Mine Egbatan

MINE EGBATAN, then a graduate student at University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Disabled Women in Turkey: Disability, Gender and Infrastructure in a Populist Authoritarian State,” supervised by Dr. Brian Silverstein. 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. Populism’s fluidity as a concept is often noted, as is its Left and Right variants, but it is commonly seen as relational — “us” versus “them” — and as such is arguably about identity creation in which moral boundaries between groups are redrawn. The ruling AKP often portrays feminists or LGBTI activists as “indecent” and even deviant, threatening the unity of the nation, family values, the morality of society, and the social fabric. However, AKP discourses do not exclude disabled folks from “the people” or “us,” unlike in many Right-populist contexts. Such divides become more artificial and complex regarding disabled women’s discourses and strategies. Left/Right and religious/secular divisions are not particularly useful in understanding disabled women’s activism. The dynamics of women’s disabled activism in some ways map onto high/low division that is common in populisms, but in some ways they don’t, which tells us something important about AKP populism, and about disability in Turkey. Through 12 months of ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara, I seek to understand the emergent entanglements of populist authoritarianism, gender, disability, and infrastructure, and how these inflect the discourses, practices, and strategies of disabled women.