Sacrificial Limbs of Sovereignty: Disabled Veterans, Masculinity, and Nationalist Politics in Turkey

Abstract

Over the last decade, disabled veterans of the Turkish Army who were injured while fighting against the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK; Kurdistan Workers’ Party) have become national icons and leading ultranationalist actors. While being valorized as sacrificial heroes in nationalist discourse, they have also confronted socioeconomic marginalization, corporeal otherness, and emasculation anxieties. Against this backdrop, disabled veterans’ organizations have become the locus of an ultranationalist campaign against dissident intellectuals. Building on two years of ethnographic research with disabled veterans in Turkey, this article analyzes these processes through the analytical lens of the body. Locating the disabled veteran body at the intersection of state welfare practices, nationalist discourses on heroism and sacrifice, and cultural norms of masculinity and disability, I illustrate how disabled veterans’ gendered and classed experiences of disability are hardened into a political identity. Consequently, I show how violence generates new modalities of masculinity and political agency through its corporeal effects.[disabled veterans in Turkey, the body, nationalism, masculinity, violence]

Tinkering Care, State Responsibility, and Abandonment: Nuclear Test Veterans and the Mismatched Temporalities of Justice in Claims for Health Care

“…State officials frame these modes of engagement as bureaucratic technologies of care through which state apparatuses provide test veterans with ongoing forms of listening, sympathy, attention, knowledge, and political recognition. These ongoing efforts link to the nationalist and exceptional status of the soldier sacrifice within military citizenship claimscreate sacred corporeal debts in need of ongoing repayment by the state that temporally link events of conflict with post‐conflict bodies (Trundle 2012; Aciksoz 2012). All state interactions with test veterans are thus prefaced and concluded with references to how “grateful” the country remains to test veterans for their service, the “special debt” society owes them, and the contributions the men have made to both national interests and global peace.…”

Prosthetic Debts

“…Working multiple jobs but still unable to make ends meet, buying on credit, and indebted to the neighborhood's shop owners for basic staples, these protagonists are symptomatic figures of the 9. For the historical baggage of the gazi title, see Açıksöz (2012Açıksöz ( , 2019.…”

“You are Like a Virus”

“…Women, exalted as mothers, [were] citizens only to the extent that they fulfill[ed] their role as helpers and advisors” (Sirman 2005, 164). However, masculine sovereignty was promised to the young men only in exchange for an absolute obedience to the military discipline and authority of the state (Açiksöz 2012, 7). Regarded as a culturally and legally sanctioned prerequisite for employment and marriage in Turkey (Sinclair-Webb 2000, 74), military service has also functioned as a rite of passage in men’s lives, similarly as in countries such as Israel and Bolivia (Gill 1997; Kaplan 2000).…”

“…The last three decades have witnessed important works analyzing the complex connections among the military, gender, and sexuality in various contexts and locations (see, for instance, Enloe 1990; Gill 1997; Kaplan 2000; Mosse 1996). However, with the exception of a few notable projects (Açıksöz 2012; Altınay 2004; Biricik 2008; Şen 2005), the lack of academic studies examining these issues in Turkey comes as a surprise given the substantial role that the military has played in the construction and regulation of (gender) identities in Turkey. By examining the military medical inspections, I discuss how the intersection of the Turkish military, medicine, and the cultural notion of homosexuality is embedded in the inspections that are designed to protect hegemonic masculinity and the boundaries of male homosocial bonding through excluding nonnormative/dangerous bodies from military service.…”