Stratification of Non-normative Identities

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. What makes horizontal identities less comfortable than vertical identities is the same reason that group identities within the disabled community and the queer community are founded on alliance and pride. There's a discomfort in choosing to be an active member of a community that has stigma attached to it. Clare comes back again and again to his point about intentionally using words that shock and words that cause people to wince. By taking words once used to oppress and turning them into something that holds power, those words have the ability to unify people but also run the risk of separating them.

In "Freaks and Queers," Clare discusses of the semantic game we play when choosing descriptors for ourselves and for each other. He's chosen his labels carefully and has extensive reasoning for why each one fits him and why others don't. I think this is another example of how we come to identify with our horitontal communities in a different if not more intentional and powerful way than we do with some of our vertical identities. Within the larger identities of "queer" and "disabled" there are, of course, many branches within them. The tensions Clare discusses between gay men, lesbian women and bisexual people, are similar in reasoning to the tensions between, in Clare's example, the tension between he and his deaf childhood classmate. There seems to be a need to stratify groups in order to hold some kind of power over each other even with the constant oppression and discrimination of normative cultures.

I wonder what would need to happen to break the cycle of continued stratification and reduce the need to be "better" or closer to the norm? Where are those lines drawn, and who draws them?