Reflections on the Temporality of Hunger and the Slow Death of Detention (original) (raw)
Related papers
Trauma, Conflict and Media 2016: Imagining a hunger strike: Guantanamo 2013
Existing literature has explored the vicarious witnessing of trauma in which images, narratives and artefacts facilitate a reconstruction of a past event by those who believe that access to these gives them an intimacy with the event and an imagining of the experiences of another (Zeitlin 1998, Nelson, 1998, Keats 2005). This paper adapts the concept of vicarious witnessing to explore how media re-imagine contemporaneous events to which journalists do not have direct access but the application of particular techniques to the limited materials available can still offer powerful reconstructions that invite news consumers to vicariously witness trauma. The paper looks at the force-feeding of the 2013 Guantanamo hunger strikers who were protesting at the perceived desecration of the Koran and at their continued incarceration. Guantanamo has a history as a site of trauma and the inflicting of trauma that pre-dates 9/11. Its remoteness has contributed to the sense of Guantanamo as an out-of-sight-out-of-mind space beyond the usual judicial constraints and rigorous media scrutiny (see Campisi 2008) and for these reasons it was chosen to house captives in the War on Terror. Journalists do have access to the base but not to the prisoners, their movements are highly constrained, the content they take out of the base is vetted and individual permits to visit may be withdrawn. Notwithstanding these limitations, journalists were able to piece together bits of information into a coherent narrative and to visualize the trauma of the prisoners in a way that resonated powerfully, challenged the accounts provided by the Guantanamo officials and drew attention to the suffering of those force-fed. Introduction In early 2013, initial reports on Facebook and blogs about a mass hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay (CagePrisoners 2013) were denied by camp authorities who claimed that nothing out of the ordinary was happening (Rosenberg 2013b). Their denials however were challenged by a video-clip captured during a routine visit to the camp by a Miami Herald journalist which showed camp guards throwing out large quantities of uneaten food (Rosenberg 2013a). Lawyers after visiting their clients detained on the base also reported on social media that significant numbers of them were on hunger strike. Faced with strong counter-evidence, threes after the first reports emerged on social media the authorities conceded that a mass hunger strike was underway (Rosenberg 2013) and began providing daily updates on the number of prisoners striking and the number being force-fed. Public responses to the protest revealed deep polarisations in American society over how the " War on Terror " was being waged and in particular the treatment of prisoners taken during it (Carroll 2013), the resort to force-feeding was heavily criticized by the American medical community and in the global media and Barack Obama's presidency came under intense scrutiny (Spetalnick 2013).
Political Imprisonment and the Hunger Strikes: Some Recent Publications
Saoirse, 2015
William Murphy: Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921, OUP, Oxford 2014. Thomas Hennessey: Hunger Strike: Margaret Thatcher's Battle with the IRA, 1980-1982, IAP, Dublin 2013 Laura McAtackney: An Archaeology of the Troubles: The Dark Heritage of Long Kesh/Maze Prison, OUP, Oxford 2014. Seán McConville: Irish Political Prisoners, 1920-1962. Pilgrimage of Desolation, Routledge, Oxon/New York 2014.
Hunger strike and the force-feeding chair: Guantanamo Bay and corporeal surrender
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
Through the biotechnology of the force-feeding chair and the hunger strike in Guantanamo, this paper examines the camp as a site of necropolitics where bodies inhabit the space of the Muselmann – a figure Agamben invokes in Auschwitz to capture the predicament of the living dead. Sites of incarceration produce an aesthetic of torture and the force-feeding chair embodies the disciplining of the body and the extraction of pain while imposing the biopolitics of the American empire on “terrorist bodies”. Not worthy of human rights or death, the force-fed body inhabits a realm of indistinction between animal and human. The camp as an interstitial space which is beyond closure as well as full disclosure produces an aesthetic of torture on the racialised Other through the force-feeding chair positioned between visibility and non-visibility. Through the discourse of medical ethics and the legal struggle for rights, the force-feeding chair emerges as a symbol of necropolitics where the hunge...
Staging incapacitation: the corporeal politics of hunger striking
Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2019
This essay examines the ongoing hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Through an analysis of news media compiled by journalists reporting on the timelines of the strikes, and various prisoner testimonials, I contextualize how hunger striking has been historically understood to be grounds for emancipation from, and resistance to, state violence and carceral techniques. I further present an analysis of the 1981 Irish death fast to consider how prisoners’ resistance to corporeal wholeness comes to function as a viable form of political self-expression. Focusing on both the state’s suppression of embodied protest as well as the weaponization of the prisoner’s body, I argue that although geopolitically different, in both the Guantánamo and Irish strikes, forms of corporeal incapacitation function as the mechanisms through which protest and discipline register.
The Body as Weapon: Bobby Sands and the Republican Hunger Strikes
Sociological Research Online, 2007
The 1981 Hunger Strike marked an important point in the Northern Ireland conflict, shifting its focus away from city streets and country lanes into the H-Block prison. Here republican prisoners used their embodiment to resist and fight back at attempts to recast them as criminals as opposed to the soldiers they perceived themselves to be. Given the centrality of the body and embodiment in the prison struggle this paper will theorise the 'body-as-weapon' as a modality of resistance. This will begin by interrogating key themes within the sociology of the body before discussing and dismissing an alternative explanation of the Hunger Strike: the actions of the hunger strikers standing in the traditions of heroic Gaelic myths and Catholic martyrdom. Finally, drawing from the sociology of the body, I will then proceed to discuss how the body and embodiment deployed in this manner can be effective, concentrating on how the 'body-asweapon': (i) acts as a resource for minority political groups; (ii) destabilises notions of the body in modernity and related to that point (iii) engages in a 'hidden' impulse of modernity, that of self-sacrifice.
New Zealand Sociology, 2013
This article explores the practice of force-feeding as a response to hunger-strikes in prisons. Drawing on three case studies of force- feeding in Britain, Turkey and Guantanamo Bay, I analyse the contested conceptualizations of force-feeding across three parties: state actors, medical associations, and the prisoners themselves. I conceptualize force-feeding as a form of violent care that inhabits the margins of Foucault’s (1995) modern prison as civilized disciplinary apparatus. The intense contestation over hunger-striking and the legitimacy of force-feeding reveals competing notions of subjectivity at play – either state-controlled or individually sovereign and inviolable. These in turn inform diverse notions of legitimate care; alternately, the preservation of life or respect for intentionality and bodily autonomy.
Body Politics and Boundary Work: Nobodies on Hunger Strike at Guantánamo (2013–2015)
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2014
Against a backdrop of overt biopolitical vitalism in the United States, in particular Joint Task Force Guantanamo’s practice of force-feeding hunger striking Camp Delta detainees, this article aims to reconsider the power/resistance relation as it investigates how bodies rendered nobodies might be able to disrupt a particular manifestation of power that is blind to personhood, aiming for control over life and death in equal measures. With a focus on boundary renegotiation and the dynamics of visibility/invisibility at play around the space of Camp Delta, analysis of the 2013–2015 hunger strike suggests that the embodied practices of even “nobodies” can work to engender a life-centered, alternative, and affirmative politics. Moreover, this article finds that the 2013–2015 hunger strike worked to contest the inhumane practice of force-feeding as well as the boundaries of the visible and the political in the contemporary US context, which are themselves found to be marked by the very bodies of Camp Delta’s detainees.
Hunger for Voice: Transformative Argumentation in the 2005 Guantánamo Bay Hunger Strike
Argumentation and advocacy, 2015
This article develops a theory of politically transformative argumentation with the 2005 Guantanamo Bay Detention Center hunger strike as its exemplary case. Drawing on Rancfere 's theory of political action, I advance the claim that transformative argumentation in hostile environments must often create its own conditions for being heard by another as deliberative speech. To account for the possibility of substantive political change in highly controlled carceral spaces such as Guantanamo Bay, critics should focus on the act of listening, rather than on the charismatic, persuasive speaker.
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine A Strategic Perspective
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine: A Strategic Perspective, 2023
This book is the first major transnational examination of prison hunger strikes. While focusing on Palestine, the research is enriched by extensive interviews and conversations with South African, Kurdish, Irish, and British ex-prisoners and hunger strikers. This study reveals in unprecedented detail how prison hunger strikes achieve monumental feats of resistance through the weaponization of lives. How do prison hunger strikers achieve demands? How do they stay connected with the outside world in a space that is designed to cut them off from that world? And why would a prisoner put their lives at risk by refusing to eat or, at times, drink? This research shows that sometimes prisoners’ need for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriya) trump their hunger pangs and thirst. Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine evaluates the process of hunger striking, including the repressive actions prisoners encounter, and the negotiation process. It analyzes differences and similarities between individual and collective strikes, and evaluates the role and impact of solidarity actions from outside the prison walls. The work’s critical and grassroots understanding of prison hunger strikes fully centers the voices of hunger strikers. The analysis results in actionable takeaways that will be as useful to prison activists as they will be to their allies around the world.
Memory Studies, 2014
This article analyses the recent struggle for control of the Provisional Irish Republican movement's collective memory of the 1980-81 hunger strikes, during which ten Republicans died. 2 It proceeds through an examination and interpretation of the published memoir-writing of some of the key protagonists within the broad Irish Republican movement. In particular, it examines the controversy surrounding the allegations made by Richard O'Rawe (former Public Relations Officer for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners at the time of the 1981 strike), in his two volumes of memoir, Blanketmen (2005), and Afterlives (2010). The article addresses the role of dissent in the movement's collective memory, and the specific role of 'memory entrepreneurs' (Jelin, 2003) in the contestation of the Irish Republican 'official' memory of the hunger strikes.