Lectures & Keynotes

Eli is a sought-after speaker. Here are some of the speeches he has given.

Resisting Shame // Body Shame, Body Pride // Unhinging Gender from All the Rules
An End to Ableism in Higher Ed // Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies
Digging Deep: Thinking about Privilege // Sex, Celebration & Justice

Resisting Shame, Making Our Bodies Home

(delivered as a keynote at the Trans Health Conference, 2008, and the Gender Odyssey Conference, 2008)

“I come to this gathering thinking about shame—that chasm of loathing lodged in our bodies, a seemingly impenetrable fog, an unspeakable and unspoken fist. Shame all too often becomes our home. This is what I want to talk about, even though it’s one of those topics that makes us restless, uncomfortable, off balance. I could start with the politics of where shame comes from, how violence and media images, stereotypes and lies, weave together to become shame’s fertile ground. I could start with what we tell ourselves about pride, how we pair shame and pride as opposites and act as if there's a distinct passage between the two. I could start with the ways in which trans communities talk around the edges of shame, using the language of body dissonance and gender dysphoria. But this afternoon I want to strike at the center, to talk directly about the raw, overwhelming mess that shame is....”
(Read more from "Resisting Shame, Making Our Bodies Home.")

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Body Shame, Body Pride:
Lessons from the Disability Rights Movement

(first delivered as a keynote at the FORGE Forward Conference, 2007)

“Tonight I want to span the distance between disability politics and trans experience. Of course I could start with the substantial presence of disabled folks in trans communities, and by disability I mean cognitive, learning, sensory, and psych disability, as well as physical ones. Or start with the truisms about bringing experiences of multiple oppressions and identities to our work. Or start with the overdue need for accessible spaces, the importance of integrating ableism into our understanding of oppression. But really I want to delve beyond the rhetoric we often don’t pay attention to and think hard about three lessons I’ve learned from the disability rights movement. The first is about naming; the second, about coming out and disclosure; the third, about living in our familiar, ordinary bodies....”
(Read more from "Body Shame, Body Pride.")

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Unhinging Gender from All the Rules

(first delivered as remarks at the R.U.1.2? Queer Community Center’s fundraising dinner, 2005)

“….I don’t want to be the token trans person here on stage tonight. I don’t want us to forget that the history of gay, lesbian, and bi peoples is woven with trans and gender variant peoples. I don’t want the T to be simply an afterthought in the alphabet soup. And so I ask you a question, a real question full of fierceness and compassion. Who among us in this room has not broken a gender rule....”
(Read more from "Unhinging Gender from All the Rules.")

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An End to Ableism in Higher Education

(first delivered as a keynote at the annual gathering of the Association of Higher Education and Disability, 2004)

“….Let me start with a story. 1969 in the backwoods of Oregon, I started the “regular” first grade after a long struggle between my parents and school officials who wanted me in the “special education” room. When I was two, my parents had taken me to a state-run hospital where a seemingly endless number of doctors, physical therapists, speech pathologists, psychologists, and who-knows-who-else put me through a battery of tests, designed, I suppose, to figure out what was “wrong” with me. I didn’t yet talk and so was given an IQ test that relied not on verbal skills but on fine motor coordination. And I, being a spastic little kid with cerebral palsy, failed the test miserably. I simply couldn’t manipulate their blocks, draw their pictures, or put their puzzles together. In the end they diagnosed me as ‘mentally retarded’....”
(Read more from "An End to Ableism in Higher Education.")

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Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies

(lecture given at Michigan State University for a symposium called Border Crossings, 2004)

“….Sometimes we who are activists and thinkers forget about our bodies, ignore our bodies, or reframe our bodies to fit our theories and political strategies. For several decades now, activists in a variety of social change movements, ranging from black civil rights to women’s liberation, from disability rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans liberation, have said repeatedly that the problems faced by any marginalized group of people lie, not in their bodies, but in the oppression they face. But in defining the external, collective, material nature of social injustice as separate from the body, we have sometimes ended up sidelining the profound relationships that connect our bodies with who we are and how we experience oppression....”
(Read more from "Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies.")

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Digging Deep: Thinking about Privilege

(first delivered as a keynote at the Against Patriarchy Conference, 2003)

“….How do we make the space to talk honestly and wrenchingly about all the multi-layered systems of injustice that target some of us and privilege others for who we are? The layers are so tangled: gender folds into disability, disability wraps around class, class strains against race, race snarls into sexuality, sexuality hangs onto gender, all of it finally piling into our bodies. I dare say everyone in this room has stories of both oppression and privilege. How do we dig down to find, not uncrackable, unmovable rhetoric, but the concrete daily material, emotional, and spiritual realities of privilege and oppression on this planet rife with injustice....”
(Read more from "Digging Deep.")

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Sex, Celebration & Justice

(keynote written for the Queerness and Disability Conference, 2002)

“...On one hand, as queers, we are perverse, immoral, depraved, shaped as oversexed child molesters or as invisible creatures, legislated out of existence. And on the other, as crips, we are entirely desexualized or fetishized or viewed as incapable of sexual responsibility. What a confounding maze of lies and stereotypes. We are the wheelchair using fag quad who can’t find a date, the bi woman amputee sought after, pursued, even sometimes stalked, by devotees—those mostly straight men who fetishize amputations—the cognitively disabled dyke who is told in so many ways that she’s simply a sexual risk to herself and the world....”
(Read more from "Sex, Celebration, and Justice.")

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Presentations Subpages

• What Eli Offers
• Lectures & Keynotes
  • Resisting Shame
  • Body Shame, Body Pride
  • Gender Rules
  • An End to Ableism
  • Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies
  • Thinking about Privilege
  • Queer Disability
• What’s Coming Up
• Where Eli’s Been