Tolga Ozata

Studies of hunger strikes typically focus on the immediate acts of political sacrifice—a moment when the body becomes a site of ultimate resistance. This project, however, explores the enduring social and political life in the aftermath: what happens when the protest ends, bodies are irrevocably changed, and survival itself becomes the terrain of struggle? What happens when the body no longer dies for a political cause, but lives on in disability? This dissertation examines the lives of survivors of the 1996 and 2000 “death fasts” in Turkey. These prolonged hunger strikes, carried out by imprisoned Marxist-Leninist activists to resist the state’s solitary confinement policy, left approximately 600 survivors with Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, a neurological chronic disability, caused by prolonged starvation and force-feeding. By shifting attention from the spectacular moment of sacrifice to the politics of its aftermath, this project explores how practices of disability and care give rise to a form of “survival politics”—a mode of collective endurance and a transformation of political life. Based on 12-month ethnographic fieldwork, this project interrogates how survivors transform state-induced disability into a continuation of collective political agency, using their survivor-led care infrastructures to challenge the state’s long-term attempts to isolate, debilitate, and depoliticize them.