Food, Care, and Carceral Power: The Politics of Commensality in Australian Immigration Detention

Abstract

Abstract Carceral institutions are not only places of oppression and domination but also sites of negotiation, compromise, and resistance. Everyday practices like eating are part of this picture. Institutional power extends to and manifests in the food that prisoners eat. Equally, meals can be a locus of everyday resistance, where prisoners assert autonomy and symbolically circumvent the institution’s control over their bodies. Drawing on more than 70 interviews with visitors to Australian immigration detention facilities, this article adds to this discussion of prison fare by exploring how visitor–detainee commensality shapes institutional dynamics of power and resistance. It shows that visitor–detainee meals have the potential to disrupt the carceral machine by affording detainees access to psychological nourishment and escape. Equally, it argues that the realization of this potential depends on detainees and their visitors building relationships that challenge, rather than reproduce, orthodox hierarchies between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’, caregivers and care receivers.