Abstract
In this chapter, we engage with different forms of atrocities committed against imprisoned dissidents in post-revolutionary Iran. This is just a sample of state violence at large against its own people, from whom it seeks legitimacy and validation. This time, legitimacy is sort by a theocratic state. Through a case study, we demonstrate how madness can be both a product of and a response to state violence, namely, imprisonment and torture. Kazemi interviewed more than 30 former political prisoners who survived torture and imprisonment in the 1980s in Iran, and, now, live in exile, as part of the Iranian diaspora. Their testimonies demonstrate how human resilience can overcome the harshest of circumstances, sustain psychological harm, witness the madness and death of friends, and yet manage to carry it all to a harbor. By a harbor, we mean their own memoirs, silence, suicide, drawings, and even witnessing via “madness.” We investigate the processes and social relations involved in how some prisoners went “mad” and some remained “sane.” Using the Transnational Disability Model (Kazemi, Critical Disability Discourse Journal, 31–63: 2017), we defetishize their disability by demonstrating how madness and sanity can be deliberately created (i.e., socially organized and imposed) from within extremely brutal institutions. Also, we ponder the ways in which madness could be the bodymind’s “response” (Sakhi, Ethics and the resistant subject Levinas, Foucault, Marx. York University. Toronto: 2014) to power/violence or a “survival strategy” in the context of asymmetrical power relations (e.g., patriarchy, theocracy). As racialized activists-scholars from the global south, we strive in this chapter to re-articulate disabled-dissident subject’s “response-abilities” in the form of “madness.”
References
Abrahamian, E. (1999). Tortured confessions: Prison and public recantations in modern Iran. University of California Press.
Abrahamian, E. (2008). The history of modern Iran. Cambridge University Press.
Agah, A., Mehr, S., & Parsi, S. (2007). We lived to tell. McGilligan Books.
Agamben, G. (2002). Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive. (D. Trans. by Heller-Roazen, Ed.) Zone Books.
Akhavan, P. (2017). Is grassroots justice a viable alternative to impunity?: The case of the Iran People’s tribunal. Human Rights Quarterly, 73–103.
Bannerji, H. (1995). Thinking through: Essays on feminism, Marxism and anti-racism. Women’s Press.
Baradaran, M. (2000). Simple truth. Nima Book.
Baradaran, M. (2001). Psychology of torture: A discussion about “guidance” and “Repenter-making” in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s prisons. Baran Books.
Bell, C. (2006). Introducing white disability studies a modest proposal. In L. Davis (Ed.), The disability studies reader (pp. 275–282). Routledge.
Blakeley, R. (2010). Liberal democracies and the globalisation of state terrorism in the 21st century. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 169–172.
Burch, S. (2021). Committed: Remembering native kinship in and beyond institutions. The University of North Carolina Press.
Burstow, B. (2015). Psychiatry and the business of madness: An ethical and epistemological accounting. Palgrave Macmillan.
Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press.
Clare, E. (2017). Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure. Duke University Press.
Dossa, P. (2008). Creating alternative and Demedicalized spaces: Testimonial narrative on disability, culture, and racialization. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 79–101.
Ebert, T. L. (1996). Lucid feminism and after: Postmodernism, desire, and labor in late capitalism. University of Michigan Press.
Erevelles, N. (2011). Disability and difference in global contexts: Enabling a transformative body politic. Palgrave Macmillan.
Fabris, E. (2011). Tranquil prisons: Chemical incarceration under community treatment orders. University of Toronto Press.
Fledman, A. (1991). Formations of violence: The narrative of the body and political terror in Northern Ireland. University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1964). Madness and civilization. Pantheon Books.
Fritsch, K. (2010). Intimate assemblages: Disability, Intercorporeality, and the labour of attendant care. Critical Disability Discourses, 1–13.
Gorman, R. (2016). Disablement In and for itself: Towards a ‘global’ idea of disability. Somatechnics, 249–261.
Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America (Race and American culture). Oxford University Press.
Iranian People’s Tribunal. (2012, September 9). On the abuse and mass killings of political prisoners in Iran, 1981-1988, Findings of the truth commission, held 18th-22nd June, 2012. Retrieved December 31, 2019, from Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC): https://iranhrdc.org/iran-tribunal-international-peoples-tribunal-findings-of-the-truth-commission/
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.
Kalantari, A. (2016, September 25). How do we understand the “system”? Retrieved from "نظام" را چگونه بفهميم : http://abdeekalantari.webspaceforme.net/archive/kalantari/pdfs/Abdee_Kalantari_Speech_at_Kevorkian.pdf
Kazemi, S. (2017). Toward a conceptualization of transnational disability theory and praxis: Engaging the dialectics of geopolitics, third world, and imperialism. Critical Disability Discourse Journal, 31–63.
Kupers, T. A. (1999). Prison madness: The mental health crisis behind bars and what we must do about it. Oxford.
Kupers, T. A. (2006). How to create madness in prison. In D. Jones (Ed.), Humane prisons (pp. 5–19). Radcliffe Publishing.
Kuppers, P. (2009). Toward a Rhizomatic model of disability: Poetry, performance, and touch. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 221–240.
Makaremi, C. (2015). State violence and death politics in post-revolutionary Iran. In A. Élisabeth & D. Jean-Marc (Eds.), Destruction and human remains: Disposal and concealment in genocide and mass violence (pp. 180–198). University Press Scholarship.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1932/1998). The German ideology, including theses on Feuerbach. Prometheus Books.
McRuer, R. (2006). Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York University Press.
Meekosha, H. (2011). Decolonising disability: Thinking and acting globally. Disability and Society, 667–682.
Mesdaghi, I. (2006). Neither life nor death, Nazistan Na Marg, prison memoris Na Zistan Na Marg, neither life nor death, prison memoris, In 4 volumes, the descent of sunrise, the sorrow of the Phoenix, restless raspberries, till the dawn of grapes. Alfabeth Maxima Publication.
Parsipour, S. (1995). Prison Memoir. Baran Books.
Parvaz, N. (2002). Under the four O’clock’s bush: Zire Boute Laleh Abbasi. Nasim Books.
Price, M. (2014). The Bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain. Hypatia, 1–17.
Rhodes, L. A. (2004). Total confinement: Madness and reason in the maximum security prison. University of California Press.
Sadr, S., & Amin, S. (2012). Crime and impunity: Sexual torture of women in Islamic Republic prisons. Justice for Iran.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Vintage Books.
Sakhi, S. (2009, September 9). Witness statement of Shokoufeh Sakh. Retrieved November 23, 2018, from Iran human rights documentation center: https://iranhrdc.org/witness-statement-of-shokoufeh-sakh/
Sakhi, S. (2014). Ethics and the resistant subject Levinas, Foucault, Marx. York University. Toronto: Proquest Dissertation and Theses.
Sakhi, S. (2017). Ethical–political praxis: Social justice and the resistant subject in Iran. In P. Vahabzadeh (Ed.), Iran’s struggles for social justice: Economics, agency, justice, activism (pp. 145–164). Palgrave Macmillan.
Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black Women’s speculative fiction. Duke University Press.
Shildrick, M. (2009). Dangerous discourses of disability, subjectivity and sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan.
Szasz, T. (1987). Justifying coercion through religion and psychiatry. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 158–174.
Talebi, S. (2011). Ghosts of revolution: Rekindled memories of imprisonment in Iran. Stanford University Press.
Tam, L. (2012). Governing through competency: Race, Pathologization, and the limits of mental health outreach. Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Whitaker, R. (2002). Mad in America: Bad science, bad medicine, and the enduring mistreatment of the mentally ill. Perseus Book Groups.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Additional information
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Darya.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Kazemi, S., Karah, H. (2024). Madness as Response-Ability Against State Terror: A Case Study from Iranian Revolution. In: Rioux, M.H., Buettgen, A., Zubrow, E., Viera, J. (eds) Handbook of Disability. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6056-7_40
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6056-7_40
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-19-6055-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-19-6056-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences