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Clare Freaks and Queers

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Clare Freaks and Queers 1J~' /Il~.' :", c.) ,Freal<s and Queers I: Naming Exile and Pride Handicapped. A disabled person sits on the street, begging for her next meal. This is how we survived in Europe and the United States as cities grew big and the economy moved from a land base to an industrial base. We were beggars, caps in hand. This is how some of us still survive. Seattle, 1989: a white man sits on the side­ 1 'I walle, leaning against an iron fence. He smells of whiskey and .. Disability, urine, his body wrapped in tom cloth. His legs are toothpick-thin, '. !.: knees bent inward. Beside him leans a set ot crutches. A Styrofoam ,., Queerness ! cup, half full of coins, sits on the sidewalk in front of him. Puget :s Sound stretches out behind him, water sparkling in the sun. Tour­ and Liberation 3 ists bustle by. He strains his head up, trying to catch their eyes. "e: Cap in hand. Handicapped.' / Disabled. The car stalled in the left lane of traffic is disabled. Or alternatively, the broad stairs curving into a public building dis­ able the man in a wheelchair. That word used as a noun (the dis­ abled or people with disabilities), an adjective (disabled people), a Eli Clare verb (the accident disabled her): in all its forms it means "unable," but where does our inability lie? Are our bodies like stalled cars? Or does disability live in the social and physical environment, in the stairs that have no accompanying ramp? I think about lan­ guage. I often call nondisabled people able-bodied, or, when I'm feeling confrontational, temporarily able-bodied. But if I call myself South End Press disabled in order to describe how the ableist world treats me as a Cambridge, MA person with cerebral palsy, then shouldn't I call nondisabled peo­ ple enabled? That word locates the condition of being nondisabled, .J: 67 68 ELI CLARE EXILE AND PRIDE 69 not in the nondisabled body, but in the world's reaction to that walking like a monkey. My mother often talked about my birth de­ body. This is not a semantic game. ject. Words bruise a body more easily than rocks and rubber erasers. Cripple. The woman who walks with a limp, the kid who uses Different!J1 abled, physical!J1 challenged. Nondisabled people, braces, the man with gnarly hands hear the word cripple every day wanting to cushion us from the cruelty of language, invented these in a hostile nondisabled world. At the same time, we in the disabil­ euphemisms. In explaining her choice of the word cripple, Nancy ity rights movement create crip culture, tell crip jokes, identify a Mairs writes: sensibility we call crip humor. Nancy Mairs writes: Dijferent!y abled ... parta1(es of the same semantic hopefulness I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me.... People---crip­ that transformed countries from undevewped to underdevewped, pled or not-'wince at the word cripple, as they do not at handi­then to less devewped, and finally devewping nations. People have capped or disabled. Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to continued to starve in those countries during the shift. Some re­ see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses alities do not obey the dictates of language.' have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her ex­ Dijfi:rent!J1 abled is simply easier to say, easier to think about than istence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.' disabled or handicapped or crippled. Gimp. Slang meaning "to limp." Gimp comes from the word Freak. I hold fast to my dictionary, but the definitions slip gammy, which hobos in the 18th century used among themselves ~ and slide, tell half stories. I have to stop here. Freak forces me to ~ ~~;': , to describe dangerous or unwelcoming places. Hobo to hobo, pass­ think about naming. '1~:: I():; ~ ,....It [ : ing on the road: "Don't go there. It's gammy." Insider language, Handicapped, disabled, cripple, gimp, retard, dijfi:rent!J1 abled. I un­ f: ., 1."'·' ;::'1' i' :; hobo solidarity. And now a few centuries later, one disabled person derstand my relationship to each of these words. I scoff at handi­ I ~ '. '" greets another, "Hey, gimp. How ya doin?" Insider language, gimp capped, a word I grew up believing my parents had invented Itt~ '•.. solidarity. specifically to describe me, my parents who were deeply ashamed ::;,r :: ,: Ii; Retard. I leamed early that words can bruise a body. I have of my cerebral palsy and desperately wanted to find a cure. I use '"',j:. 11:'11 been called retard too many times, that word sliding off the ).1 ,:1 I the word disabled as an adjective to name what this ableist world , ,,~ ... tongues of doctors, classmates, neighbors, teachers, well-meaning HI does to us crips and gimps. Cripple mal<.es me flinch; it too often ,:; f~ '! strangers on the street. In the years before 'my speech became un­ accompanied the sticks and stones on my grade school play­ <:: ii, :::i I!, p derstandable, I was universally assumed to be "mentally retarded." ground, but I love crip humor, the audacity of turning cripple into a r: When I started school, the teachers wanted me in the "special edu­ word of pride. Gimp sings a friendly song, full of irony and under­ r ;:~ cation" program. My parents insisted I be given yet another set of standing. Retard on the other hand draws blood every time, a ;L~ ji2". diagnostic tests, including an IQ test, and I-being a white kid sharp, sharp knife. In the world as it should be, maybe disabled ~I:~ who lived in a house full of books, ideas, and grammar-school Eng­ people would be different!J1 abled: a world where Braille and audio­ lish, being a disabled kid who had finally leamed how to talk­ recorded editions of books and magazines were a matter of course, scored well. They let me join the "regular" first grade. I worked and hearing people signed ASL; a world where schools were fully overtime to prove those test results right. Still I was retard, monkey, integrated, health care, free and unrationed; a world where univer­ defect on the playground, in the streets, those words hurled at my sal access meant exactly that; a world where disabled people were II body, accompanied by rocks and rubber erasers. Even at home, I not locked up at home or in nursing homes, relegated to sheltered l'l heard their echoes. My father told me more than once to stop employment and paid sweatshop wages. But, in the world as it is, Ij j; I. different!J1 abled, physical!J1 challenged tell a wishful lie. r. I:: Ll: J' 70 ELI CLARE EXILE AND PRIDE 71 j" : i Handicapped, disabled, cripple, gimp, retard, differentlY abled, freak. tions of normality and abnormality, do not? I want to unravel I need to stop here. Freak I don't understand. It unsettles me. I freak, to pull on the thread called history. don't quite like it, can't imagine using it as some politicized dis­ abled people do. Yet I want freak to be as easy as the words queer and cripple. II: Freak Show Queer, like cripple, is an ironic and serious word I use to de­ scribe myself and others in my communities. Queer speaks volumes about who I am, my life as a dyke, my relationship to the domi­ The history of freal<.dom extends far back into western civilization. nant culture. Because of when I came out-more than a decade af­ The court jester, the pet dwarf, the exhibition of humans in Ren­ \1, ter the Stonewall Rebellion-and where-into a highly politicized aissance England, the myths of giants, minotaurs, and monsters all urban dyke community-queer has always been easy for me. I point to this long history, which reached a pinnacle in the mid­ il adore its defiant extemal edge, its comfortable internal truth. Queer 1800s to mid-1900s. During that century, freaks were big enter­ belongs to me. So does cripple for many of the same reasons. Queer tainment and big business. Freak shows populated the United and cripple are cousins: words to shock, words to infuse with pride States, and people flocked to the circus, the carnival, the store­ and self-love, words to resist internalized hatred, words to help front dime museum. They came to gawk at freal<.S, savages, and r~ geeks. They came to be educated and entertained, titillated and re­ ,a:: " forge a politics. They have been gladly chosen-queer by many '~i~ . pulsed. They came to have their ideas of normal and abnormal, su­ >4J'; "-Ii' gayllesbian/bi/trans people, cripple, or crip, by many disabled people. ,.'"'1il.­ I""f perior and inferior, their sense of self, confirmed and strengthened. :.:;1.( ! ~ another story. Unlike and it has not been :~~~ , . Freak is queer crip, '" 4 And gawk they did. But who were they gaWking at? This is where I ,.t, widely embraced in my communities. For mefreak has a hurtful, .....< ~.'_~ WI want to start. '::;:::1 V '" scary edge; it takes queer and cripple one step too far; it doesn't feel ~,~,f" $.i:~ Whatever these paying customers-rubes in circus lingo-be­ j.,." good or liberating. ":::ii lieved, they were not staring at freal<.s of nature. Rather, the freak f.~ This profusion of words and their various relationships to !~.l\ show tells the story of an elaborate and calculated social construc­ :;:1 ~ marginalized people and politicized communities fascinates me.
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