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While I agree with khinchey's choice of icon for Eli Clare, I'm not sure if I can agree with the choice of username in both the previous post and the root post. In the same passages that you both cite, there is a to+ne of resentment and too much negativity attached on
"At 13 my most sustaining relations were not in the human world. I collected stones - red, green, gray, rust, white speckled with black, black streaked with silver - and kept them in my pockets, their hard surfaces warming slowly to my body heat. . . . Wandered in the hills thick with moss, fern, liverwort, bramble, tree. Only here did I have a sense of body. Those stones warm in my pockets, I knew them to be the steadiest, only untouched parts of myself" (145).
"... I lay myself
in the riffle where stream
meets river, water warmed all day
and still cold, current pulls, finger bones
tremble. I hang onto rocky bottom
long as I can, then give way,
body rushing downstream
to steadier water"
-from "Angels"
Personally, I don't think Clare would define himself as Supercrip in a public setting. He does say that he has supercripdom within himself, but that is not him. He does want supercrip to be dead, as you stated -- as he stated -- and it is not really a slur or identity to reclaim. Instead, it is a falsehood, a societal creation that does nothing but harm and erase disabled people. It is not a term that has been used against anyone as a negative term, like, say, crip, that can be flipped on its head and held up instead of being a tool to put down.
I also believe that Eli Clare would chose to identify himself in this group as "supercrip". The word comes up many times when Eli speaks about dealing with people who are nondisabled. I have never experienced 'crip-theory' in school before and I believe this is the experience of many of the 360 students. Because we are reading Exile and Pride as the first text in two of our three courses, we are giving serious value to Clare's work and assigning him the supercrip label by default (subconciously).
Like Sunshine, I lingered onto the spotted owl/logger conflict. Clare brought a unique perspective to this particular situation, given his familiarity with both the economics of his hometown and the necessity of logging to sustain his community as well as the ecological damage sustained by deforestation--a knowledge particular to 1) those with the class privilege and education to be familiar with ecology and, 2) those who are on the outside looking in, a location from which it is easy to criticize and, furthermore, to scapegoat the "Neanderthal thugs' and 'club-weilding maniacs,'" the "dumb brutes" who are tearing down forests simply as a means of work (52).
I really loved Sunshine's use of Clare's logger story to help formulate an avatar and an identity. I found myself easily overlooking this aspect of Clare as I read the story, because it is so easy to use other, neater, words to label him, such as disabled, trans, or queer. Still, Eli Clare writes about his rural roots as a source of great love and fulfillment, even if they come with immense amounts of pain. For this reason, I chose to use this image of flannel as Clare's potential avatar.
I chose the word crip as Eli Clare's name because while reading crip stood out to me as a defining name that I had never came across. Claire goes into great depth of usage of crip and queer and the reclaiming of both terms. I beleive the term is what Clare identifies with as well as a term that builds a community between him and other disabled people. I chose the landscape of the Elk River as his photo because Claire has a deep connection with nature and references the Elk river as where he first learned about nature. This idea he expands on withing Clearcut: explaining the distance. His attachment to nature he finds is unlike the people he works with while living in the city.
I think Eli Clare would use Supercrip as his username. On page 13 he wrote “Supercrip lives inside my body, ready and willing to push the physical limitations.” Clare wants the idea of “supercrip” to be dead, but until that happens this username could be a way that he reclaims it.
Considering what I've read of Clare so far, I'm taken with his imagery of feeling in his bones. Beyond his frustration with being evaluated in comparison to an ableist ideal, on entirely superficial bases, he discusses the importance of what's under the skin. He frequently expresses that his deepest feelings and beliefs about advocacy and identity resonate internally, in his bones.