"The queers"

Like bridgetmartha, I also spent a long time thinking and reflecting on Clare's explanation of naming: the words we use to identify ourselve, and the words others use to identify us. I identified with Clare's explanation of queer because it is an identity I share (two posters in my room contain the word "queer"), but it is also fraught. I remember distinctly a moment three years ago while visiting my grandparents. Sitting around the table after dinner, my grandfather said, "I don't mind the queers, I just don't want them trying to turn me queer too." A man who'd been happily married to my grandmother for so many years, father of five, feeling his own heterosexuality so threatened. Had he known I sat silently identifying with "the queers" he may not have said what he said. Before that moment, I'd only understood queer in the reclaimed "We're here! We're queer! Get used to it!" chants featured at neighborhood Pride parades from my childhood. I was aware the word was reclaimed, but hadn't fully understood from what. My grandfather – a man I love and admire deeply – showed me then the sting that word can bring. 

Other words, though, are ones I cannot identify with. As one of the "nondisabled" (as Clare would say), I am often quite unaware of my privilege. However, the same grandfather who taught me the sting of "queer" taught me the way the world constructs disability. As he's lost mobility, small things like raised door jambs, a set of steps, bathtubs, and high shelves make a bigger difference on his quality of life. And I think more and more about how different this experience is for him – someone who has developed impairments over the course of his life, rather than being born with them. I don't think he would take on any of Clare's terms – crip, freak, gimp, disabled – perhaps because even though he has struggled with mobility for at least the 21 years I've been alive, he thinks of himself as before his impairments. I wonder then if claiming a "crip identity" (for example) is filled with the same kind of anxiety as claiming a queer identity after coming out in some way to yourself. At what point may one claim such an identity? At what point may one decide to reclaim an identity?