where the question itself is intended to stigmatize and shame.
EC: I think it’s a little more nuanced because even that child’s question—Are you a boy or girl?—is not entirely innocent because it reflects how we live in this binary that insists that everyone gets categorized. For the kid who asks me, Why do your hands shake? My shaky hands are only notable to them because they’re already living in a world that tells them that humans shouldn’t shake. So even questions that don’t feel hostile are still connected to larger systems of power and privilege.
RW: Good point. Susan Styker spoke in an interview last month about her sometimes controversial idea of social disability as a way to common way to approach some trans and disabled bodies. Society constructs the world in ways that disadvantages and erases certain kinds of bodies, which is the bigger disability. I don’t recall you writing about this frame specifically, but it does seem to echo points you’ve raised elsewhere. For instance, in Resisting Shame, Making Our Bodies Home you talk about structures that “turn our bodies into problems to be solved.”
EC: I’ve not engaged with that idea specifically, but that model is completely connected to a part of disability politics that says that ableism is often a bigger force in disabled people’s lives than our impairments, as well as how the built environment creates lack of accessibility. Many the parts of our bodyminds that are disabling would not be disabling except for material conditions in which we must live. If being trans has done nothing else for me, it’s really made me aware that I need to pay attention to what my bodymind is telling me, whether I like it or not.
RW: In Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness, you write, “I want to write about the body not as metaphor, symbol or representation, but simply as the body—to write about my body, our bodies in all their messy reality.” I really share that desire too. And also to read the work of others. But then I recall the special Trans Studies Quarterly issue on “Towards a Trans[]Crip Theory and I was struck that none of the pieces seemed to engage with those messy realities.
EC: The messiness, the contradiction of bodies, what we adore about bodies, what we despise about our bodies, knowing that we need to pay attention to our bodies and knowing that our bodies aren’t necessarily going to conform to systems or theories or what the medical industrial complex thinks or wants from them. I have spent decades now writing about my body and other people’s bodies. One of the bars I set for myself is asking, Is what I’m saying grounded in the lived experience of bodyminds?I’m also not surprised that the TSQissue stayed in the realm of theory because it was academic. Because trans studies has gone the way of queer studies in terms of high theory. And some of that theory is often very, very disembodied.
RW: I just I’m going to very gently disagree a tiny bit. I still believe that you can write deeply theoretical stuff that is about the reality of bodies. In fact, I think bodies and what we do with them and how we live in them is so important that it demandsthat we theorize deeply about it. And when we disembody high theory, we do ourselves a disservice.
EC: So here’s an interesting question on that: who are the high theorists that you’re engaging with write powerfully about material embodied experience.
RW: Granted, it’s only a handful right now—folks like Florence Ashley and Billy Huff. But I still have hopes.
One of the things that I find frustrating about your writing—and I think intentionally so—is its constant refusal to offer a resolution to tough questions. You often refuse to let the reader find a comfortable place or reach the easy answer. It’s almost like you’re spinning the written equivalent of the lack of resolution that can come for some living in a disabled body, and allowing the reader to feel that. Okay—so you’re smiling and nodding so I’ll just stop there…
EC: Oh, absolutely. I want that the discomfort of not finding easy resolution. I want that to be a provocation. I want to provoke people. I want that discomfort to be part of our figuring out what it means that we live in this world shaped by rules that are constricting and damaging. Because these are human made rules, so we can unmake them.
RW: If you’ll allow a really personal question, you talk about how you knew almost from birth the ways your body was different because of its disability. But then there must have been a point at which you realized you were transgender, and not only that but that you also were attracted to male-bodied creatures. Is there a point at which you thought: Oh no, not thistoo. I have enough on my plate.
EC: There’s no guessing how this is all going to unfold for us. And it certainly unfolded to me in a series of what felt like a cosmic joke. By the time I came out as a dyke in the early 80s, I was 17 and 18 and I made good home in the lesbian community as a soft butch, and then a harder butch. I knew more about my gender when I was nine than I did when I was 18 or 19. And over time, the gender door started to open again. I knew that boymade no sense, and I knew girl made no sense. So by my early 30s, I was like, Dammit, I’m going to lose the only community home I know.And I threw temper tantrum after temper tantrum after temper tantrum. There were these trans masculine people—even though that wasn’t the language of the time—and they were so attractive and it was like, Do I want to fuck them? Do I want to be them? Do I want both?And the answer was, Yes I want both. But I did not want to lose the lesbian community. And there was this incredible process over a number of years of dealing with internalized transphobia, of unlearning lessons of the gender binary, and of I don’t know how I’m going to go find the medical care I need because—as a disabled person—my life experiences with the medical industrial complex have not been good.
RW: Transitioning on top of all that must have been extraordinarily tough.
EC: Right? So, so transition was one thing, but when it became clear that I wanted medical transition, I was thinking, Am I going to willingly interact with more doctors that want to pathologize who I am?And the answer was that I wanted access to the medical technology enough that I was willing to navigate more pathologizing.
RW: I think it’s in Defective, Deficient, and Burdensome: Thinking About Bad Bodies you say that you have no idea who you’d be without the tremoring and tense muscles and slurred voice. Because this also makes you who you are. You also talk about this in your book Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. And I’m challenged by that. On one hand, I know that who I am and almost everything I feel I’ve accomplished in life are connected with my experiences of being a trans person. And I don’t want to lose that. But there’s this other part of me that still turns green with envy over the kids I see going on blockers and hormones and having a quote-unquote cis-normative puberty. And there is a deep part of me that I don’t talk about very much which still wonders who I would be and what body I would have and how I would look like if I’d had those advantages.
EC:God, that’s so real, Riki. That’s so real. I’ve said that about living with trembling hands, but I can also say that I live with chronic pain. And although pain shapes who I am and how I move in the world, if there was a pill that would take that chronic pain away, I’d take that in half a heartbeat. But I can feel one way about my tremors, and I can feel entirely different about chronic pain. So again, there’s this refusal of resolution.
RW:Thank you. In the book Exile and Pride, you critiqued some trans people’s use of “disability” as a tool to access health care. I was there when Sen. Jesse Helms insisted on excluding gender identity from the American’s with Disabilities Act as a condition of passage which resulted in thousands of low-income, uninsured trans people losing access to medical care they might have otherwise have had. Unfortunately, the medical system forces us to claim either that we have a disability or a mental condition in order to get the same procedures and medications that cis people get, simply by saying they want it.
EC: So let me clarify my critique. I don’t have any issue with trans people using disability law to leverage rights, justice, or medical care. My critique is that if non-disabled trans people are going to leverage those policies and laws, they should be paying attention to what disabled people are doing and the lived conditions out of which those policies and laws have grown. Because then trans people have a responsibility to be less ableist.
Also, they need to stop saying things like, “We just need good, respectful health care like disabled people get”and this kind of using disabled people as a metaphor or analogy.
RW: Yeah, the medical complex often provides care to disabled people in ways that are neither goodnor respectful.
Susan Stryker has certainly done a lot to mine the idea of monstrosity, and you’ve also mined words like freak. I confess I just can’t seem to get to either one of those places. I totally get the argument that there’s a lot of good stuff invested in terms like that which we need to recover and reclaim. But I also find myself resonating sometimes with the trans people who just long for a certain kind of gender normality, and who don’t want to think of themselves in terms of monstrosity or freakiness. Again, it’s one of those frustrations that it’s impossible to resolve.
EC: So it isn’t an easy embrace, right? I don’t understand why I love the word queer and hate the word freak. How we embrace language is complicated and contradictory. To reach towards normality is to talk a little about abnormality because it only exists in relationship to it. This opposition to abnormal/normal only has so much power because abnormalcarries so much danger with it. I yearn to live in a world wherenormal does not exist, but familiarand ordinary do, because they have completely different valences to me and aren’t so full of danger.RW: Good point. His latest book is Unfurl: Survivor,’ Sorrows and Dreaming from Duke University Press: Eli, thank you for being with Assigned Media today.
