ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the body not as a transparent surface, an instrument, an obstacle, an extension, or a passive object but as a borderland and a threshold. Guided by the work of revolutionaries, journalists, and scholars, the authors offer a corporal geography of the last decade of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The historical map is necessarily partial, open, and collaborative and reflects on the rollercoaster of hope and despair since December 2010, the Tunisian inception of the uprisings, now inseparable from that reductive moniker, the Arab Spring. Disability studies is central to this chapter’s analysis of repression and upheaval. It offers a selection of anecdotes to reflect on what burning, iconic, tortured, enduring, and disabled bodies teach us.
