Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University by Matt Brim, and: Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare, and: Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness by M. Remi Yergeau

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University by Matt Brim, and: Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare, and: Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness by M. Remi Yergeau Alison Parks (bio) Matt Brim, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University Duke University Press, 2020, 264 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0820-0 Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure Duke University Press, 2017, 241 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6287-6 M. Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness Duke University Press, 2018, 313 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8223-7020-8 What connects the works of Matt Brim, Eli Clare, and M. Remi Yergeau is their individuated efforts to confront and grapple with the ways in which thought is implicated by the material and bodymind conditions of its [End Page 250] imaginings. Collectively they illustrate the rhizomatic future of the discipline of queer theory/studies. Although they each have queerness as their primary conceptual interlocutor, Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection, Yergeau’s Authoring Autism, and Brim’s Poor Queer Studies, initially seem to be an ill-fitting triangulation. There is a sense that one of them does not belong with the other two, and which one that is changes depending on what criteria one embraces. What ultimately bridges these three works together is how they point to the blind spots in queer theorizing and point toward new ways of doing queer theory. In his own words, Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection is “rooted in the nonnegotiable value of ” diverse bodymind experiences—resisting the white Western impulse to treat the body and mind as distinct entities—and rejecting ideas of normativity (Clare 2014, xvii). With this in mind, he embarks on an exploration of “cure” as an ideology that, especially throughout the history of white Western medicine, has simultaneously inflicted “promise” and “violence” to those whose bodyminds deviate from “some definition of normal and natural ” (15). Clare begins with the definition of cure provided by the American Heritage Dictionary—“the restoration of health”—and sets out to examine and push back against this impetus to cure and to locate the violences inherent in this notion of restoration. Ultimately, however, he ends up finding himself in a “maze of contradictions” (183). Among these contradictions include the difficulties of reconciling anti-cure politics with the experiences of those living with chronic illness, the double-edged sword of diagnosis, and “resist[ing] the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-minds . . . while not equating disability with injustice” (60). Rather than agreeing to resolve these contradictions, Clare implores his readers to sit with them, bear them witness, and imagine the possibility of a world that promises justice instead of cure. Brilliant Imperfection is constructed as a “mosaic” of prose and poetry, histories and personal narratives. The book is divided into ten parts, beginning with the “Ideology of Cure” and ending with the “Promise of Cure.” Each section is divided into a number of subsections that vary in length and form. New parts are introduced by poetic meditations on “Brilliant Imperfection” that illustrate his concept by locating its examples in nature or in life. For example, the first page includes a prose poem titled “Brilliant Imperfection: White Pines.” The poem explains the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century practice of the British Royal Navy laying claim to any white pines over 100 feet tall. It then returns the reader to Clare camping in the forest, noticing those trees that “would never be the king’s trees” for the way they “break and curve,” “split” and “grow bent around and through each other” (1). This opening poem provides an easy metaphor illustrative of the primary thread that runs through this book, namely, that there is beauty and value in the natural world of difference that, in white Western cultures, is often overlooked and devalued in the pursuit of “perfection” and the production/protection of capital, which together drive the impetus toward cure. [End Page 251] As he traces the concept of cure throughout his own life and through the medical-industrial complex, he tells a parallel story of a restored prairie ecosystem near his home that had once been used...