Bodies at Their Limits

Hunger strikes profoundly shaped the twentieth century political landscape and, in the early twenty-first century, show no signs of abating. The prevalence of such costly protests provokes deep questions about the character of contemporary political violence, power, and resistance. In Bodies at Their Limits, Dr. Kerry McInerney analyzes how gender and race shape the way that hunger strikes are performed, enacted, mediated, and remembered. McInerney argues that female hunger strikers push their bodies to the ultimate extreme to challenge their liminal positioning at the very limits of the body politic. Without romanticising these violent, desperate acts of last resort, McInerney argues 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.

Bodies at Their Limits focuses 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, McInerney reveals how 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.