Erin L. Durban
University of Minnesota—Twin Cities
The greatest contributions of Sacrificial Limbs to anthropology derive from Salih Can Açıksöz’s feminist approach to disability, militarism, the state, sovereignty, and nationalist movements in late twentieth and early twenty first century Turkey. While not announced explicitly or recognized in existing reviews, the book’s feminism is apparent throughout, such as in Açıksöz’s generative analysis of gender, masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, and the institution of marriage. The book has the essentials of feminist and good anthropological scholarship—intersectional analyses of power that take into consideration gender, sexuality, class, disability, ethnicity/race, nationality, and religion and careful attention to one’s positionality as a researcher. It moreover engages with critical feminist and queer literature and concerns, including embodied subjectivity, affect, publics, norms, identity, and community formations.
Açıksöz’s engagement with core feminist concerns is also characterized by his approach to political mobilization and social movements. As he represents it, the consciousness raising and organizing of gazis, primarily working-class Turkish veterans disabled in the Kurdish conflict, can be encapsulated in the feminist slogan from U.S. women’s liberation, “the personal is political.” As Açıksöz makes clear, the shared experiences of gazis—military conscription, being “on the mountain,” and incurring violent injury in the line of duty—does not in and of itself lead to politicization. The individualization of their post-injury social lives amplifies veteran’s experiences of isolation and degradation. But coming together to share their experiences with other disabled veterans in friendship networks and organizations, what Açıksöz calls “communities of loss,” led to new insights and subject formations. The informants explored the tension between their embodied sacrifice for the state that should ostensibly bring honor and the difficulties of their everyday lives as disabled men unable to meet the expectations of normative masculinity. Gazis contend with the indignities of low-waged jobs, lack of sufficient state medical and financial support, and even repossession of prosthetics under pressures of mounting debt regimes in the political landscapes of Turkey in the early 2000s. Açıksöz brilliantly and with great ethnographic description details how sharing their pain and anger with each other leads to different forms of political mobilization, including—ultimately—as part of far-right movements.
I taught Sacrificial Limbs in a critical disability studies graduate seminar shortly after its publication. Sacrificial Limbs resonated with the other scholarship on the syllabus grounded in anti-racist feminist, queer, and crip theory. It likewise showed that to be in relationship to disability and to counter ableism requires deromanticizing disability and disabled people. This comes through in Açıksöz’s representations of the lives of the disabled veterans who appear as complicated people. He also enacts this deromanticization in his theorization of the complex entanglements of ableism with other structures of power and—significantly—his own political divergence with his informants. This quality made it particularly important for the syllabus, since so much critical disability studies scholarship highlights progressive social movements like those for disability rights or disability justice. Alongside The Right to Maim (2017) by Jasbir K. Puar, Sacrificial Limbs brings necessary transnational analyses and international dimensions to this U.S.-centric field.
The personal is political has another meaning in relationship to the feminism of Sacrificial Limbs. Here I highlight the life of the scholar beyond the pages of the book even though it is not typical of reviews. Since we find ourselves in an ongoing crisis within anthropology and higher education broadly stemming from the supposed disconnect between professors’ scholarship and their lives, inside and outside of academe, it seems appropriate to address this issue.
Açıksöz has conducted meaningful work on behalf of disability anthropology (where anthropology and critical disability studies intersect), beyond the contributions of Sacrificial Limbs and his other publications. He has been actively involved and taken on leadership roles in the Disability Research Interest Group (DRIG), which as an organization takes on a tremendous amount of work to counter the ableism of anthropology. Açıksöz likewise uses his capacity as a nondisabled scholar to elevate disabled anthropologists at various stages of their careers, including myself. (A personal note: he is one of a handful of people who has successfully made food that meets all my dietary restrictions as a chronically ill person, which is no small feat!) This is particularly important because of the extractive economies of medical anthropology and the entire discipline, which have promoted scholarship by nondisabled people about disability and failed to adequately address the multiple ableist barriers for disabled people to succeed as professional anthropologists. Nondisabled anthropologists should follow the lead of Açıksöz, who has done all this as a junior scholar, not to mention as an immigrant and man of color in the U.S. academy.
References
Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham and London: Duke University Press.