Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Hunger strikes have profoundly shaped the political landscape of the twentieth century, and in the early twenty-first century show no sign of abating. The prevalence of these costly protests provokes questions about the character of contemporary political violence, power, and resistance. This monograph asks how gender and race shape how hunger strikes are performed, enacted, mediated, and remembered. It argues that female hunger strikers push their bodies to their very limits to challenge their liminal positioning at the very limits of the body politic. Without romanticising these violent, desperate acts of last resort, I argue that female hunger strikers use self-directed political violence to produce new gendered identities that contest the gendered and racialised subjectivities that are violently imposed by the state. I focus on two examples of women’s collective hunger strikes in the British context: the hunger strikes undertaken by the British suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) between 1909 and 1914, and the 2018 hunger strike by detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). Through an analysis of these two cases, I argue that women’s hunger strikes are complexly situated within gendered norms, narratives, and discourses that affect the ability of female hunger strikers’ bodies to ‘speak’ of political injustice. Despite this, female hunger strikers still use their bodies to make political claims on the body politic, enact radical political projects that gesture towards a collective vision of freedom, and even invoke new and different ways of being human.</jats:p>