Mine Egbatan

Turkey is increasingly described as a populist authoritarian country, governed in the name of ‘the people’ by a party that has seized control of most parts of the state and media. This has also coincided with extensive investments in large-scale infrastructure projects as ‘development,’ and a populist weaponization of culture, ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ that hinges on patriarchal gender norms. Disabled women have been especially affected by these trends as their mobility is often intimately imbricated with the infrastructure provided by the state. At the same time, disability is profoundly gendered in Turkey (like elsewhere), and the country’s patriarchal norms shape how some disabled women experience their conditions, and how they seek to improve their lives. This research examines how disabled women navigate their everyday lives under such conditions and relate to the populist authoritarian state in Turkey through 12 months of ethnographic research with disabled women activists of differing orientations in several organizations in Ankara and Istanbul. This research will contribute to the ethnographic and theoretical work on infrastructure, gender and disability as well as everyday authoritarianism and populism.