Negotiating the 1981 Hunger Strike (original) (raw)
Hunger Power: The embodied protest of the political hunger strike
Interface, 2016
An enduring form of protest, the hunger strike features in numerous historical and contemporary political and social movements. Yet its simple denial of food is belied by its numerous contradictions. Undertaken by those denied voice it nevertheless can be extremely powerful. It deftly interiorises the violence of the opponent within the body of the protester, affirming and undermining the protest simultaneously. It can be undertaken for highly strategic and rational reasons and yet it is often affective because of the emotional response it provokes. This paper attends to the hunger strike, focusing upon the three historical examples of political activism provided by the Suffragette, Irish republican and anti-apartheid movements. In particular, it highlights three political aspects of the hunger strike: 1) the facilitation of non-verbal communication 2) the embodiment of collective identifications 3) the disruption of the dominant order. The paper considers how the hunger strike challenges the omission of the body from political theory, displaying the body to be both political instrument and political actor. It also challenges the prioritisation of deliberative discussion over embodied protest.
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.
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.
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.