scholarly journals The Body as Weapon: Bobby Sands and the Republican Hunger Strikes

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Yuill
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Sociology Of The Body ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
Political Groups

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-as-weapon’: (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.

scholarly journals ‘Agitate, educate, organise’: partisanship, popular music and the Northern Ireland conflict

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Sean Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
Performance Strategies

AbstractThis article explores popular-musical invocations of the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998), focussing specifically on the period between the IRA hunger strike of 1981 and the British Government's Broadcasting Act in 1988. Whilst most songs addressed to the ‘Troubles’ were marked by (lyrical) abstraction and (political) non-alignment, this period witnessed a series of efforts that issued upfront and partisan views. The article explores two such instances – by That Petrol Emotion and Easterhouse – addressing each band's respective views as well as the specific performance strategies that they deployed in staging their interventions. Drawing on original interviews that the author has conducted with the musicians – alongside extensive archival research of print and audio/visual media – the article explores the bands’ songs in conjunction with salient ancillary media (such as record sleeves, videos and interviews), yielding a more nuanced account of popular music's engagement with the ‘Troubles’ than has been offered in existing work (which often assumes the form of broad surveys).

scholarly journals ‘But then they started all this killing’: attitudes to the I.R.A. in the Irish Republic since 1969

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (151) ◽  
pp. 439-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Hanley
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
School History ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
Irish Republic ◽  
History Book

This article examines one of the most intense divisions between Irish nationalists during the Northern Ireland conflict. The Provisional I.R.A. claimed to be waging a similar war to that of the I.R.A. of the revolutionary era (1916–1921); an assertion disputed by many. The argument was significant because all the major political forces in the Irish Republic honoured the memory of what they called the ‘old’ I.R.A. (defined in a popular school history book as ‘the men who fought for Irish freedom between 1916 and 1923’). They argued that in contrast to the Provisionals, the ‘old’ I.R.A. possessed a democratic mandate and avoided causing civilian casualties. Echoes of these disputes resurfaced during Sinn Féin's bid for the Irish presidency during 2011. Commemorating Denis Barry, an anti-treaty I.R.A. prisoner who died on hunger strike in 1923, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin claimed that in contrast to men like Barry ‘those who waged war in Northern Ireland during the more recent Troubles were an impediment to Irish unity and directly responsible for causing distress and grief to many families. Yet they still seek to hijack history and the achievements of the noble people who fought for Ireland in our War of Independence … to justify their terrorist campaign.’

Workers Entering the Prison

Qui Parle ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-372
Author(s):  
Christopher McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Care Work ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Affective Dimensions

Abstract This article argues that Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) represents an unexpected but compelling mutation of the genre of postindustrial labor film. Hunger depicts the protests of Irish republican prisoners inside the Maze Prison that culminated in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. At the same time, the film develops an extended representation of the labor of the prison workers who beat, humiliate, care for, and counsel the prisoners throughout the protests. By combining and reworking the genres of labor film, prison film, and Irish Troubles film, Hunger imagines the prison as a microcosm of a deindustrialized Northern Irish economy where labor has left the factory and become conjoined to the disciplinary power of the state, either as police work or as care work. In this way, Hunger attends to the “spirit” of what Lenin called the “labor aristocracy,” here reduced to the work of maintaining the very boundary between itself and those excluded from it. McQueen’s attention to the body and to the affective dimensions of labor and struggle, the article argues, allows Hunger to achieve a uniquely committed, totalizing representation of the political economy of Northern Ireland.

Hunger strike in H-Block: the disavowal of passivity

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Paddy Maynes
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Psychoanalytic Understanding

The hunger strikes in prison in Northern Ireland took place forty years ago. Since then, much has changed in the politics of Northern Ireland. The hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981 were formative in the progress from violence, and the use of the body as a weapon, to inclusion and participation in democratic political institutions. This article, first published, in longer form, twenty years ago (Maynes, 2000) places the hunger strikes within a psychoanalytic understanding in order to more fully understand some of the dynamics of violence towards others and towards the self.

Unmaking and Remaking the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Lisa Guenther
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Solitary Confinement ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
State Prison ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Civil Death

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down. The Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison functions as a weaponized architecture of torture in precisely this sense; but in recent years, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world through collective resistance. This resistance took the form of a hunger strike in which prisoners exposed themselves to the possibility of biological death in order to contest the social and civil death of solitary confinement. By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.

Reseña del libro: Sociology of the Body. A Reader

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Solís López
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Sociology Of The Body

<p class="p1">E<span class="s2">st</span><span class="s3">e </span><span class="s2">magnífico libro</span>, publicado en 2008 y plenamente actual en su lectura para una comprensión sociológica del cuerpo, está organizado en dieciséis apartados, conformados por una introducción escrita por Claudia Malacrida y Jacqueline Low, más tres textos que ofrecen al mismo tiempo una perspectiva temática y teórica sobre el cuerpo desde la sociología... </p>

The Limits to Coercive Consociationalism in Northern Ireland

1989 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 562-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan O'Leary
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict

The merits of consociation as a means of solving the Northern Ireland conflict are presented through contrasting it with other ways of stabilizing highly divided political systems. Why voluntary consociation has been unsuccessful in Northern Ireland and unfortunately is likely to remain so is explained. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) must be understood against the background of the failure of previous consociational experiments. The AIA partly represented a shift in British strategy from voluntary to coercive consociationalism. The prospects for this coercive consociational strategy and variants on it are evaluated. Irish history is something Irishmen should never remember, and Englishmen should never forget.

The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-211
Author(s):  
Ashjan Ajour
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Principal Tool ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article explores the body as a site of subjectivity production during a hunger strike in Occupied Palestine. It further explores the former political prisoners’ theory of subjectivity as it emerges through their praxis and philosophy of freedom. Although the body is the principal tool that the hunger strikers use, they don't consider it the decisive factor in attaining their goal. For that they build on the immaterial strength that develops with the deterioration of the body and from which they construct the concept of rouh (soul). This is expressed through the formation of contradictory binaries: body versus soul and body versus mind. The article shows that the hunger strike not only is a political strategy for liberation; it also moves into a spiritualization of the struggle. It uses and problematizes Foucault's “technologies of the self” to theorize the specific formation of subjectivity in the Palestinian hunger strike under colonial conditions, and it contributes to theories of subjectivation. The hunger strikers, in their interaction with the dispossession of the colonial power, invent technologies of resistance to transcend the colonial and carceral constraints on their freedom and create the capacity for the transformation from a submissive subject to a resistant one.

scholarly journals Hunger strike and the force-feeding chair: Guantanamo Bay and corporeal surrender

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Ibrahim ◽  
Anita Howarth
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Full Disclosure ◽  
Guantanamo Bay ◽  
Force Feeding ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
A Site ◽  
Corporeal Body

Through the biotechnology of the force-feeding chair and the hunger strike in Guantanamo, this paper examines the camp as a site of necropolitics where bodies inhabit the space of the Muselmann – a figure Agamben invokes in Auschwitz to capture the predicament of the living dead. Sites of incarceration produce an aesthetic of torture and the force-feeding chair embodies the disciplining of the body and the extraction of pain while imposing the biopolitics of the American empire on “terrorist bodies”. Not worthy of human rights or death, the force-fed body inhabits a realm of indistinction between animal and human. The camp as an interstitial space which is beyond closure as well as full disclosure produces an aesthetic of torture on the racialised Other through the force-feeding chair positioned between visibility and non-visibility. Through the discourse of medical ethics and the legal struggle for rights, the force-feeding chair emerges as a symbol of necropolitics where the hunger strike becomes a mechanism to impede death while possessing and violating the corporeal body.

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