Anything but What Normal Seems to Be

Anything But What Normal Seems To Be

            “But whatever the differences, all four groups held one thing in common: nature did not make them into freaks. The freak show did, carefully constructing an exaggerated divide between “normal” and Other…” (Exile and Pride pg.87).  This was Eli Clare’s world, a world that stripped him of the ability to feel comfortable with his sexuality and disability, but allowed him to journey beyond what few answers society provided. Throughout “Exile and Pride”, Eli faces multiple failed attempts to find where he fits on this spectrum of normalcy that society has created. By opening up to his audience Eli brings attention to how human beings live within constricted bounds of what normal seems to be by rejecting the odd and unknown and conforming to society’s expectations.

            The word normal began to become commonly used in the 19^th century through the current definition, according to the Oxford dictionary, “conforming to a standard; usual; typical, or expected”. Clearly this word is not one that can define who Eli Clare is and what type of life he’s chosen to lead, but that all seems to depend on which perspective one is holding. For Eli, someone who has chosen to exile himself from what was initially home to where home is now, he is meeting his expectation by leaving a society that did not accept him and entering one that does. Eli states on page 84, “Queer speaks volumes about who I am, my life as a dyke, my relationship to the dominant culture.” By leaving his rural home that typically expects heterosexual relationships to form amongst the community, he has left behind the disappointment of not meeting up to someone else’s standards. On entering this society he is immediately engrossed into a place that understands his sexuality. By coming across a new world that now connects one level deeper to who he is, allows him to put less emotional strain on what he wasn’t.

             However Eli’s journey does not end with discovering his sexuality. He goes onto explain how he feels queered from being queer. “In its largest sense, queer has always been where I belong,” but later states, “I lie when I write that home is being a dyke in a dyke community.” This contradiction has some truth to it though. Sexuality plays a large role in defining his identity, but it is only a portion of what makes him Eli. The very place he grew up in, not the social aspect, but the environment is what drew him in. Unlike people that placed judgments, the environment allowed him to connect by presenting a place where he could be disabled yet still be able to be one with nature. He was unified with the trees, the flowers, the dirt, even the mud and mountains. But this was a place that was being destroyed by the logging industry, a place so dear to heart being ripped away. So even when he could find another place slightly similar to what home was like originally, this home and the home of the dyke community and the idea of still being able were never going to be combined all in one moment.

            Eli struggles to feel at home in one or the other knowing completely that the two will never be fully unified into the utopia he seeks and with “normal”, a word that is so easily adopted by various societies and applied to what majority rules, he may never know where he belongs. Through the reading it always seemed as though he was chasing such an impossible dream. Although it allowed him to branch away from what others tried to define as the standard, he learned about what standards his happiness held. Normal for him is what others deemed as a freak, but the people deemed as freaks may find themselves in normalcy. Eli later mentions in the text, “the desire to create an Other against whom one could gauge her/his normality, ...” This means that even if a society wanted to hold a norm, someone would have to be anything ,but normal in order to compare what normal really is to what society deems is not. His journey is a matter of perspective, depending on which society he is in, who is in it, and what its values are. Eli may very well be that person creating the normality for a society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Clare, Eli. Exile & Pride. Cambridge, MA: South End, 2009. Print.

"Normal." OED. Oxford University, 2014. Web. 26 Sept. 2014. <http://oed.com>.