Brilliant imperfection : grappling with cure / Eli Clare.

  • Clare, Eli
Date:
2017
  • Books

About this work

Description

"[In this book, the author] uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure, the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. [The author] grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds. The stories [the author] tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, [the author] weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, [the author] adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure. Ultimately [this book] reveals cure to be an ideology grounded in the twin notions of normal and natural, slippery and powerful, necessary and damaging all at the same time."-- Back cover.

Publication/Creation

Durham : Duke University Press, 2017.

Physical description

xxi, 218 pages ; 24 cm

Contributors

Contents

Introduction: writing a mosaic -- A note on reading this book: thinking about trigger warnings -- Brilliant imperfection: white pines -- Ideology of cure -- Birth -- Prayers, crystals, vitamins -- Beliefs about disability -- Overcoming disability -- Hope in motion -- Rebelling against cure -- The restoration of health -- Walking in the prairie -- Brilliant imperfection: twitches and tremors -- Violence of cure -- Defect -- At the center of cure lies eradication -- Personhood is a weapon -- Great turmoil -- Brilliant imperfection: maples -- In tandem with cure -- Cerebral palsy -- Reading diagnosis -- Disorder -- Antibiotics and acupuncture -- The price of diagnosis -- Useful, but to whom? -- Brilliant imperfection: stone -- Nuances of cure -- Wishing you less pain -- Wanting cure -- Birthmark -- Cautionary tale -- Body-mind yearning -- Yearning for the peeper pond -- Jostling my anti-cure politics -- Your suicide haunts me -- Brilliant imperfection: shells -- Structure of cure -- The medical-industrial complex -- A far-reaching network -- Troubled and troubling body-minds -- Variations on cure -- Skin lighteners and hot springs -- Brilliant imperfection: hermit crabs -- How cure works -- Cure just around the corner -- Charity events -- Shifting technologies -- A pharmaceutical history of eflornithine -- Brilliant imperfection: rolling -- At the center of cure -- Carrie Buck I: yearning -- Carrie Buck II: torrent of history -- Carrie Buck III: feebleminded -- Lives reduced to case files -- Living with monkey -- Schizophrenia -- Brilliant imperfection: Myrtle -- Moving through cure -- Choosing disability -- Airports and cornfields -- Interdependence -- Wanting a flat chest -- Gender identity disorder -- Claiming ourselves -- Brilliant imperfection: drag queen -- Impacts of cure -- Endless questions -- Ashley's father -- Resisting intelligence -- Feeling broken -- Being fixed -- Shame and pride -- Brilliant imperfection: survival notes -- Promise of cure -- Normal and natural -- Finding wholeness -- Gender transition -- Bullied -- A maze of contradictions -- Mama, what will you swear? -- Walking in the prairie again -- Brilliant imperfection: cycling.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-208) and index.

Languages

Subjects

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    NH.U
    		Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780822362760
  • 0822362767
  • 9780822362876
  • 0822362872