Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis(D/C: Dis/color)

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

About the Author :
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.

Review :

"Disabling Relations continues the field-changing work of conceptualizing disability as integral to global class relations. Kazemi provides an unflinching analysis of the ways in which state violence produces both mass injury and sociopolitical wounds. She offers up transnational disability theory and praxis as a way forward for disability studies. Her carefully contextualized case studies elucidate the significant lacuna of state violence in disability studies in particular and exceptionalist critical theory in general. Disabling Relations is a must-read."--Rachel da Silveira Gorman, Professor in Critical Disability Studies at York University

"Disabling Relations could not be more timely. Sona Kazemi introduces the analytical tool transnational disability theory, guiding readers through a theoretical landscape in which, as she argues, 'there are no simple ways to explain whose side we are on.' It's rare to find a book of such nuanced theory that is also centered upon lived experience and firsthand research with survivors of incarceration, acid attacks, war, and torture. Disabling Relations is a field-transforming and unique work."--Margaret Price, Professor and Director of the Disability Studies Program at The Ohio State University

"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