Abstract
Over the past several years, we have been engaged in human-rights/disability-rights activism and organizing with disabled and/or traumatized survivors who have been victims of the state violence (e.g., war, incarceration, forced migration). As we interviewed them, documented their narratives, and/or read their prison memoirs, we re-lived our own past experiences with state violence as two racialized Middle Eastern women who have experienced incarceration in Turkey and Iran. Given our experiences, and being Disability Studies (DS) scholars and feminists, we have developed a new model to approach disability and disablement in the global southern/“third world” contexts. Herein, we narrate a real-life story of incarceration, torture, and hunger strike that has resulted in permanent disability. Following that we introduce our Transnational Disability theory to set the foundation for a historical and dialectical materialist understanding (DHM) of disablement. Finally, we apply the new model to our interviewee's narrative and analyze it through a DS lens. We end the paper by offering future directions for DS and Ethnic Studies scholars, prison abolitionists, and/or disability-rights activists who are enthusiastic about using the transnational disability approach in theory and political praxis.
Highlights
Over the past several years, we have been engaged in human-rights/disability-rights activism and organizing with disabled and/or traumatized survivors who have been victims of the state violence
As we interviewed them, documented their narratives, and/or read their prison memoirs, we re-lived our own past experiences with state violence as two racialized Middle Eastern women who have experienced incarceration in Turkey and Iran
We end the paper by offering future directions for Disability Studies (DS) and Ethnic Studies scholars, prison abolitionists, and/or disabilityrights activists who are enthusiastic about using the transnational disability approach in theory and political praxis
Summary
The first construct we extracted from the case study and put toward building our new theory is historicity. The nation’s diversity inherited from the Ottoman era was completely suppressed and hegemonized into one identity: Turkishness This extreme politic of Turkification was broadly practiced, especially in the second part of 1920s, wherein Kurds and other ethnic groups were forced to assimilate. This process was facilitated through new pieces of legislation favouring Turkish language and Turkish culture over any other ethnicity inherited from the Ottoman era. This process can be divided into six categories: fascist Turkish nation-building, imprisonment and torture of Kurds, military invasion of Turkish Kurdistan, prolonging the prosecution of Kurds after coups, using violence to suppress an ethnic group, and Turkification.[51].
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