Rania Kassab Sweis
University of Richmond
Despite great strides made in recent years by anthropologists of gender and sexuality (Ghannam 2013; Inhorn 2012), ethnographies focused exclusively on men, masculinity, and the materiality of the male body in the Middle East are still few and far between. Women, and the adult normative woman body, remain the focus of much of the critical scholarship on gender and the body in the region. Studies exclusively centered on men or child embodiment are less prominent, albeit growing. Salih Can Açiksöz’s Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey therefore adds much to Middle East studies and medical anthropology. By drawing on over two years of robust ethnographic data centered on gazis (disabled veterans) in Istanbul and Ankara, moving from homes to cafes, governmental to non-governmental institutions, archives to medical spaces, life history interviews to first-hand accounts of political protest, Açiksöz vividly captures how sociohistorical and political forces impinge on disabled veterans’ bodies and subjectivities (xv).
The book’s central argument is cogently presented throughout, and in many ways, it is heartbreaking—that the war-damaged bodies of disabled veterans occupy both the center and the margins of normative masculinity, lionized through the masculine ethos of nationalism while also violently expelled from ableist public citizenship (3). As a result, disabled veterans as masculine subjects live in ambivalence, experiencing new forms of embodied subjectivity, community, and political agency (3). Throughout the book, readers gain new understandings of how these veterans manage their physical disabilities in an incredibly ableist society, straddling state-enforced heteronormative masculine expectations and political violence.
I have always been fascinated by paradoxes. However, my scholarly attention towards paradoxes blossomed full force while I was conducting research for my book on global medical humanitarianism for children in Egypt (Sweis 2021). I found that children, humanitarian workers, and I, the ethnographer, constantly negotiated a set of realities that had no simple resolution—interventions helped yet harmed recipients, aid assisted some kinds of suffering, yet simultaneously produced other ones. These kinds of grounded findings leave us in a “grey” zone so to speak, as Açiksöz puts it, or an ambivalent space. Paradoxes present ethical and moral complexities for ethnographers, research interlocutors, and readerships. Açiksöz presents us with a number of richly textured paradoxes to navigate in Sacrificial Limbs. The following are merely two inter-related ones that stood out to me while reading and encourage deeper reflection:
As Açiksöz states, right-wing nationalist movements affectively mobilize whole groups of people that are ultimately harmed by their politics (xxiii). This harm is evident in the data presented, particularly the ways in which the state has repeatedly fallen short on its promise, or “debt” to be paid, to veterans who have sacrificed their material bodies and social worlds in exchange for state sovereignty (see chapter 6). For example, they tackle convoluted state bureaucracies in order to receive benefits they believe are owed to them, benefits that are never enough for them to live comfortably on as male household providers. Thus, they oscillate between “hero” and “beggar.” On detailing their right-wing politics, Açiksöz delves into his own positionality and attempts to adequately translate the suffering of these veterans whose politics he finds “reprehensible and inimical” to his own understandings of justice (xxiii). I found myself thinking about this in the context of the United States as well, where we have witnessed the effects of a populist movement bound to right wing politics, nationalism, and white masculinity.
Next is the paradox resulting from the breakdown of the material male body in Turkey, the source of male economic and sexual productivity. We learn how veterans must negotiate with numerous people and institutions in their quest for income, or for more advanced prosthetic limbs. We come to understand how they wage “prosthetic revenge” when their efforts for fair compensation are thwarted by the state, or how they must reckon with their broken bodies despite sacrificing them for their nation as valiant soldiers. Here, the male body is not merely a biological entity; it is a social product and a producer of life. In an ethnography on urban male masculinity in Cairo, Egypt, Farha Ghannam tells a similar story about men in the Middle East—that the intersections of work demands and gender norms shape the male body and subjectivity (6), sometimes tragically and to their detriment.
As patriarchy is a system in which both men and women participate, I wondered how the women and families of these disabled veterans defined “manhood” and male expectations alongside definitions promoted by the state, as their voices and intimate perspectives were not a central aspect of the book. Still, Açiksöz’s book propels the study of masculinity forward in revolutionary ways, shining light on how disability and state politics fold onto conceptions of what it means to be a man in Turkey. Medical anthropologists benefit from this ethnography because it foregrounds embodiment in a region where the full experiences of men, particularly in the aftermath of political violence, are sparse or dangerously misrepresented.
References
Ghannam, Farha. 2013. Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt. Stanford University Press.
Inhorn, Marcia C. The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. Princeton University Press.
Sweis, Rania Kassab. 2021. Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt. Stanford University Press.