Sakatlık ve anneliği yeniden düşünmek: Sağır çocukları olan annelerin deneyimleri

The welfare and healthcare structures and hegemonic social and cultural discourses in Turkey inform mothers' understandings of deafness. First, by laying out mothers' experiences of medical procedures including diagnoses, hearing tests, hearing aids and cochlear implantation in settings such as hospitals, rehabilitation services, and schools, this thesis examines how mothers make sense of disability in their encounters with medical and rehabilitative experts, school teachers, doctors and family members. Second, this thesis also examines how mothering experience is transformed in relation to caring experience. I investigate mothers' experiences at two levels: I examine the mechanisms through which mothers are reproduced as the main caregiver for disabled children and how mothers, doctors, medical and rehabilitative experts, teachers and family members reproduce the idea that women are the primary caregivers for the disabled. Second, I tease out how inadequate healthcare services and unequal division of care labor in the family push these women to engage in public advocacy concerning the rights of their disabled children. Drawing on the mothers' advocacy work in the "Association for Families" (AF), which was founded by mothers in 2004, I analyze how mothers translate their own difficulties in medical and educational settings into a struggle for improved services.