Hunger Power: The embodied protest of the political hunger strike (original) (raw)

Becoming stronger by becoming weaker: The hunger strike as a mode of doing politics

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2019

Drawing on Judith Butler’s work and a series of studies associated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this paper engages with political agency through the concept of performativity. Based on the empirical analysis of a hunger strike that took place in Brussels in 2012 and involved 23 illegal immigrants, we aim to achieve three things. First, we foreground physical bodies as political entities caught up in multiple modes of doing politics. Second, we show how such modes relate to each other, reinforcing citizenship, activism, and party politics as specific performances of agency associated with liberal democracy. Finally, we argue that the Brussels hunger strike also challenges these performances by failing to meet certain expectations about what it is to be political/act politically. As the European refugee crisis is generating louder and louder voices, hunger strikes sensitise us to modes of doing that work by becoming passive, silent, weak, and vulnerable. Such processes, we suggest, expand the standard repertoire of modes of doing and may refigure our understanding of the interaction between transnational and liberal democratic politics – in International Relations, ANT and beyond.

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.

Embodied Refusals: On the Collective Possibilities of Hunger Striking

Abolition Journal , 2020

This essay explores the 2013 hunger strikes that took place in Pelican Bay State Prison protesting the use of long-term solitary confinement. I argue that in Pelican Bay, force-feeding, or what California Corrections calls “refeeding,” was used in conjunction with litigation to attempt to halt the 2013 hunger strike by stripping prisoner activists of their rights and credibility, making it possible for the prison to justify the continued use of solitary confinement. Further, I theorize the practice of hunger striking as a collective form of “embodied refusal” to state violence.

Who clamours for attention–and who cares? Hunger strikes in France from 1972 to 1992

La Lettre de la Maison Française d'Oxford, 1999

Year 1996 was famous in France because of the protest of many undocumented migrants asking for their regularisation. Their protest movement climaxed with the break in of the police into the church Saint-Bernard 1 on the 23rd of August. As I have shown in other works (Siméant, , 1988, hunger strikes have been, since the early 70's, the main way of protesting for undocumented migrants. But of course, other social agents use this means, both in political and non political actions.

Bodies in Protest. Hunger Strikes and Angry Music

Research on social movements has historically focused on the traditional weapons of the working class, especially labour strikes and street demonstrations. But everyday actions, such as eating or singing, which can also be turned into a means of protest, have yet to be fully explored. An inter-disciplinary and comparative history of these modes of action, Bodies in Protest: Hunger Strikes and Angry Music reveals how hunger strikes and music ranging from gospel songs to rock anthems can efficiently convey political messages and mobilize the masses. Common to both approaches, the contributions to this volume show, is a direct appeal to the emotions and a reliance on the physical, concrete language of the human body.

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.

Bodies in Protest. Hunger Strikes and Angry Music. Amsterdam University Press, 2016.

Research on social movements has historically focused on the traditional weapons of the working class, especially labour strikes and street demonstrations-but everyday actions, such as eating or singing, which can also be turned into a means of protest, have yet to be fully explored. An interdisciplinary and comparative history of these modes of action, Bodies in Protest reveals how hunger strikes and music ranging from gospel songs to rock anthems can efficiently convey political messages and mobilize the masses. Common to both approaches, the contributions show, is a direct appeal to the emotions and a reliance on the physical, concrete language of the human body.

The grammar of a hunger strike: nonviolence and biopolitics in Manipur, India

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024

What are the potentialities and limits of nonviolence as a method of resistance against modern biopolitics? This article offers an ethnographic account of Irom Sharmila's sixteen-year-long hunger strike against the continued state of emergency in the Indian state of Manipur. It interrogates how she envisioned the protest, the objectives that she set, and how her protest came to an end. This article demonstrates that her protest was not about a will to death, as it has often been described, but instead was based on a radical distribution of responsibility among the people suffering under the regime of violence. Her nonviolent protest as a Gandhian practice was directed particularly at the entailments of violence. In challenging the state but refusing to emulate it, she became an exemplar. She became the one who could not be killed even by the state with exceptional powers. Finally, by contrasting her protest with Manipuri nationalism, this article shows how the ethics of nonviolence offers a unique vision for peace and liberation.