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Disability, Gender and Infrastructure in Populist Authoritarian Turkey
Abstract by Mine Egbatan On Session I-11  (Authoritarian Practices and Gender)

On Monday, November 11 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Turkey is increasingly described as a populist authoritarian country, governed in the name of “the people” by a party that has seized control of most parts of the state and media. This has also coincided with extensive investments in large-scale infrastructure projects as “development,” and a populist weaponization of culture, “us” versus “them,” that hinges on patriarchal gender norms. Populist authoritarianism in Turkey increasingly features the promise of providing infrastructure as tangible “development,” but only for those citizen-subjects who fall under the category of “decent”, “patient”, and “loyal”—in other words, deserving in very gendered ways. Disabled women have been especially affected by these trends as their mobility is often intimately imbricated with the infrastructure provided by the state. At the same time, disability is profoundly gendered in Turkey (like elsewhere), and the country’s patriarchal norms shape how some disabled women experience their conditions, and how they seek to improve their lives. This research examines how disabled women navigate their everyday lives under such conditions and relate to the populist authoritarian state in Turkey. This research particularly focuses on how infrastructural moment in populist authoritarian context of Turkey affects disabled women’s political practices, strategies, and discourses based on 12 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul and Ankara. By studying the interrelations of the material and the cultural through gender and disability, this research will contribute to the ethnographic and theoretical work on infrastructure, gender and disability as well as everyday authoritarianism and populism.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None