The Supercrip story is one that sticks with me, one that I think about every day. Supercrip – the disabled people who “overcome” their disability and become inspirations for people.

The dominant paradigm is, I think, that these Supercrips are people who have a single “severe” disability. As Clare gives as examples – “A boy without hands bats .486 on his Little League team. A blind man hikes the Appalachian Trail form end to end. An adolescent girl with Down's syndrome learns to drive and has a boyfriend. A guy with one leg runs across Canada.” [2] In these examples, every individual is described with their disability as the focus, and they have a singular disability or their disability is condensed to a single word/idea.

In the area where I am from, there are no mountains. Unlike Eli Clare, I am from a place often called "the flyover zone", the Midwest, an area that's an odd mix of East Coast-style urban mixed with urban sprawl and some incredible, ingrained, capitalist prejudice, slowly mixing and melding into a "bible belt" of slowly failing rural areas, ex-urban housing developments, and liberal urban transplants trying to make their environmentalist beliefs into a reality. Like Clare's northwest, there are many people who believe they are on some sort of frontier, a cutting edge of independence--yet in most cases they are continuing an era that is dying out.

Clare’s idea of the body as home keeps coming back to me as I think about intersections of the author’s identities. In “The Mountain,” Clare discusses the conflict between claiming one’s own body and simultaneously having that body claimed by someone else, and having it violated, and oppressed. It wasn’t until he found friends and support from the queer community that he was able to take pride in that aspect of his identity. Not until he became aware of a vast community of people who self identify as “crips” and “gimps” did he come to claim his own disabled body as home. This made me think about our discussion of horizontal and vertical identities.

Until I left home, I never saw myself as brown.

Until I stumbled into places of whiteness, I did not know that I was an other.

Until I came to Bryn Mawr, I did not know the term “person of color”—partially due to my own ignorance, but mostly because that was not how I had ever seen myself.  I know now that that was a privilege.

In Exile & Pride, Clare seemed to express his identity as manifest in his desire. This, to me, is the most apparent aspect of Clare's identity. Yes, in "The Mountain," expressed a wish to not have others see him in the context of making progress toward an ableist ideal. This comparison, further fleshed out through "freaks and queers," highlights this comparison to an ideal. My favorite aspect of Sociology is the study of deviance, and I frequently reflect on a quote by Howard Becker: "Instead of asking why deviants want to do things that are disapproved of, we might better ask why conventional people do not follow through on the deviant impulses they have." Identity is informed by others, but why must it be in comparison to an ideal?

Throughout the his introduction in Exile & Pride, "The Mountain," Eli Clare consistently describes himself using slurs--for example, many that the nondisabled have assigned to the disabled--'crip,' 'supercrip,' 'gimp,' etc. Some of these, he addresses and explores in depth what it means to identify with and reclaim these names. He works through the many meanings and usages of 'redneck' in a later chapter, tying it to how he identifies with his home while expressing the conflict it creates between his multiple identities, given that its most damaging, stereotyping usage is that taken on by "progressives, including many who are queer: ... 2. Used as a synonym for every type of oppresive belief except classism"  (qtd. in Clare 33).