Hunger Strike Research Articles

Translating Yoani

In 2013, the young philologist Yoani Sánchez was “possibly the most famous living Cuban not named Castro” and one of the world’s most famous bloggers. Although, at the time, very few people in Cuba had access to the internet, a legion of volunteers worldwide translated her Generation Y blog into eighteen languages, reaching millions of internauts globally every month. In many parts of the world, the press and political figures viewed Sánchez with awe, describing her as a “girl genius” and a “rock star.” This view was not unreasonable—a thirty-four-year-old woman who built her computer from scratch in a country ruled undemocratically by old military men—Sánchez’s writing constituted a daily defiance of the Cuban state. Yet, questions remained: What made Sánchez different? Why did so much attention flow to Sánchez rather than the numerous hunger strikers in and out of Cuban jails during this period? Why did global media pick Sánchez to speak for and translate Cuba to the world and with what effects? Here, Frances Negrón-Muntaner investigates how multiple forms of translation, of language but also of form, education, ideology, color, and gender, in a context of capitalist and technological change allowed Sánchez to play a pivotal and mediating role that changed her, Cuba, and beyond.

The hunger strike as a biopolitical technology: re-reading the 1981 Irish republican prison protest

ABSTRACT This article uses the case of the 1981 Irish republican prison protest to show that indefinite hunger strikes can force Euromodern states to the negotiating table by undercutting their commitment to good government. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of biopower and political reason, I argue that these acts of willed self-starvation exert pressure on state officials by exploiting a tension between the modern state’s juridical claim to sovereignty and its biopolitical investment in fostering life. In the case of the famed IRA hunger strike on the H-Blocks, the archive shows that the Thatcher government experienced more pressure to reach a negotiated settlement than the prime minister or her top advisers publicly acknowledged. Such pressure, however, stemmed not from a moral or humanitarian investment in saving the individual hunger strikers’ lives, but instead from officials’ biopolitical concern that the protest was undermining British attempts to restore ‘life as usual’ in the conflicted region. Ultimately, Thatcher was willing to let ten of the Irish republican strikers die rather than grant them any concessions that might indicate they were political prisoners. The article closes by showing how an indefinite hunger strike’s efficacy is often foreclosed in securitized and postcolonial contexts like that of Northern Ireland, where the protesters can be framed as a ‘biopolitical remainder’ that is allowed to die so that the broader society might thrive.

California’s AB 101

In 2021, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 101, which requires that all students graduating high school by 2029–2030 must take an ethnic studies course. California is the only state in the nation with this graduation requirement. This article explores the historical and contemporary factors that pushed California to legislate and implement AB 101. We utilize a historical case study approach focusing on different student-led movements that embraced ethnic studies to combat educational inequalities. To do so, we pinpoint three historical phases in which ethnic studies became implemented throughout the state. In the first phase, influential scholars in the early and mid-twentieth century produced scholarship about historically marginalized people of color, which became foundational for the study of Black, Chicana/o, Asian American, and Indigenous people. The second phase involved students of color fighting for a culturally relevant curriculum, as demonstrated by the 1968 Third World Liberation Front, the 1968 East Los Angeles Chicano walkouts, El Plan de Santa Bárbara, and Chicanx/Latinx student hunger strikes in the 1990s. Lastly, the third phase consists of contemporary students, parents, educators, and activists successfully petitioning their local school districts to mandate ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement. Despite these gains, far-right organizations in cities like Santa Barbara have mobilized to push back against both the ethnic studies requirement and progressive social justice groups like Just Communities Central Coast. This resistance initially derailed AB 331, an earlier ethnic studies bill that Governor Newsom vetoed based on accusations that it was “anti-Semitic.” A revised version, AB 101, was then introduced and passed. While momentous, we contend, AB 101 is still limited; reaching its full potential would require greater teacher credentialing and the expansion of ethnic studies to K–8 students.

An observational sketch essay of an undocumented immigrant hunger strike in Brussels

This visual essay makes use of sketches and watercolour drawings in order to present an observational study of a hunger strike conducted by undocumented immigrants in a Brussels church in 2021. The study aimed to explore the lived experience of the hunger strikers, focusing on the physical consequences, emotional states and process of the strike. The essay highlights the importance of visibility in gaining public support for a hunger strike. The study adds to existing scholarship on the use of visual methods in social research and highlights the potential of observational drawings as a tool for understanding the experiential aspects of social movements.

‘No status – no census!’ The causes and consequences of the 1971 and 1981 Northern Ireland census boycotts

ABSTRACT Despite Northern Ireland having been established on the basis of statistics from the 1911 census and the centrality of religious demography to many accounts of its conflict, little has been written about the political history of census-taking there. This paper contributes to addressing this oversight by exploring two related controversies in that history: the 1971 and 1981 census boycotts. Through use of archive materials, it demonstrates how concerns about the privacy of personal information collected by the census against the backdrop of the Troubles, were mixed with broader motivations whereby the census was seen as a symbolic target for protest and boycott in the context of discrimination against Catholics and the republican movement’s campaign for political status for its prisoners, with the 1981 boycott taking place during the hunger strike of that year. Despite a perhaps surprisingly low rate of overall non-response to the census given calls for it to be boycotted, the boycotts did have a significant impact and a legacy that lasted into the 1990s—by which time republicans’ attitude towards the census had changed for the positive.

‘I’m not a martyr, I’m a terrorist’: the Cospito affair and the rejection of martyrdom in insurrectionary anarchism

ABSTRACT While self-sacrifice and martyrdom are considered an important component in several forms of violent extremism, including jihadism and even sectors of violent right-wing extremism, very few works have looked at the presence of these narratives and practices in today’s violent left-wing and anarchist extremism. This article aims to help fill this gap, paying attention to insurrectionary anarchism, an understudied violent extremist tendency within the diverse anarchist galaxy. In particular, the paper focuses on Alfredo Cospito, a well-known and influential exponent of this transnational clandestine movement, convicted of terrorism in Italy in 2013, and his widely publicized prison hunger strike in 2022–2023, drawing upon primary and secondary sources. During his long hunger strike to protest against detention conditions, Cospito knowingly risked his life for the cause but at the same time he explicitly rejected the idea of martyrdom with scorn. Building on this emblematic case, the paper explores the reasons why contemporary insurrectionary anarchists are reluctant to accept and promote the powerful social construct of martyrdom, with an emphasis on cultural and organizational constraints.

Ethical challenges in health care during collective hunger strikes in public or occupied spaces.

Public collective hunger strikes take place in complex social and political contexts, require medical attention and present ethical challenges to physicians. Empirical research, the ethical debate to date and existing guidelines by the World Medical Association focus almost exclusively on hunger strikes in detention. However, the public space differs substantially with regard to the conditions for the provision of health care and the diverse groups of healthcare providers or stakeholders involved. By reviewing empirical research on the experience of health professionals with public collective hunger strikes, we identified the following ethical challenges: (1) establishment of a trustful physician-striker relationship, (2) balancing of medico-ethical principles in medical decision-making, (3) handling of loyalty conflicts and (4) preservation of professional independence and the risk of political instrumentalization. Some of these challenges have already been described and discussed, yet not contextualized for public collective strikes, while others are novel. The presence of voluntary physicians may offer opportunities for a trustful relationship and, hence, for ethical treatment decisions. According to our findings, it requires more attention to how to realise autonomous medical decisions in the complex context of a dynamic, often unstructured and politically charged setting, which ethical norms should shape the professional role of voluntary physicians, and what is the influence of the hunger strikers'collective on individual healthcare decisions. Our article can serve as a starting point for further ethical discussion. It can also provide the basis for the development of potential guidelines to support health professionals involved in public collective hunger strikes.

Claiming Agency in the Disappearing Body: Performing Hunger as Necroresistance and the Decolonial Self

In my performances, installations, and writing at the nexus of social justice and stories of marginalized and minoritized identities, I contemplate the psychophysical implications of lack of fundamental necessities caused by withholding of company, sleep, letting go, food, water, movement, and agency. Whether such lack is imposed on bodyminds by torture, protest due to oppression, or experimentation, it creates deprivation and hunger for breath, rest, nutrition, contact—nourishment and healing not just for the physical body but for the entire self. The effects of such physiological lack is always social, emotional, and mental. The mark of such hunger remains on the mind even when the body heals. Like air, shelter, and water, food is a fundamental human right—and it has been widely evidenced that the planet has enough resources for all. However, states and institutions use slow violence of hunger to perform power and practice control over others, often minoritized, impoverished communities of color or disadvantaged countries. In this paper, I discuss how educator activists in hunger strike, fighting for their right to make a living, subvert the dynamics of control hunger provides by claiming agency of their own bodies, in Turkey. I trace hunger as a performative in the silent and still protest of these university and college teachers whose careers were ended due to political retaliation by the state and discuss how performing hunger serves as a disidentification strategy for the already starved minoritized groups. I also engage with the connection between corporeal and metaphorical agency of the body/self as I also claim that these protests of what I call necroresistance do not belong within traditions of nonviolent protest.

Adaptive Effects of Endocrine Hormones on Metabolism of Macronutrients during Fasting and Starvation: A Scoping Review.

Food deprivation can occur for different reasons. Fasting (<24 h duration) occurs to meet religious or well-being goals. Starvation (>1-day duration) occurs when there is intentional (hunger strike or treatment of a medical condition) or unintentional (anorexia nervosa, drought, epidemic famine, war, or natural disaster) food deprivation. A scoping review was undertaken using the PubMed database to explore 1805 abstracts and review 88 eligible full-text articles to explore the adaptive relationships that emerge between cortisol, insulin, glucagon, and thyroid hormones on the metabolic pathways of macronutrients in humans during fasting and starvation. The collected data indicate that fasting and starvation prime the human body to increase cortisol levels and decrease the insulin/glucagon ratio and triiodothyronine (T3) levels. During fasting, increased levels of cortisol and a decreased insulin/glucagon ratio enhance glycogenolysis and reduce the peripheral uptake of glucose and glycogenesis, whereas decreased T3 levels potentially reduce glycogenolysis. During starvation, increased levels of cortisol and a decreased insulin/glucagon ratio enhance lipolysis, proteolysis, fatty acid and amino acid oxidation, ketogenesis, and ureagenesis, and decreased T3 levels reduce thermogenesis. We present a potential crosstalk between T3 and the above hormones, including between T3 and leptin, to extend their adaptive roles in the metabolism of endogenous macronutrients during food deprivation.

The hunger strike in prison: bioethical and medico-legal insights arising from a recent opinion of the Italian national bioethics committee.

This contribution addresses some bioethical and medico-legal issues of the opinion formulated by the Italian National Bioethics Committee (CNB) in response to the dilemma between the State's duty to protect the life and health of the prisoner entrusted to its care and the prisoner's right to exercise his freedom of expression. The prisoner hunger strike is a form of protest frequently encountered in prison and it is a form of communication but also a language used by the prisoner in order to provoke changes in the prison condition. There are no rules in the prison regulations, nor in the laws governing the legal status of prisoners, that allow the conscious will of the capable and informed subject to be opposed and forced nutrition to be carried out. However, this can in no manner make therapeutic abandonment legitimate: the medical doctor should promote every action to support the patient. In the recent opinion formulated by the CNB it was remarked how self-determination is a central concept in human rights and refers to an individual's ability to make autonomous and free decisions about his or her life and body.

Hunger strikes and force feeding in detention: Clinical and ethical challenges

Hunger strikes and force feeding in detention: Clinical and ethical challenges

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

AbstractWhat 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.

Reframing a community in crisis: an Intersectional discourse analysis of media responses to state of emergency declarations in Attawapiskat

ABSTRACT During the height of the Idle No More movement over the winter of 2012–2013, then Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence undertook a ceremonial fast, widely framed by the mainstream Canadian media as a hunger strike. This event responded to a housing related State of Emergency declaration in her community. During the cold Canadian winter, for six-weeks Chief Spence survived on medicinal fish broth and tea while catalyzing unprecedented social mobilization. Her actions sparked dialogue about the failures of the Canadian government and the general public to understand and uphold treaty relations. From an interpretive critical policy studies perspective, this paper presents an intersectional discourse analysis of mainstream coverage of her community and highlights themes of crisis, accountability and blame. In doing so, this paper seeks to interrupt these hegemonic frames with an account alternative counterstories grounded in community voices. Drawing upon interpretive policy analysis this paper argues that these predominant frames misrepresented Spence’s core request: a revitalized dialogue about treaty relations. Spence’s story and the voices of community-members speak back to and intervene upon the colonial status quo in Canada. This paper presents some insights and lessons learned for critical policy studies based on counterstories articulated in a community-engaged mixed media storytelling research project entitled Reimagining Attawapiskat.

Rejecting Defeat and Approaching Liberation: Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger Strikes

Hunger strikes have been central to the ways in which Palestinian prisoners confront the Israeli carceral regime; demand changes in the ways prisons are run; and demand their most basic rights. Indeed, the earliest documented hunger strike dates to as early as 1968, with demands that included refusals to address Israeli jailers with ‘sir', and having access to pens and notebooks. The recent martyrdom of Khader Adnan on his eighty-seventh day of a hunger strike against his detention highlighted both Palestinian prisoners' continuous resort to hunger strikes, and Israeli violent responses to this act of confrontation whenever it is used by prisoners. Hunger strikes have been analysed and discussed by multiple scholars to shed light on this practice both in Palestine and other global sites of carcerality. The literature on hunger strikes, however, is abundant with analysis that draws on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics. Applying these concepts involves conceptualising prisons as sites intended for the civil and social death of prisoners, or depicts prisoners as bare life and objects of modes of management over their life and death. Yet, an approach that centres the power over life and death, and that presents freedom or its negation as that of the moment of approaching death, falls into a trap that Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daka (2021) warns of in his brief discussion of hunger strikes [from a text read as part of a conference on carcerality, entitled ‘Control Through Time']. Such an analysis, for instance, views death as the sole space over which the captive body has power, as Achille Mbmebe argues in ‘Necropolitics'. My article, however, seeks to investigate and discuss Palestinian prisoners' recourse to hunger strikes in a different vein. To conceptualise hunger strikes and their history in Palestine, the article argues that one has to situate the practice as part of an ever-evolving repertoire of prisoners' responses aiming to constitute political subjectivities that reject defeat, that dream and work for liberation, and that constantly counter attempts at moulding consciousness. Hunger strikes offer yet another example of prisoners' attempts to smuggle freedom from the confines of their cells. The article will engage with the long history of Palestinian prisoners' hunger strikes (collective and individual), with prisoners' own descriptions of hunger strikes, and with several theoretical and conceptual understandings of hunger strikes to shed light on this practice’s political meanings. In doing so, the article hopes to situate hunger strikes within the broader sets of confrontation practices used by Palestinian prisoners, and which constantly dream, and work for, a liberated geography.

Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israeli Jails: Stories of Resistance

The Palestinian cause was brought one more time to the agenda of global politics after the Gaza 2023 genocide. At the heart of the ongoing genocide was the question of Palestinian prisoners. One of the motives of the October 7, 2023, Hamas’ al-Aqsa Flood Operation was to release Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails by taking Israeli hostages. Palestinian prisoners have played an important role in the Palestinian national movement. This commentary highlights the stories of some of these prisoners and their role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza in addition to analyzing how they are an integral part of the Palestinian national movement. This commentary sheds light on the significant impact Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have on current events by featuring a selection of the author's works, including “The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag,” “Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian Child Prisoners Speak,” and “A Shared Struggle: Stories of Palestinian and Irish Hunger Strikers.

Constraint against Constraint: Hunger Strikes and the Score

Abstract In 1961, the poet Jacques Roubaud was dismissed by the French military in Algeria after undergoing a series of “clandestine hunger strikes,” an act he later referred to as his “very first constraint.” By using a term that at once refers to a particular and increasingly prevalent resistance act, the rules and procedures used by post–World War II avant-garde artists and writers, and oppressive structures like prisons that delimit lives, “constraint” provides a way to rethink the history of avant-garde procedural poetry through the act of the hunger strike. This essay analyzes the constraint as a “score,” a method of making that allows for the repeatability and transformation of forms across contexts. This repetition with a difference is underscored by a cast of 1960s and 1970s writers from France, the United States, and Morocco, including Roubaud, Norman H. Pritchard, Bernadette Mayer, Saïda Menebhi, and Abdallah Zrika. Foregrounding the hunger strike and seeing an aesthetics that accords with this provocative and popular act, this essay makes a case for avant-garde practice, rather than the avant-garde object, as acts that might not only reorganize everyday life into weapons and tools, but also thread trans-national possibilities of solidarity through a shared political form.

‘Dead faces laugh’: Medievalist hungers and Irish republican time, 1917-1981

AbstractThe article analyses the temporal entanglements of personal and historical time through hunger-striking protests in Ireland and their commemoration in medieval imagery, reflecting on the role of medievalism and temporality in nation-building by insurgent agents. Between 1917 and 1981, twenty-two Irish republican paramilitary prisoners undertook hunger strikes to the death for recognition of political status and protest against their prison regimes. While some of these deaths went unremarked by the wider public because of state censorship and lack of support, others catalysed worldwide attention, and succeeded in pitching a compelling national and political narrative for their supporters. The article focuses on how the use of medievalism in examining and commemorating these deaths highlights the vivid temporal collapse between the present of the individual and the past of the nation, and the way this can appeal to the protest’s audience, while making a powerful political bid for the legitimacy of the insurgents’ national narrative. The article examines temporal entanglement both as practiced by the audience of the hunger strikes, from poets such as W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney to journalists and scholars, and by the republican community itself, whether by hunger strike survivors, their comrades, or their families, bringing together literary, material, and art historical evidence to show its relevance and pervasiveness. By doing so, the article achieves a study of the ways medievalist temporalities interact with political and personal history, in a bid for the ownership and definition of the nation.

Acute Cardiomyopathy in a Prisoner on a Hunger Strike

Acute Cardiomyopathy in a Prisoner on a Hunger Strike

Лексико-семантична структура діалектного тексту

The article substantiates the importance of the lexical-semantic structure of a dialect text as a basis for studying the real manifestations of the semantic spontaneous speech, the dynamics of the lexical structure, the lexical background and verbal content of various texts, and factage for spatial interpretations of contextual meanings. The author proves that dialect texts are characterized as a semantic phenomenon, and this thing actualizes the question of the lexical composition and semantic structure of lexemes of this phenomenon, which has central (obligatory) units and peripheral ones, as well as qualifiers that determine the tonality of speech. The article demonstrates that memoir texts about the country's political and social events contain colloquial names of the past (collectivization - driven into collective farms; decentralization – razkuǀlac'uvan'a, hunger strike – holoǀdovka, etc.), popular assessment of these phenomena. Tests in which the origin of toponyms or microtoponyms is explained have a clear structure (toponym or microtoponym – a motivator word and an interpretive part), they are considered as a text within a text. They have signs of language play.

Unionist Screws: Depictions of Northern Irish Unionists in British and Irish Cinema

This article explores the representation of Northern Irish unionists in British and Irish cinema by investigating a dominant way that the community has been portrayed in fiction films: as prison officers and orderlies. Specifically, Northern Irish unionists have been portrayed as prison officers and orderlies employed in the Maze and Armagh prisons during the period of republican unrest which culminated in hunger strikes in 1981, and a mass prison escape in 1983. The films that depict, to varying degrees, these characters as belonging to the Northern Irish unionist community include Some Mother’s Son (1996), H3 (2001), Silent Grace (2001), Hunger (2008) and Maze (2017). In these films, the typical representation of Northern Irish unionists reflects both the community’s general ‘othering’ in cinema and the film-makers’ primary interest in Irish nationalism when depicting Northern Ireland. Thus, unionist characters are usually depicted abjectly and feature only as adjuncts to narratives that are principally about Irish nationalists. This study aims to build upon a range of critical work in this area and to add to broader debates that have identified this cinematic deficit whereby Northern Irish unionists are depicted more critically and less frequently than Irish nationalists.