Fetishization of the Disabled War Veterans in Iran through the Ideological Construction of “Living Martyrs”
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Keywords
Middle East, Iran, Iraq, war, transnational, martyrdom
Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which disability gets fetishized in the global context using the case study of disabled war veterans in Iran who were injured during the Iran-Iraq war. Relying on a Disability Studies' lens, I analyze the ways in which the Iranian state after the Iran-Iraq war has “dealt” with its disabled veteran and civilian population. The paper argues that since the war ended in 1988, the Iranian state has engaged in what I call “fetishizing” the disability of its injured population, both veterans and civilians, in several ideological ways. Throughout this paper I indicate how the state has managed to use the disabled bodies of the injured survivors as a way to guarantee its survival by portraying them as an ideological construct called “living martyrs,” as opposed to disabled humans in need of physical and affective care. Additionally, the paper discusses how the injured survivors’ disability has too been fetishized in the global context during and after the war, as the world has remained silent in the face of violent chemical attacks on Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan.
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Sona Kazemi, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Dr. Sona Kazemi was formally the Provost’s Research Justice at the Intersections Fellow at the Mills College in Oakland, California. From 2018 to 2020, Sona was a postdoctoral researcher of Migration Studies, Disability Studies, and Medical Humanities at the Ohio State University. Her research program is located in contradictions among transnational disability rights frameworks in the context of global and regional imperialism(s), as well as the proxy wars in the Middle East. Her postdoctoral projects concern traumatized Yazidi refugees in the diaspora and their disability consciousness as survivors of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the mental health of Iranian and Kurdish refugees in the United States who are the survivors of state terror and its implications for international security, Iranian women survivors of acid attack and their disability and feminist consciousness, and punitive limb amputation in Saudi Arabia and Iran. She is also completing a monograph, tentatively titled “Disabling Relations: Injured Bodyminds and Active Witnessing,” based on her dissertation and her two postdoctoral research projects. Sona is the Society for Disability Studies’ 2018 recipient of the honorable mention for the prestigious award of Irving K. Zola Award for emerging scholars in Disability Studies. Sona is currently the associate editor for the Global Perspectives Section at Review of Disability Studies, an International Journal.