introduction
time

Before reading
◇Strobe pine

Chapter 1 | The Ideology of Healing
◇Convulsions and tremors
Chapter 2 | The Violence of Healing
◇Maple tree
Chapter 3 | Healing and Complicity
◇Stone
Chapter 4 | The Nuances of Healing
◇Sora shell
Chapter 5 | The Structure of Healing
◇Sora-ge
Chapter 6 | How Healing Works
◇Rolling
Chapter 7 | In the Heart of Healing
◇Cairo tree
Chapter 8 | Embracing Healing
◇Drag queen
Chapter 9 | The Impact of Healing
◇Survival Notes
Chapter 10 | The Promise of Healing
◇Riding a bicycle

Acknowledgements
clear
Translator's Note
main
References
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What conditions has society defined as “problems” and “cured”?
"Healing is an ideology that has permeated white Western thought and culture."

Healing, in the sense of curing an illness and making it better, always presupposes a 'defective' and 'problematic' state, which, according to the author, is a political definition.
This is because the powerful groups with medical, scientific, and national authority have declared people with disabilities, people of color, and queers as defective beings and have wielded violence and oppression in the name of healing.
In this history, the characteristics of the dominant group—white, wealthy, able-bodied, and cisgender—became the standard for what was “natural” and “normal,” and the countless bodies and minds that did not fall into this category were relegated to beings of no value and in need of elimination.


『Dazzlingly Imperfect』 argues that this concept of 'healing' has permeated every corner of modern culture and value systems, functioning as a kind of ideology that preaches 'normality.'
According to Claire, the ideology of healing permeates even very everyday tools, as well as medical technologies like selective abortion, which are still practiced.
For example, commonly sold skin-whitening creams reinforce racist messages that dark-skinned bodies are unattractive and immoral, perpetuating white supremacy.

『Dazzlingly Imperfect』, which structurally explores the structure, operation, purpose, cases, and promises of 'healing' as a powerful mechanism that operates normalcy, does not simply say that we should reject healing.
This is a radical proposal to establish a new framework for understanding pain and healing, health and recovery, by understanding the political and economic power relations surrounding healing.


Bodies and minds that adapt, negotiate, depend, and desire
Beyond Overcoming and Healing, About the Colorful Possibilities of Imperfect Beings

Consider some common tropes used in disability and illness campaign advertising.
Christopher Reeve, the lead actor in "Superman," who became paralyzed in a horse riding accident and constantly yearned to stand on his own two feet while seeking cutting-edge treatments.
Whoopi Goldberg on a billboard proclaiming that anyone can overcome dyslexia if they try.
Numerous disabilities and diseases are consumed as symbols of bad luck and injustice.
Dazzlingly Imperfect argues that the dominant view of disability as a “flaw” and a problem to be “overcome” reduces disability to an individual problem and erases the social context and issues surrounding disability and illness.


Rather than risking enormous costs and side effects to repair paralyzed legs, what if society allowed people to travel anywhere in wheelchairs? How would the lives of the deaf and blind change if access to various languages, including sign language and Braille, were guaranteed? If the stigma surrounding mental illness were lessened, wouldn't the experiences of seeing hallucinations and hearing voices be less terrifying? "Dazzlingly Imperfect" proposes a shift from the current focus on medical healing to examine the disabling of specific bodies and minds.


This book does not insist on a single, unified position opposing healing as a strategy for asserting disability identity and self-esteem.
In the latter part of the book, Eli Clare confesses his journey as a female-to-male (FTM) transgender person to choosing breast reconstruction surgery and testosterone treatment, and he reflects intensely on the self-contradiction, healing, and politics of desire he experienced along the way.
The author, who is objectively aware of his own privilege as a white person and his own positionality as a person with congenital cerebral palsy, illuminates the various ways in which people of diverse races, classes, genders, illnesses, and sexualities relate to healing.
It demonstrates that minority pride and identity can be compatible with healing, and thoughtfully discusses how asserting self-esteem can be challenging for those with intersectional identities.
Exploring the possibilities of solidarity based on diverse identities and differences, "Dazzlingly Imperfect" will serve as a valuable guide to the evolving discourses on disability, queerness, gender, and feminism.


Literary imagination that revives erased and forgotten beings
Clare's solidarity extends to the environment and non-human creatures.

Beginning with the suffering of individuals, this book expands to include the lives of minorities throughout history and even non-human creatures, and its format is also noteworthy.
Chapter 7, "In the Heart of Healing," tells the story of Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma Buck, who were branded "mentally retarded" and forced to undergo sterilization under eugenics laws.
Eli Clare imagines Carrie Buck's voice based on various literature and sources, and makes her the narrator of the text.
Claire's narrative, which revives the voices of those left in the blank spaces of history, questions them, and speaks to them, breathes special vitality and literary imagination into this book.

In 『Dazzlingly Imperfect』, the oppression of minorities by the powerful group expands into the oppression of nature by humans.
The author interprets the 'monoculture' method of growing only one crop as a healing ideology that erases the differences between different bodies and minds and produces only 'normal' beings.
Claire's story is quite chilling, as it reminds us of how much this loss of diversity has destroyed ecosystems.
Rather than thinking of recovery as removing the 'problem' and returning it to its previous state, Claire's unique insight shines through in reimagining 'recovery' from the perspective of reviving the interdependence between diverse organisms.

The prose interspersed between each chapter (Strobe Pine, Cramps and Tremors, Stones, Conch Shells, Rolling, Barrington, Drag Queen, Survival Notes, Bicycle Riding) connects the chapters while paying attention to “moments and feelings that are not subsumed by the arguments and arguments presented in each chapter.”
These writings are Claire's invitation to readers to open their senses and experience the interdependence of nature and humanity.
The work of marking American place names as the territories of Native Americans also reveals Clareman's sensibility, which broadly recognizes the violence and history engraved on nature and land.