Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey -- talk by Salih Can Açiksöz

 

Compulsory military service in Turkey historically operated as a key rite of passage into normative adult masculinity, sealing a heteropatriarchal contract between the state and its male citizenry. In the context of Turkey’s ongoing war with Kurds, however, this political equation has been disrupted by the embodied costs of war. The gendered and classed predicaments of thousands of conscripts who returned home with disabilities fueled a political crisis, which has given rise to an array of biopolitical efforts aiming to remasculinize veterans.

In this talk, Salih Can Açiksöz will trace the quandaries of this militarized biopolitics in neoliberal times through a focus on nationalist spectacles revolving around veterans’ prosthetic limbs. Açiksöz will show how prosthesis—the historical icon of postwar male recuperation—becomes a projection surface for the gendered anxieties around sacrifice and betrayal. Açiksöz will illustrate the making, remaking, and unmaking of the disabled male body at the nexus of nationalism, militarism, technoscience, and neoliberal capitalism.

 

 Salih Can Açiksöz, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, is an interdisciplinary-minded anthropologist with a guiding interest in the intersections of violence, embodiment, gender, and subjectivity. Açiksöz’s book Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, is an ethnographic study of war disability, masculinity, and political subjectivity in the context of the Kurdish conflict. 

The seminar is co-sponsored by the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS), the Science, Religion and Culture Program (SRC), the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, and the Journal of Middle East Women Studies (JMEWS). This year’s seminar inaugurates the residence of JMEWS at Harvard, which extends from May 2018 to May 2022.