My leading question for the project is: in what ways have attitudes towards female bodies within the British Empire affected their role in hunger strikes over time? Hunger holds different contexts based on location, religion, and government. I want to further understand how communities respond to women’s hunger strikes differently based on their previous histories of famine and hunger striking. In addition, I am interested in the legacies or hunger striking from one generation and community to the next. How do government systems and their ethos affect forms of political action and the success of hunger strikes? Taking a comparative approach between time and place will also allow me to question how changing attitudes towards women’s agency and bodies affect their political motives, methods, and success. For example, looking into how Swati Maliwal’s recent hunger strikes against Indian rape laws are connected to and inspired by suffragette’s earlier tactics.
In order to ensure I use the correct vocabulary in this project, I plan to establish definitions of fasting, famine, and hunger striking. These terms carry different weights of agency, action, and intention and I do not want to misrepresent these women’s experiences. To better understand these words, I am reading medical and historical journals on the histories of fasting, famine, and hunger strikes.
About the Irish women’s hunger strikes at Armagh Prison in 1980, Laurence McKeown noted, “not only had they broken the laws of the State but they had also gone against their feminine gender roles as defined by society.”[1] I am fascinated by the gender theory that will accompany this study of women’s hunger strikes. For example, Kevin Grant describes fasting as a ‘feminine’ form of bodily protest, versus a male capability to resist authority with force.[2] In my project, I plan to begin with an analysis of attitudes towards female bodies – understanding how gender norms, women’s agency, and mobility affect their political action and its responses.
I am interested in decentering the Eurocentric narrative of hunger strikes. Unfortunately, as Joseph Lennon notes, ancient histories of fasting in India and Ireland have been used to “foster understandings that linked the Oriental and Celtic across the globe as two antitheses of modern Enlightened Europe.”[3] I hope to highlight cross-cultural exchanges while avoiding generalizations and false narratives that re-establish colonial hierarchies. In addition to gender history, I will also study postcolonial theory and methodologies to write approach this project thoughtfully.
I am currently researching and mapping where and when women’s hunger strikes are conducted. One of my central questions, which led me to my thesis, is why have most women’s hunger strikes occurred in the boundaries of the former British empire? The connections will allow me to narrow my focus to specific instances and set a time frame. I’ve found literature on imperial Britain – connections of fasting in England, Ireland, India, connections of Russian fasting methods on British suffragettes, and more recent civil rights movements in India and the United States. Below is a list of the women-led hunger strikes within the empire I have found so far:
British Suffragette Hunger Strikes, 1909-1914
American Suffragette Hunger Strikes, around 1918
Irish Women’s Hunger Strike of Armagh Prison, 1980-1
India, Irom Chanu Samilla, 2000-2016
India, Swati Maliwal, 2019
England, British Afghan Women, 7-day strike, September 2021
From this project, I hope to improve my knowledge on postcolonial states and their imperial legacies, female agency and activism, and developments in a form of protest many resort to when all other power is stripped away.
[1] Simona Sharoni, ‘Gendering Resistance within an Irish Republican Prisoner Community: A Conversation with Laurence McKeown’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2 (2000).
[2] Aidan Forth, ‘Review of Last Weapons, Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890-1948 (Oakland, 2019), by Kevin Grant, Reviews in History, DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2437
Hi Avery! It was really great to work with you at the Unconference, and I find your topic of hunger strikes and attitudes towards female bodies really fascinating. Following our discussions on Saturday and after re-reading your project proposal I have a couple of thoughts, questions and ideas that hopefully may be useful!
I really like your idea and intention of decentring the Eurocentrism surrounding the scholarship on hunger strikes and focusing on the less well known examples and cases that are generally overlooked – I know that from experience when reading ‘hunger strikes’ I pretty much exclusively think of the Suffragettes. As well as postcolonial theory as you have mentioned, looking at orientalism may be useful to your project in understanding how non-Western women in particular were constructed and the image and ideas that was created of them and their bodies.
Do you have an exact time frame of what period you are going to look at? I see you have mentioned the British Empire, which would mean up to roughly the mid twentieth century. This could be an interesting period to analyse and compare hunger strikes, and follow the transnational flows and influences around them through the empire. Nevertheless, the more recent examples you have found are really interesting, particularly through their ties to other hunger strikes such as those of the Suffragettes. Maybe comparing strikes at the start of the twentieth century to those a decade later might be an interesting aspect to incorporate to show their development?
I have found a couple of articles on male hunger strikes in late-colonial India which I have linked below. Although, I know you are focusing on hunger strikes by women, I thought these could potentially broaden the understanding of hunger strikes as a form of protest; attitudes towards the body; and also serve as a comparison to female examples and gendered understandings of protest and bodily autonomy. Even if not directly relevant, I hope they at least serve as an interesting read! I look forward to seeing how your project develops over the coming weeks!
Bhagat Singh as ‘Satyagrahi’: The Limits to Non-Violence in Late Colonial India, Neeti Nair https://www.jstor.org/stable/20488099
Resistance and repression in India: the hunger strike at the Andaman cellular jail in 1933, Pramod Kumar Srivastava https://www.jstor.org/stable/42708540
State Practice, Nationalist Politics and the Hunger Strikes of the Lahore Conspiracy Case Prisoners, 1929–39, Taylor C. Sherman https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.2752/147800408X341686?needAccess=true