Lauren Wilcox1

Millennium Conference on Materialism

October 19-20, 2012

Draft prepared for Conference Presentations, comments are welcome but please do not circulate

or cite without permission from the author.

What the Body Does: Theorizing Hunger Striking and Embodied Agency in International

Relations

For someone who is contented, or unconcerned with any worry, living what is termed an everyday life, you may find my psychological circumstances hard to comprehend. For two reasons: firstly, my inability to describe the psychological struggle of myself and of my three hundred and fifty comrades; secondly, it is terribly hard, if not inconceivable, to conjure up in one’s imagination the pain and stress of the psychological torture or to know its many forms or to understand its various effects.

In short, imagine being entombed, naked and alone, for a whole day. What would it be like for twenty torturous months? Now again, with this in mind, try and imagine what it would be like to be in this situation in surroundings that resemble a pigsty, and you are crouched naked upon the floor in a corner, freezing cold, amid the lingering stench of putrefying rubbish, with crawling, wriggling white maggots all around you, fat bloated flies pestering your naked body, the silence is nerve-racking, your mind in turmoil.

Consider being in that frame of mind every day! Knowing in your mind that you're to be beaten nearly senseless, forcibly bathed, or held down to have your back passage examined or probed. These things are common facts of everyday H-Block life.

It is inconceivable to try to imagine what an eighteen-year-old naked lad goes through when a dozen or so screws slaughter him with batons, boots, and punches, while dragging him by the hair along a corridor, or when they squeeze his privates until he collapses, or throw scalding water around his naked body. It is also inconceivable for me to describe, let alone for you to imagine, our state of mind just waiting for this to happen. I can say that this physical and psychological torture h as brought many men to the verge of insanity (Sands 1982, 82-83).

The relations of violence expressed by Bobby Sands in his account of life in the H-block

leading up to the 1981 hunger strikes are vivid reminders of the entanglement of subjectivity and

embodiment with violence, material objects and other bodies. International Relations has two

main ways of thinking about agency, subjects and bodies. In the bulk of international relations

theory, human bodies are not explicitly theorized. Rather, they are implicitly substances that

encase subjects. They are only a location where consciousness is located, providing spatiality for

1 Acknowledgments: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Renee Marlin-Bennett, Rose Shinko, Sam Chambers, Alex Livingston, audiences at Johns Hopkins and American University, Millennium.

the subject. Human bodies, in one sense, are the material form that makes agency possible, as

they are a necessary precondition of the subject’s interaction with the world. However, the body

itself is seen as lifeless or passive, only given life and animated by consciousness. Bodies also

pose a limit on human agency, in their ability to be harmed and killed. Wendt’s articulation of

the body as analogous to the state’s territory in that it has an independent material existence and

is not constituted by ideas or discourse is exemplary of the dualism that pervades IR theory in

general. Alex Wendt’s constructivism is the primary example of this, not because he is alone

(most of the broad perspectives of rationalism and constructivism falls in this category), but

because he is more explicit about his assumptions than most theorists. Wendt’s articulation of the

body as analogous to the state’s territory in that it has an independent material existence and is

not constituted by ideas or discourse is exemplary of the dualism that pervades IR theory in

general. Wendt explicitly relegates the human body as only a ‘brute fact’ that exists outside of

politics. Fearon and Wendt suggest that the internal structure of the body and its ability to move

and act, serve as a “platform on which actorhood is constructed” (2002, 63). Fearon and Wendt

write that while the meaning and social position of bodies varies, prior to the process of

meaning-making, bodies must be structured by an internal organization in order to acquire

meaning. For individuals, this is the body’s biological structure. For states, the collective action

of biologically given people is shaped by the structure of the state (2002, 63). Embodied subjects

exist prior to the process of identity formation and meaning-making in politics. In this

framework, the capacities of bodies to weaken, show signs of pain and deterioration, and die

could only be a barrier to political action, or something that could be calculated and used by

conscious subjects. Bodies are formed before the social process of meaning-making, and cannot

contribute themselves to this process. Here, the relevant question is what the body is.

The positing of pre-existing agents with material characteristics prior to their formation in

political practices has come under criticism by scholars affiliated with post-structural theorizing

in International Relations precisely for this pre-political understanding of subjects as possessing

certain forms or characteristics prior to political processes (Zehfuss 2001, Doty 2000, Neumann,

Uses of the Other: "The East" in European Identity Formation 1999, Epstein 2010). Inspired by

theorists such as Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault, work associated with post-structuralism in IR

takes the concept of ‘discourse’ to be central to understanding the relationship between subjects,

power and representational practices such as language. In Foucault’s words, discourse analysis

“consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements

referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of

which they speak” (Foucault, 1972, 49). Theorists associated with post-structuralism have

insisted that they do not deny the existence of a material world, but rather there is no way to

know that world outside of discourse, and that discourse is inherently material (Campbell 2000

[1992]; Hansen 2006, 21-25). “The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse

has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism

opposition . . . . What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather

different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside of any discursive

condition of emergence” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 108). Discourses are productive of certain

subject positions, of ways of being, knowing, and acting in the world. They are thus productive

sites of social power because they define what is imaginable and possible in ordinary practices of

life (Barnett and Duvall 2005). Our bodies are produced as objects in discourse. They are

essentially cultural constructs, and thus have no agentic properties in themselves. Here, the

primary question concerning bodies is what the body means.

While this theory seeks to undermine the Cartesian dualism between culture and nature,

mind and body by insisting upon the discursive (and thus contingent) foundations of objects and

categories, this position reverses the causal attribution of agency: discourse constitutes agency.

Even in sophisticated variants such as that of Hansen or Paul Edwards in which discourse

contains more than speech acts to refer to the endure field of signifying or meaningful practices

to consist of “these social interactions—material, institutional, and linguistic—through which

human knowledge is produced and reproduced” (Edwards 1996, 34), suffer from this issue.

Discourse still treaties material practices to be effects rather than causes, and a dualist ontology

is preserved.2

In invoking the performative capabilities of bodies to enact discourse, Lene Hansen

writes, “it is the question of the body which pushes the discursive approach most fully to its

limits” (Hansen 2000, 301). In this piece, I argue that the embodied practice of hunger-striking

does indeed push the discursive approach to its limits. Rather than a fixed substance, or a product

of social meanings, bodies should be understood as processes, as bodies-in-formation that

2 Footnote here about Chambers and the argument about discourse and bodies.

interact with multiple bodies and discourses to effect political transformation. Such a bodily

ontology enables a posthumanist theory of agency, which I argue is necessary to theorize the

agentic capacities of the hunger striker. In recent years, some feminists and political theorists

have sought to reassess the relationship between the cultural and natural, mind and body, by

overcoming not only discourses of biological determinism, but what they see is excessive weight

granted to the cultural or linguistic in previous work in feminist and political theory in theorizing

the embodied subject. Such theories are collected under headings of new materialisms or

material feminisms. These theories are important in their attempts to formulate a space of agency

for bodies and materiality more broadly, without falling into either trap of biological

determinism or the idealism of post-structuralism in which bodies are produced by language or

discourses ‘all the way down’. A key argument of this emerging movement is that nature

‘punches back’ in ways that humans and their technologies cannot predict (Alaimo and Hekman

2008, 7). Materiality is re-theorized not as a limit to, or foundation for, cultural inscription, but

as agentic in such a way that it cannot be ontologically separated from cultural or discursive

forces. The category of ‘nature’ is not what halts or forms a barrier to human liberation, but can

introduce dynamism into the human world in unpredictable ways. As two leading proponents

insist, “For materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality,

relationality or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable”

(Coole and Frost 2010, 9).

The practice of hunger striking gives us an opening to think about bodies as having a

capacity to push back against their inscription and formation in discursive practices. In other

words, human bodies can be productive as well as produced. Such a perspective would also not

defining subjects or bodies as a priori individuals; rather, individualism is only one possibility

for understanding the subject. A post-humanist perspective of agency would entail a ‘plane of

immanence’ in which not only are nature/culture, materialism/idealism, mind and body given the

same status, but these very distinctions do not exist. This entails a rejects of both vulgar

materialism and most variants of the ‘discourse’ approach, even most of the ‘practice turn’

(Pouliot 2008, Adler and Pouliot 2011). Posthumanist agency also requires a foregrounding of

relations rather than either subjects or objects (Jackson and Nexon 1999). Third, a posthuman

conception of agency requires an ontology of movement, complexity and assemblage. Rather

than incorporating an ontology of substance, or viewing bodies as a repository of meanings,

theorizing bodies as agentic in their relations with other bodies requires a method for thinking

bodies and embodiment as processes and means, rather than looking at bodies, turning one’s

attention to processes that form bodies in assemblages. Assemblages are made of parts that work

together, that have no meaningful existence outside of the relations.

My argument in this piece is twofold: one, human bodies possess agentic capacities in

that they can they can produce political affects in reassembling assemblages and second, that

these agentic capacities exist insofar as bodies are components of broader assemblages. Bodies

are assemblages, but they are also parts of assemblages. In an assemblage, every element has a

vital force, but this is not a solid block, but a collective, so that the parts have their own

inflection—they are not subsumed by the assemblage. Components of assemblages have no

independent function or meaning, but only work to produce effects as joined in assemblages.

Rather, elements from within can disrupt it. Assemblages are not solid or stable, but are

generative, in the process of combining and recombining functions, removing elements and

functions and bring out new ones. Here, I refer both to human bodies as assemblages, and to

bodies as elements or components in another assemblage, which for ease of reference I call the

prison assemblage.

“Posthumanist performativity” is a term Barad uses to restore agency to materiality, but

not as a force existing outside of the productive powers of discourse: neither materiality nor

discourse is given causal efficacy on its own as in dualist ontologies. Specifically, she describes

how the materiality of bodies comes to play an active role in the discursive production of bodies,

rather than a basis for the passive inscription of social forces. Barad posits an account of

phenomena as the basic epistemological unit that is not individual but relational: phenomena are

relata, part of relations that do not precede these relations. These phenomena are constitutive of

reality, as “reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things behind phenomena but

‘things’-in-phenomena” (2003, 817). Barad’s work is influenced by her reading of quantum

physics, but it shares much with Deluezian concepts of assemblages.

Agency, according to new materialist approaches, is a distributed phenomenon, meaning

that it emerges from interactions between bodies (and can include both human and non-human

bodies) (see (Krause 2011, Barad 2003). Bodies undergo change when they act upon or are acted

upon by other bodies. In terms of affect, bodies may be thought of as what they are capable of

doing. Bodies have more power in relation to other bodies. This kind of metamorphosis in the

powers of a given body or assemblage is what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘becoming’. (Deleuze

and Guattari 1987, 54)3 Objects in assemblages have agency in that they produce effects—again,

the material or discursive nature of such effects is not a relevant distinction. Causality is complex

and emergent—neither objects nor structure pre-exist, but are the result of complex interactions.

Bodies and assemblages are always ‘becoming’ rather is, becoming something other than they

were—in motion rather than static. The agentic capacities of bodies, or their involvement in

practices of resistance do not take the form of dichotomous opposition or a ‘great refusal’ but

rather, lie in their capacity to form new connections and assemblages with other bodies.

To theorize the body of the hunger striker as an agentic component in a broader

assemblage, I start with the prison. Much has been written about the prison as a coercive and

disciplining institution, most famously of course by Foucault, who considered what people

thought about prison design as an exemplary moment of disciplinary politics. I begin with the

prison precisely because it is an extreme example of bodily coercion, violence, and isolation as

such, it presents us with something of a ‘hard case’ for seeing the agentic capacities of bodies in

formation with one another. The material structure of prison does not only consist of walls and

bars, but the showers, the bodies of guards, the food, the blankets, the uniforms, the bodies of

prisoners, and their letters, smuggled in and out. Prisons are not isolated units either, but are parts

of broader assemblages including (but not limited to): a history of English colonialism and Irish

nationalism, the families and comrades of the prisoners, and the meaning of hunger strike. In the

case of Guantánamo, the prison is part of an assemblage of the war on terror, the whole prison

complex, the legal justifications, and the sedimented history of the hunger strike, the meaning of

‘terrorist’ and ‘Islam’.

The prison is also the site of torture, in which the state’s power is produced through the

harming and injuring of bodies. Sand’s writing quoted above tells of the implements of torture as

other critical bodies in this assemblage, such as the showers and brushes which formed part of

the collection of elements that become part of the assemblage. Torture and abuse are well-

documented parts of the prison experience for hunger strikers in the examples I have mentioned;

3 For clarity, although Deleuze and Guattari refer to bodies in a broad sense as ‘things in existence in relation to others’, I’m referring to components in an assemblage and keeping bodies to mean human bodies—since my point here is twofold: bodies have agency, as components of broader assemblage.

Irish Republicans, prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, and those affiliated with the PKK in Turkey.

Torture has the effect of producing certain subjects, or rather, non-subjects reduced to ‘bare’ or

biopolitical life. Torture marks the body not only through injury, but by performatively making

the body of the torture victim into a subject that can be tortured, or as Judith Butler writes, “one

locates injurability with the other by injuring the other and then taking the sign of injury as the

truth of the other” (Butler 2009, 178). Torture is a technique that acts in and through bodies to

constitute certain political subjectivities and relations. These relations that are constituted

through torture make the body of the prisoner into a key battlefield. As Feldman writes of the

British torture of Irish Republican paramilitary prisoners, “the performance of torture does not

apply power; rather it manufactures it from the ‘raw’ ingredient of the captive’s body. The

surface of the body is the stage where the state is made to appear as an effective material force”

(Feldman 1991, 115). The bodies of prisoners are thus produced in relation to a state power and

the bodies of their torturers in the prison. Bodies of prisons become part of an assemblage in the

prison aimed at making prisoners into docile subjects and furthering the state’s aims in

maintaining rule in N. Ireland.

The hunger strike as a form of prison protest is a site in which bodily agency as part of

bodily assemblages becomes visible. The hunger strikes of imprisoned Irish Republican

Nationalists in the early 1980s (led by Bobby Sands) are some of the most well known. In this

context, hunger striking has a long history in both Irish Nationalist politics and is legitimated by

references to Irish tradition, in which sitting on the front steps of someone who has aggrieved

you and refusing to eat has a historical basis within the culture. In this sense, the practice of

hunger striking can be compared to self-immolation or suicide bombing as a kind of

‘performative witnessing’ (Roberts 2007) in which causing harm or death to yourself is a

particularly powerful way of making a statement that your cause is just. Indeed, hunger strikes

have been used by organizations that also deploy suicide bombers, such as the LTTE in Sri

Lanka, and the PKK in Turkey. Hunger strikes by members of Irish Republican nationalists,

political prisoners affiliated with the PKK and prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were all designed as

a protest against prison conditions that had to do with how bodies were controlled and made into

certain symbolic options. Not all hunger strikes take place in prisons or as a protest of prison

conditions, of course. I focus on the hunger strike as a form of prison protest in order to

demonstrate one site in which the politics of bodies is especially evident; the examples I refer to

are relevant not only to international politics, but because they are examples of a phenomenon

that allow us to ask questions about the functioning of bodies in international politics. In

beginning not with the hunger strike, but with the prison, I also seek to take seriously the dual

nature of materialism: “The political appeal to materialism is always twofold: we must both

recognize how bodily life has unfolded historically to produce certain relations, and we must

acknowledge that freedom from those relations requires recognition of our materiality”

(Colebrook 2008, 63). The prison setting highlights the exteriority of bodies; while the story of

hunger striking can be told as a story of the body’s rebellion and refusal, the prison is a dramatic

example of the body as a site of coercion, victimization and inscription.

The hunger strike and other bodily practices such as the ‘Dirty Protest’ reveal the body

not only as locus of the state’s power, but also as an agentic source of resistance. At issue is not

the prison per se but the question of the possibilities of transformation in relation to the ways in

which contemporary regimes of power control, shape, mold, invest and inscribe bodies. At stake

in Foucault’s words, “all these movements…have been about the body and material things…they

were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. What was at issue was

not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient,

but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power” (Foucault 1979, 30). Following

Foucault’s logic, it becomes clear in the enclosed world of the prison has implications for the

study of power, agency and embodied more broadly in International Relations. The body takes

on meaning, and a range of possibilities for action, in the process of forming assemblages.

Theorizing the ‘agentic capacities’ (Coole 2005) of bodies moves us from the enclosed, modular

view of the prison as a set of material practices of coercion and disciplining to a view of bodies

and agency more attuned complex nature of power in the contemporary world of multiple and

overlapping flows of power rather than fixed, stable institutions.

We can view torture in the prison as an attempt to mold and shape the bodies of

prisoners, making them into docile, individualized subjects that are thoroughly subjected in the

sense of dominated by sovereign power. Torture is a continuation of prison as a practice to write

the bodies of prisoners through and through with the power of the regime and deny its victims a

subjectivity outside that of the regime’s will. Thus far, however, we have not departed from what

‘discourse theory’ in International Relations theorizing about our bodies: they are given meaning

through discursive practices, they are inscribed by power, and it is through discursive formation

that we ‘know’ bodies. We can begin to transcend this view that fails to delineate an active or

agentic role to the materiality of bodies themselves by thinking about how bodies play an active

role in producing political effects and can usher in a transformation in the prison assemblage.

Hunger striking involves a decision by a subject to refuse food. That human emotion and

cognition is involved does not mean that bodies as/and assemblages cannot be agentic, for as

Coole argues, “the operations of agentic capacities in politics will always exceed the agency

exercise by rational subjects” (Coole 2005). Here, some may object that the body here is no more

than a tool to be used, and that we need not depart from the Cartesian view of the body as

mechanistic, or passive material to be manipulated by active subjects in order to theorize the

body of the hunger striker. However, this view is inadequate for a number of reasons. First,

human subjectivity cannot be separated from experiences of the body. Contemporary

neuroscience and cognitive science theorizes the ‘mind’ as a category not only of the brain, but

as always situated in a body (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). We experience emotions or

sensations as a result of our body’s attempts to maintain equilibrium (Damasio 1999). For

example, the experience of hunger is a felt experience that is a result of a drop in blood sugar,

which is detected by neurons in the brain, which activate a bodily state—the sensation of hunger.

This is what is known as a molar view of the body, in which the body is made up of organs, of

which the brain is only one. If we were to follow this line of reasoning instead of the

instrumental view of hunger striking (that the actions of hunger strikers are driven, at least after

the initial decision to undertake a hunger strike, by the biochemical processes in the body), we

would subvert a dynamic sense of embodied agency as a process. While theorizing the hunger

strike from an instrumental perspective reinforces a view of the body as ‘substance’ that subjects

manipulate, a biochemical view of embodied give us only a partial understanding of bodily

experiences by reducing them to interactions within a singular body.

The lived body is always, in Iris Marion Young’s terms, ‘enculturated’ (Young 2002).

One’s bodily experience is not separate from the social and political context in which one lives.

The experience of prison life contributes to one’s cognitive and emotional state—as Sands

struggles to communicate in the prelude to article. The subject’s cognition is only one part of his

or her bodily assemblage, as bodies are written upon, produced by, social and political forces as

well. This is the contribution of Foucault, Butler, and others who theorize the formation of

subjects through subjection to power that works on and through the body. The body is enacted

materially through its interactions in the environment. “Living in spaces and participating in their

organization forms the body in characteristic ways, which in turn provides a matrix of

permutations for thought and action” (Hayles 1999, 203).

Bodies are lively, self-organizing assemblages. They are assemblages because they are

not closed entities, but are dependent upon its openness and connectedness for survival and for

imagining its place in the world as a subject. Food, water and air are environmental elements

crucial for the survival of bodies, while clothes and shelter are needed other environmental

elements that provide protection from other elements (such as the weather). The existence and

agency of bodies depends upon the interaction and cooperation of bodies and other elements and

forces (see also Bennett 2010, 21). They are assemblages, as they are not closed entities and rely.

The body as assemblage is not a stable configuration of forces, as processes of growth and aging

make plain. The same foods that nourish one in one’s youth may cause weight gain as one ages,

for example. The body as a self-organizing assemblage is, however, not completely open—there

must be some kind of boundary membrane between bodies and the outside milieu. This is

necessary for oneself to experience life as a body, to experience bodily sensations and feelings.

The self-organization of bodies revolves around this principle (Colebrook 2011, Damasio, 1994).

Bodies as assemblages (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, as bodies-without-organs) are

not bounded in a given territory, they do not end at the skin. They only exist in their relations

with other bodies, human and non-human. What bodies do, in hunger striking, I want to suggest,

is not only ‘act in the only way possible, out of desperation’ which is a way of describing a

rational, or at least, cognitive actor using his or her body as a tool. Such an explanation is

inconsistent The agentic role of bodies, in acting on other bodies and disrupting the prison

assemblage is, in combination with cognition and a broader media landscape—of entering into

new relationships by their capacities to weaken and die. Bodies enact and reassemble

assemblages.

The hunger strike took place after a blanket protest in which prisoners refused to wear the

prison uniform that would visually label them criminals rather than political prisoners. The

protest intensified into a ‘dirty protest’ involving a refusal to wash and the smearing of

excrement on cell walls, as reaction against abuse related to meals and bathroom shower trips

such as inedible food, beatings, and invasive bodily inspections. The body’s need for food and its

processes of elimination played a key role in the struggle for control over bodies and to control

the meaning of bodies. These components of the human-body-as-assemblage entail both the

means of abuse and the means of resisting this abuse. The hunger strike involves a subject

refusing her or her body’s needs for food. Food is taken out of the assemblage of the body. In

doing so, a disruption is caused in the body assemblage, and in the broader prison assemblage.

The hunger striker refuses food, denying the body some of the material supplementation it needs

to exist. The body of the hunger striker, in turn, acts by weakening, feeding on its own tissues,

causing a great deal of pain and eventual death. The vulnerability of bodies is a necessary

condition for the agentic effects of hunger striking. As such, the body of the hunger striker enters

into politics on terms that refuse to occupy the docile subject position of inmate. Because

assemblages are not stable but defined by movement, vitality, and even life in their combining,

rearranging and discarding, the death of the body assemblage of the prisoner is a denial of a

crucial component of the prison assemblage: a body to act upon.

The transformation of the prison assemblage through hunger striking comes in no small

part through the manipulation of time. Body assemblages have their own time in the lifespan of

human beings, in which bodies strive toward equilibrium but which is affected by outside forces

and choices by subjects as well as eventual weakening and death. The prison assemblage works

on bodies to create a sense of urgency for those who could not be docile bodies out of a sense of

desperation at the tactics deployed by the prison assemblage. For example, those involved in the

Dirty Protest and blanket strikes that preceded the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland prisons in

1981 reported a sense that, after five years of various forms of prison protest, there was an

increasingly feeling that something had to be done to break the stalemate (Feldman 1991, 249).

A similar dynamic is reported from Guantanamo Bay detainees over not knowing how long they

would be detained and when, if ever, they would be released. Hunger striking prisoners in

Guantanamo Bay demanded to be set free or put on trial; in short, to end their legal limbo

(Worthington 2007, 271-276; Stafford Smith 2007, 189). Shaker Aamen, a spokesman for the

prisoners, wrote on the verge of a renewed hunger strike, “I am dying here every day. Mentally

and physically, this is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of

the ocean for four years. Rather than humiliate myself, having to beg for water here in Camp

Echo, I have decided to hurry up a process that is going to happen anyway” (Stafford Smith

2007, 207). The prison assemblage is relatively static assemblage, moving toward fixity and

closure—while bodily assemblages are relatively open.

The temporality of the hunger strike differs from similar practices of self-harm as

political tactic such as self-immolation or suicide bombing. By undertaking a hunger strike, one

is open to negotiation, or the possibility of coming off the hunger strike if certain conditions are

met. The hunger strike prolongs the time to death of the suicide, but it condenses the time of the

regular life span of the body. As such, hunger striking makes a weapon out of ‘life’ as a

naturalized process (see also Bargu 2011). The practice of hunger striking “fus[es] the subject

and object of violent enactment into a single body” (Feldman 1991, 264). The practice of hunger

striking is a means of resisting the control over the body and its performance of political relations

by shifting the orientation of violence in the prison assemblage. The body of the hunger-striker

enacts the progression of the body toward death in a reduced time, amplifying the effects of the

body’s inevitable decline toward death. As such, the self-destructing bodies force a certain crisis

to take place. Death is inevitable if the strike continues, but it is also unpredictable, as it is based

in an internal logic of body assemblages that is not necessarily accessible to human subjects.,

sometimes including ‘the will to live’. Whether action is taken to acquiesce to demands, if the

demands are ignored, if the hunger strikers are force-fed, or if some other intervention takes

places, new relations are forged and the shape and movement of the assemblages shifts. The

becoming-(dead)bodies of hunger strikers transform the relations of power in the prison by

reassembling elements in cross-cutting assemblage.

Hunger striking relies upon yet other elements in an assemblage: the audience whose

attention is drawn to prison conditions via the hunger strike. Here, the assemblage extends

spatially beyond the architecture of the prison. When Bobby Sands and others went on a hunger

strike to demand classification of IRA members as political prisoners, rather than criminals, the

Thatcher government decided not to intervene and allowed them to die. Rather than

acknowledging their actions as a political protest, Thatcher declared the prisoners had

‘committed suicide.’ The hunger strikers who died were celebrated as martyrs and their funeral

parades attended by a hundred thousand, and Bobby Sands was elected as an MP during the

hunger strike. Most of the demands of the prisoners were eventually met. The hunger strikes

served to radicalize the population and led to the success of Sinn Fein in electoral politics. “The

British won the battle of the bowels but lost the war for the hearts and minds” (Coogan 1997

(1980), 261). The prison was politicized from a site of punishment for crimes and surveillance, to

a site of struggle that echoed broadly through the assemblage.

One case of a hunger striker who was taken off the strike illustrates how bodies can exert

a kind of agency even against the speech-acts of subjects. Turkish hunger striker Fatma Sener is

quoted by journalist Scott Anderson defending her choice to undertake a death fast: “I don’t want

to quit life, I want to live very much, but I also came to see that I had to make a stand for what I

believed in, to fight for the kind of life that I want to live” (Anderson 2001). Sener’s body in its

weakness and deterioration has ambiguous effects. Described as “an extraordinarily beautiful

woman, with an infectious smile and penetrating brown eyes” by Anderson, Sener’s frail

embodiment leads him to intervene and work with her family to take her off the hunger strike.

Would he have done this if not for her embodiment as a woman and moreover, her attractive

appearance and affect: “serene, ethereal” with the “aura of an angel”? Anderson paints Sener as

a misguided teenager, a damsel in distress who needs to be under the guidance and care of her

family. As she grew increasingly weak and close to death, Anderson frantically communicates

with both the Turkish official in charge of the prisons and Sener’s family to convince Sener that

her hunger strike was pointless and the demands would not be met. Despite Sener’s political

commitments, it seems evident that her feminine, dying body acted upon Anderson, causing him

to intervene to apply pressure to Sener and her family to get her to stop her hunger strike. Sener’s

body acted against her conscious mind, and acted upon Anderson to become its ally in ending

Sener-the-intentional-subject’s hunger strike. And yet, this kind of agency is not possible outside

of a particular discursive structure of gender and heteronormativity: Sener’s body acted in

concert with certain gender norms and Anderson as the repository of such norms to end Sener’s

hunger strike.

In the case of Binyam Mohammad, Shaker Aamen and the other hunger strikers at

Guantánamo Bay the main effect of the hunger strikes was to force their jailers into a kind of

recognition or apprehension of them. The US was, in essence, forced to care for them. To be

sure, this ‘care’ took the form of painful force-feedings against the will of the hunger strikers.

However, by force-feeding the prisoners, the prisoners were discursively produced as

dependents, as ‘psych patients’ as only those considered unable to make decision on their own

behalf such as those in mental institutions have historically been force-fed. Of one prisoner,

naval surgeon Louis Louk said, “He’s refused to eat 148 consecutive meals. In my opinion, he’s

a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesn’t get his way” (Stafford

Smith 2007, 189). A Pentagon spokesperson has responded to charges of ill-treatment in force-

feeding by saying that Defense Department officials “believe that preservation of life through

lawful, clinically appropriate means is a responsible and prudent measure for the safety and well-

being of detainees” (White 2006). While this subject position as ‘dependent’ is far from the

status as rights bearing subject that the hunger strikers sought, this instance does show that the

starving body can be disruptive enough to cause a change in the political relations between jailer

and prisoner. In this case, we could say that the prisoners (as already assemblages) and the jailers

(likewise assemblages) were transformed because of the transformation of their relations with the

broader prisoner and war on terror assemblage. Furthermore, the body is also acting against the

conscious wishes of the hunger strikers in absorbing the nutrients from the force-feeding. The

body’s nutrient absorption energies are used by the state to overpower the conscious subject, but

not without a shift in the discourse surrounding the prisoners. We can’t call hunger striking in

this circumstance an act of pure freedom, or an uncomplicated victory for one side or the other,

we can, I think, say that this causes a kind of shift and disturbance, bringing in new objects and

discourses – the feeding tubes, the chairs, the protests of doctors representing medical ethics,

discourses to the overall assemblages, trying to incorporate them into the assemblage.

The hunger striker demonstrates that subjectivities cannot be reduced to discursive

phenomenon but are also constituted by bodily affects. In short, bodily experiences may be

shaped by language or discursive formations, but bodily experiences also wield a force that

shapes linguistic and other choices in a recursive process. In the figure of the hunger striker,

matter has a history, an agentic capacity of its own. It is not entirely written. Rather, it enters into

relationships—with meaning, with other bodies, with objects and structures. By weakening and

dying, or threatening to, the body assemblage works on the broader prison/state/media

assemblage to acquire a new meaning, and to perhaps change the function of the prison

assemblage or apparatus. Subjects become subjects by taking possession of the means of bodily

violence, even if this is intended to, or even just risks, bring about the demise of the subject.

Hunger-striking can be read as a re-appropriation of the mechanisms of power that seek to

dominate, shape and mold bodies. It is thus not a pure form of resistance to power, but a form of

power itself (Foucault 1978, 101). The political act of the hunger strike is enabled by the human

body in a way that exceeds frameworks of agency that posits the human body as a platform for

human agency, or of bodies that are only knowable through discourse. The agentic properties

that enable the hunger strike to work as a political protest have to do with the obvious, yet

undertheorized, aspect of embodied subjectivity: the unpredictable yet inevitable weakening and

death of the body.

The reading of bodies in pain as communication in non-representational terms and as a

call for recognition, can be thought of as exposing, and contributing to, a particular relationality

in the acknowledgement of the realities of pain and the mutual constitution of subjectivity as

embodied in particular context that includes other embodied subjects as well. Hunger striking is,

at one level an individual act, but it is an act that produces new bodies and new assemblages.

Guantánamo Bay prisoners and hunger striker Binyam Mohammad declared, “I do not intended

to stop until I die or we are respected” suggests that it is an I who embarks on a hunger strike, but

a ‘we’ that is to be brought into being, recognized as a political entity with certain rights. This

statement suggests the practice of hunger striking is a performative practice conjuring a

multiplicity of bodies in the action of a singular body. Furthermore, this ‘we’ depends on a

certain audience that is addressed, whose attention is drawn to the prison by the wasting body of

the hunger striker. Veena Das argues that the expression of pain is a call for recognition in the

body of the other. The experience of pain cries out for the response of the possibility that pain

could be reversed, that it could reside in your body instead of mine in a kind of remembrance or

imagining (Das 2007). The pain materialized in the body of the hunger striker acts through the

body to form connections with other bodies. As Asad reminds us, “What a subject experiences as

painful, and how, are not simply mediated culturally and physically, they are themselves modes

of living in a relationship” (Asad 2003, 84). Bodily pain is a way of possibly entering into a

relationship—but what relationship depends upon the response to pain, how it is allowed to be

expressed. Asad gives us a way of thinking about how we can differently establish relations and

rethink connections—through attention to the material body in its social and political relations.

The subject of torture/hunger striking in this way is not an autonomous subject trapped in his or

her own body but bound in relations of recognition with fellow prisoners, prison guards/doctors,

and a broader audience beyond the prison. The practice of hunger striking transforms the

violence that produces the vulnerability and criminality of the prisoner into a form of sacrifice

with different performative effects; making the bodies of hunger strikers into more fully political

actors with different relationships to their jailors and the broader community.

Conclusion:

Theorizing bodies as assemblages with agentic capacities is not only to broader questions

about agency, subjectivity and discourse. A methodological focus on practices of bodies and

embodiment has much to offer IR, which as a discipline is just beginning to think about the ways

that human bodies are relevant in the formation of subjects in international relations. Readers of

Foucault are well aware of the state’s investment in not only disciplining individual bodies but in

managing the state’s population in terms of movement and migration, health, longevity and

reproduction by marshalling apparently ‘natural’ forces. Of particular note are theorists who

have used Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ to denote subjects who are produced as ‘just bodies,’

who live on the terms of animal or biological life rather than as political subjects in such

examples as the indefinite detention camps Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Air Force base and

elsewhere, internally displaced persons and refugee camps, occupied lands, detention centers for

asylum seekers or who become ‘collateral damage’. (Enns 2004; Seshadri 2008; Tagma 2009). If

practices of sovereign power routinely take the form of the biopolitical investment in the life-

processes of certain bodies—to ‘make live’ while demarcating and producing other bodies as

those who must die, and if biopower comes to characterize the functioning of power globally in

terms of a “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of

human bodies and populations” (Mbembe 2003, 13) see also (Dillon and Reid 2009; Reid 2006;

Dauphinee and Masters 2007) it falls to us to take seriously not only the power that forms bodies

either constituted as ‘bare life’ or as ‘unlivable lives’ (Butler 2004) but the terms of bodily

existence which resist, which strike back and that are not entirely written or determined by

power.

Besides hunger striking, various forms of protest have explicitly involved self-harm, from

the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi that sparked a chain of events that become known as

the Arab Spring, to asylum seekers in Australia who have sewn their lips shut in protest of their

living conditions and uncertain political status. The practice of suicide bombing can also fall

under this category, along with what might be considered more mundane, everyday bodily

practices. Given the importance that IR theorists have given to thinking about the way that power

shapes the political meanings given to certain bodies, as well as the ways in which how certain

ways of theorizing bodies give rise to certain forms of politics, IR would do well to consider the

implications of a more robust, vibrant and deeply political understanding of bodies as both

constituted by, yet in excess to themselves, constituting our world in their relations with one

another.

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