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Cripping Histor(iograph)y in the Middle East
Abstract by Dr. Sona Kazemi
Coauthors: Efrat Gold
On Session   (New Histories of Disability in the Modern Middle East)

On Wednesday, November 13 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
We define “cripping histor(iograph)y” as documenting, engaging, and interpreting the lives of disabled and mad people who have either lived in the past, live in here and now, or will/should be living in the future. We used this epistemology to resist disabled and mad people’s erasure from the past and from the future, and therefore, from here and now, as it is the erasure from temporality that slowly creeps in and facilitates the erasure from here and now. To have an inclusive future that values, invites, and desires disability, madness, and alternative ways of being in the world, we must resist dissolving into sameness. It is ableism and sanism along with other forms of oppression that should be abolished, not our insanities and disabilities. As such, in this paper, we engage in “cripping histor(iograph)y” by writing disabled people back into their own histories and exposing the embedded ableism in documenting history, memory, and memoirs, especially as it relates to mass atrocities and systemic violence. To transnationalize disability as a material reality and to address the significant gaps in the literature around the experiences of Middle Eastern peoples with disability, madness, and trauma, we engage in cripping Iran’s prison history of the 1980s by attending to the disabled and mad dissidents who became disabled through systemic torture. We interviewed more than 30 former political prisoners who survived torture and imprisonment in the 1980s in Iran, and now live in exile as part of the Iranian diaspora. Using the Transnational Disability Model (Kazemi, 2017) rooted in Dialectical Historical Materialism, we theorize dissidents’ disability as a “response-ability” against the totalizing state violence (Sakhi, 2014) and demonstrate how disability/madness is a historical-materialist construct, not a fixed biomedical pathology, mediated by power relations. Following Marx’s Consciousness Theory, embodied experiences of violence (state-sanctioned, ableist, and gender-based) become a point of departure for survivors to develop political consciousness and transform themselves, and society, as public pedagogues. - There can be radical possibilities rather than “limiting tragedies” that need to be “fixed” by medicalization and psychiatrization. We explore disability’s meanings in relation to the material conditions under which people are forced to function in the Middle East, seeking to theorize how people become and remain disabled due to state violence, and how they come to terms with what happens to them as politically conscious agents and actors.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None