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kxiong5's review against another edition
4.0
thinking about it as the opening of many conversations you could go deeper into (history, environmental restoration, land back, etc.), it’s a really good book. And it sits with conflict the way a coalition has to sit with it and still choose to hold together, to care about each other…calling you to actually probe at things you might otherwise assume are monolithic or absolute bc they are the given categories and you never really have to think about them unless you do, or you push yourself to. The book’s main takeaway for me: keep paying attention and go out and find the conflicts that emerge through learning and developing a stronger activist politics. Lean into the hard feelings but don’t discredit feelings. Compassion > consistency.
**go back and see your note to yourself about time—the hedging on future cure, the desire to return to an un-disabled past, the need to control the developmental time of the present --> and also think about: how might imagining a future of mutual care rather than letting the future seem like a scary, one-dimensional abstraction be an act of resistance rather than an act of enclosure?
**go back and see your note to yourself about time—the hedging on future cure, the desire to return to an un-disabled past, the need to control the developmental time of the present --> and also think about: how might imagining a future of mutual care rather than letting the future seem like a scary, one-dimensional abstraction be an act of resistance rather than an act of enclosure?
halschrieve's review against another edition
5.0
Clare is a genderqueer living-as-a-man person with cerebral palsy and schizophrenia who has been a disability activist and theorist and speaker for i think a long time. Clare was born in what i think is 1964, based on anecdotes about his childhood, which makes him a little older than my parents and part of the same generation as a few other older queer writers and thinkers and survivors I admire. Brilliant Imperfection is a work that-- like many other works --bends genre in some ways. It is written with extensive citations and brings up/connects many historical dots between ableism, genocide, eugenics, modern pharma companies' profit motive, and environmental destruction and alienation. At the same time, it is accessible, poetic, evocative, emotional, and a work of literature. In my opinion, Clare dances really well between stories of his own experiences as a working-class disabled child whose parents wanted his disability to disappear/who was harmed+abused by schools, institutions, doctors, and family in this context, and stories of the activism and connection he has experienced with other people, and historical analysis. There are passages where he directs his voice AT a historical figure or person with a disability who has been denied agency and sometimes life by mechanisms of medicine and state, which combine profound emotional affect with information. Clare talks about indigenous lands and the genocide that precipitated America a lot. He specifically uses and re-uses a metaphor about the restoration of tallgrass ecosystems in Wisconsin, discussing the nuances of cure: how treatment of an ecosystem's problems can happen, how it must happen, how it is imperfect, how it resists the history of death and genocide against the Dakota people and animals of the prairie , how it cannot revive the dead. Anecdotes about people with disability whose agency is taken from them (Carrie Buck, sterilized in 1925, Molly Daly, taken from her family and incarcerated for decades, beaten inside a locked facility, hidden from her family in the 1950s, a young girl named Ashley with a rare form of cerebral palsy whose parents had doctors perform a hysterectomy and mastectomy on her at the age of 6 and dose her with estrogen so that she would never reach puberty) also contribute to his thesis: that disability and race and gender and order/disorder, man/nature, are artificial and harmful paradigms and their enforcement consistently results in violence, and "cures" to various conditions consistently rely on these paradigms to determine who can live and die. Clare recognizes the ways bodies (he says "body-minds" a lot, which I love) need things that western medicine has sometimes invented, but we cannot live when they are administered using their current structures, which emphasize profits and which prioritize individual bodies over communities, order over life, white heteropatriarchal normalcy over balance and diversity, intelligence without love or recognition over feeling, over empathy, over safety. I LOVE Clare after reading this and can't wait to consume his other works. He is wise, prolific, talented; he describes sliding down his butt over a mountainside and seeing the fungi and small animals that live there and uses this to explain how his specific life experience enables him to look at things with complexity that other people may not reach alone. He communicates so well the need we have for each other and for sustaining systems that resist past violence.
carrienation76's review against another edition
4.0
This is an engrossing read. Clare wraps lived experiences and historical vignettes together with poetry and prose to make an inviting book. Clare takes great care to center queerness, race, class, and gender identity while acknowledging privilege where it exists.
crowcore's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Read this for class, but enjoyed it quite a bit. I'd like to read some of this author's other work in the future.