Brilliant imperfection: grappling with cure

Eli Clare is an American disabled and gender-queer activist and poet, who writes and teaches on disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure follows his first publication of creative non-fiction, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation (Clare 2015), in drawing upon his own experiences at the intersections of disability and queerness to speak to the history and future of disability politics.

Brilliant Imperfection itself comprises 10 chapters in which Clare explores and critiques historical and socio-political aspects of cure – which he describes in the summary blurb on the back of the book as ‘the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed’. He contextualizes this critique by situating it in the American social and political history of disability, and writes in a style that intertwines poetry and prose, and the personal with wider social concerns. The book therefore represents a creative and interpretive critique, which may in some places be experienced by the reader as opaque, but which encourages them to participate in an interpretive relationship with the material presented in a manner that is powerful and challenging.

In terms of the specific aspects of cure that are covered, Clare begins with a critical exploration of the ideology of cure: examining how social understanding of disability as something to be fought against and overcome leads to an association of cure with the ideal of the restoration of health. He broadens this by reference to other medico-social structures, such as diagnosis, which work alongside cure in the mainstream construction of disability, and of disabled ‘body-minds’.

The politics of cure are also considered in detail; particularly in relation to the role of what Clare refers to as the ‘medical industrial complex’, which, he argues, has a specific interest in championing the empirical veracity of claims around diagnosis and cure. This political analysis is further developed with a strong criticism in the role of charity in social understanding of disability – with the suggestion that individual fear concerning disability as a ‘life-draining disorder’ leads non-disabled people to direct their concern for and support of disabled people towards doing increasingly physically challenging sponsored activities with the aim of ‘making the future better and helping “conquer” a disease or disability’ (89). These are contrasted with models of fundraising that Clare argues are not centred on fear, but have social justice at their heart.

Throughout the book, Clare draws on and creates parallels with identities and experiences that would generally be considered to be outside of mainstream social understanding of disability and cure. He does this in order to provide a robust intellectual challenge to the impact of normative social expectations on all who find themselves outside of such expectations and unable, or unwilling, to conform. He draws on characteristics such as gender identity and queerness, race, and class, in order to propose a radical political rethinking of a social order that invokes aims of cure and ‘fixing’ as a tool in the pursuit of an ultimate goal of social conformity. He seeks moments that ‘allow us to turn away from normal’ (original emphasis) and that ‘interrupt the many ways shame hooks us into cure’ (167). He envisages a world that fosters acceptance of human quirks and characteristics; that embraces strength and ingenuity in diverse places, such as ‘the smarts that stretch food stamps to the end of the month’ and ‘the flash of hands signing American Sign Language, or typing on assistive communication devices’; and he wants to live in a world ‘where these moments are common and unremarkable’ (167).

The book brings to mind the great tradition of critical discourses of, for example, anti-psychiatry theorists such as R. D. Laing – and, indeed, Clare’s questioning of the utility of diagnosis, which he argues ‘allows for violence in the name of care’ (48), is reminiscent of Laing’s (1967) The Politics of Experience, which challenges notions of ‘normality’ inherent in thinking around schizophrenia and psychotherapy, and presents an analysis of how the imposition of conformity leads to the potential for alienation and the waste of human potential.

In using his ‘insider’ position, as an activist in domains of which he has personal experience, Clare adds to the voices of other disabled and survivor activists, such as those who contributed to the edited collection Searching for a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies (Russo and Sweeney 2016), in order to challenge that which is socially and politically unhelpful about mainstream, normative, ‘taken for granted’ understandings of, and responses to, disability, mental distress, and other identities and experiences that challenge the social order.

Brilliant Imperfection is a strong, personal, and heartfelt challenge to the dominance of discourses of cure, as experienced by the author. It is a call to arms, in which Clare writes that he has ‘ranted repeatedly about cure and the medicalization of disabled people’ (12) and invokes the generations of disabled activists who have, across the decades, implored the medical communities and the wider non disabled world to ‘leave our body-minds alone. Stop justifying and explaining your oppressive crap by measuring, comparing, judging, and creating theories about us’ (12). As such, the book will be of interest to disabled people concerned with developing their own socio-political identities around critiques of dominant orthodoxies of cure. It should also be required reading for professionals working across medical, health, and social care communities that uphold and reproduce such cure-centred orthodoxies in order that they might understand and transform the experiences of those with, and for whom, they work.

Gillian Loomes
School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
[email protected]
© 2018 Gillian Loomes
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2018.1438049