Description: How do we learn to defetishize disability in our everyday lives? In Disabling Relations, Sona Kazemi probes this and other questions that consider how processes and relations of patriarchy, imperialism, and religious fundamentalism, as well as class and ideology, rework the dialectics of disability in transnational contexts.
Kazemi focuses on the disabled dissidents who were incarcerated and tortured by the Islamic regime in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution in Iran, the disabled veterans and civilians wounded during and after the Iran-Iraq War, the disabled survivors of state-sanctioned punitive limb amputation, and the disabled women survivors of acid attacks as a form of gender-based violence. Disabling Relations explains how disabled bodyminds are produced and sustained through the violence of patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist, nationalist, and theocratic social relations. Kazemi uses the theoretical concept of "wounding" as a historical process of becoming and remaining disabled mediated by unequal power relations and "disability consciousness" to show how these survivors come to terms with their disability. Thinking about critical disability theory in a new way, Kazemi investigates how disability is produced transnationally and the impact that this new theorization can make globally. In the series Dis/colorReview Quotes:
"With Disabling Relations, Sona Kazemi bears active witness to disabled bodyminds under the Islamic Republic of Iran--war veterans, political prisoners, punitive amputees, and acid-attack survivors. Through a historical-materialist analysis and deep ethical involvement, she reveals how patriarchal, capitalist, and authoritarian forces actively produce disability. In constant dialogue with these situated realities, Kazemi both develops and applies a transnational lens, revealing how local experiences of disable-makings are bound up with global systems of exploitation. This book opens pathways toward solidarity, infrastructures of care, and possibilities for disability justice."--Dr. Shokoufeh Sakhi, writer, activist, and survivor of eight years of political imprisonment