{"id":2569,"date":"2022-03-04T17:29:07","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T17:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=2569"},"modified":"2022-03-04T17:30:05","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T17:30:05","slug":"project-proposal-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2022\/03\/04\/project-proposal-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Project Proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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?<\/strong> Hunger holds different contexts based on location, religion, and government. I want to further understand how communities respond to women\u2019s 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\u2019s agency and bodies affect their political motives, methods, and success. For example, looking into how Swati Maliwal\u2019s recent hunger strikes against Indian rape laws are connected to and inspired by suffragette\u2019s earlier tactics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s experiences. To better understand these words, I am reading medical and historical journals on the histories of fasting, famine, and hunger strikes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Irish women\u2019s hunger strikes at Armagh Prison in 1980, Laurence McKeown noted, \u201cnot only had they broken the laws of the State but they had also gone against their feminine gender roles as defined by society.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> I am fascinated by the gender theory that will accompany this study of women\u2019s hunger strikes. For example, Kevin Grant describes fasting as a \u2018feminine\u2019 form of bodily protest, versus a male capability to resist authority with force.[2]<\/a> In my project, I plan to begin with an analysis of attitudes towards female bodies \u2013 understanding how gender norms, women\u2019s agency, and mobility affect their political action and its responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cfoster understandings that linked the Oriental and Celtic across the globe as two antitheses of modern Enlightened Europe.\u201d[3]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am currently researching and mapping where and when women\u2019s hunger strikes are conducted. One of my central questions, which led me to my thesis, is why have most women\u2019s 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\u2019ve found literature on imperial Britain \u2013 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

British Suffragette Hunger Strikes, 1909-1914<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American Suffragette Hunger Strikes, around 1918<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Irish Women\u2019s Hunger Strike of Armagh Prison, 1980-1<\/p>\n\n\n\n

India, Irom Chanu Samilla, 2000-2016<\/p>\n\n\n\n

India, Swati Maliwal, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

England, British Afghan Women, 7-day strike, September 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> Simona Sharoni, \u2018Gendering Resistance within an Irish Republican Prisoner Community: A Conversation with Laurence McKeown\u2019, International Feminist Journal of Politics<\/em>, 2 (2000).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> Aidan Forth, \u2018Review of Last Weapons, Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890-1948<\/em> (Oakland, 2019), by Kevin Grant, Reviews in History, <\/em>DOI: 10.14296\/RiH\/2014\/2437<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Joseph Lennon, \u2018Fasting for the public: Irish and Indian sources of Marion Wallace Dunlop’s 1909 hunger strike\u2019, in E\u00f3in Flannery and Angus Mitchell (ed.), Enemies of Empire: New perspectives on imperialism, literature and historiography<\/em> (Dublin, 2007) p. 24.<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[214,82,216,213,217,215],"class_list":["post-2569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-british-empire","tag-empire","tag-gender-history","tag-hunger-strike","tag-postcolonial-history","tag-protest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-Fr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2571,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569\/revisions\/2571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}