On Sona Kazemi’s Disabling Relations: Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis

NWSA 2026

Jo Hsu (vjohsu@austin.utexas.edu)

It’s hard to know where to begin with a book this capacious, that draws from so many stories and methods, a book that moves indifferent to disciplines or borders in general. There is something intimately familiar in Dr. Kazemi’s approach to the transnational, which *feels* like she starts from a place where the West loses its gravitational pull—where it’s beholden to a sprawling network of histories; where it is both responsible for violence and not the only cause of it.

At the same time, the book casts me into worlds I can’t begin to fully imagine. The number of scenes and people would be disorienting if they weren’t also rendered with such care— both in attending to the full person *and* in acting on the stories they give her.

It’s impossible *not* to see that this book is a feat of labor, courage, and intellectual range, and yet, it’s also not possible for us to actually know what it was like to carry out. And there is no way for me to do justice to any of that in 10-15 minutes.

So, as a rhetorician, I’m going to focus on one of the many— but also one monumental— contribution of the book, which is story. On the one hand, story is everything— it is fundamental to how we turn information into meaning; facts don’t matter until you put them into a story… On the other hand, story is a way of doing nothing. It’s a smokescreen and a safety blanket; we talk about harm to feel as if we’ve done something about it; we treat awareness as an end in and of itself. Dr. Kazemi critiques story at its limits while also stretching its capacities to show what scholarship can and should be.

Writing on political consciousness, Dr. Kazemi’s voice joins a chorus that she calls onto the page: She writes, “when it comes to war, we, as war survivors, can refuse to mobilize only around our experiences, and instead, “live our consciousness arisen from that experience” to end the social organization that gave birth to our experience in the first place.” (37)

Afterwards, she reassigns that “we” — “we,” scholars; we who claim disability studies and feminism and care, [quote](#)“should approach “disability oppression” or “creation of disability” in conversation with consciousness and agency; otherwise, we will end up floating in an ahistorical empiricist void.” Dr. Kazemi herself is proof that these communities aren’t separate— *can’t* be separated—and so the theorization of disability cannot be cleaved from the mass devastation that creates disability.

In *Disabling Relations*, story is a thing that moves across borders. Sometimes, physically. For the prisoner, the exile, the refugee, and the asylum seeker, their story might reach where their body cannot. But story is also the thing that figuratively traverses great distance. Story is how survivors find one another, or find resonance across difference. Story both mobilizes and *is mobile*, bridging individual pain to collective struggle without collapsing them into one.

But if story is such power then of course it, too, can be abused.

Story, as in Wendy Hesford’s “already-available narratives” sets the unspoken, often unquestioned assumptions through which we make meaning. Stock stories are the default— the way that disabled stories become inspiring or tragic, and always individualized. Dr. Kazemi’s **transnational disability model** makes such isolation impossible.

— and this is story at its most potent. Story as incommensurable. In chapter two, Dr. Kazemi recounts a childhood memory— a school trip to a nursing home with disabled veterans. A man asks her, “Do you know how it feels to be forgotten for seventeen years?” (58)

And, the intellectual contribution of this book is about transnational disability theory. It’s about disability in wounded bodyminds and a wound as relation and relation as both the wound and the state that made it. But something about this story, about this room that wasn’t meant for visitors, about the air equal parts sterility and gloom, about a twelve-year-old being asked to comprehend a loss older than she is. Something about this moment feels, to me, like the heart of the book.

Perhaps because this is where Dr. Kazemi the *scholar* comes for the world that put the girl in that room. [quote](#)“Schools were not supposed to take us to nursing homes and cemeteries to make the veterans feel cared for and loved,” she writes. “This was also part of the cultural nationalism project to prepare the next generation for the same ‘sacrifice’ and ‘defense’ against internal and external enemies…” (58).

This is Dr. Kazemi’s storytelling as defetishization. Story as clarity, as insight, as the smoke clearing, where the individual memory lays bare the worldview that made it possibe. This is story connecting memory to social relations to ideologies— pulling our analyses away from the comfortable and the predictable, into the kind of discomfort that requires change.

And none of this is easy or pure. Later in that same chapter, a veteran asks another researcher, “Miss, do you want the official version that we have to tell the television crews every year?” (63). Story as liability, as survival, as a truth that can risk your life. If a story can carry you across a border, it can also destroy the way back.

And yet. Dr. Kazemi still brings us to story … The many meanings of her title fold again and again, each bend turning a new facet to the light. There are relations that disable, relations she means to disable, relations that do that disabling, relations among the disabled. Woven together, these threads are a core of disability justice— access intimacy, crip solidarity, building collective alternatives to structures of care.

Which is how we get to story as active witnessing. Here, active witnessing is also a research model — receiving a story with attention to our own roles in it, using critical insight to map power relations, and acting on the knowledge we’ve been entrusted with (173).

Dr. Kazemi writes, “Solidarity is not charity. Nor is it something to give. Rather, it is something to ‘show,’ a resistance to the divisive and fragmenting lies of structural power embedded in binary thinking.” (180). *Disabling Relations* is a book of solidarity as practice and scholarship as a transnational practice of solidarity.

In this way, it’s an unapologetic expansion of disability studies, and one that invites more generative connections to discussions in Black studies about the state’s production and management of disability; Indigenous studies’ refusals of state recognition; and trans and intersex studies’ intricate vocabularies around the state management of medicalized bodyminds that resist cure but also, still, sometimes reach for medicine.

From where I’m standing, I’m perhaps most excited by this vision of disability studies that braves beyond presumed borders, that aspires to better fluency in wounds that are not exclusively ours. I’m particularly struck by the accounts of mistranslation, with a nod to Dr. Zarabadi, who has warned against the misintepretation of transnational feminist struggles into Western feminist and often US-centric terms. This is how the story of a women’s uprising against theocracy can get told, in the US, as a struggle over grocery prices; or the way the theocracies can get misread as allies against empire.

The course correction is a disability studies that holds us to account for the *world* we are in- a world of many centers, of which the West is just one.

*Disabling Relations* ends with story as an agent of transformation. Dr. Kazemi recounts how the work of listening to and writing these stories has changed her— as they should. So, too, should we— scholars; we who claim disability studies and feminism and care— we should receive this book as the knowledge to see and *do* differently.