Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational PRAXIS

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/color

Sona Kazemi is Assistant Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She is the Society for Disability Studies’ 2018 recipient of the honorable mention for the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, and Associate Editor for the Global Ideas’ Section of Review of Disability Studies, An International Journal.