Lauren Wilcox1 Millennium Conference on Materialism October 19-20, 2012 Draft prepared for Conference Presentations, comments are

welcome but please do not circulate or cite without permission from the author.

What the Body Does: Theorizing Hunger Striking and Embodied Agency in International Relations
For someone who is contented, or unconcerned with any worry, living what is termed an everyday life, you may find my psychological circumstances hard to comprehend. For two reasons: firstly, my inability to describe the psychological struggle of myself and of my three hundred and fifty comrades; secondly, it is terribly hard, if not inconceivable, to conjure up in ones imagination the pain and stress of the psychological torture or to know its many forms or to understand its various effects. In short, imagine being entombed, naked and alone, for a whole day. What would it be like for twenty torturous months? Now again, with this in mind, try and imagine what it would be like to be in this situation in surroundings that resemble a pigsty, and you are crouched naked upon the floor in a corner, freezing cold, amid the lingering stench of putrefying rubbish, with crawling, wriggling white maggots all around you, fat bloated flies pestering your naked body, the silence is nerve-racking, your mind in turmoil. Consider being in that frame of mind every day! Knowing in your mind that you're to be beaten nearly senseless, forcibly bathed, or held down to have your back passage examined or probed. These things are common facts of everyday H-Block life. It is inconceivable to try to imagine what an eighteen-year-old naked lad goes through when a dozen or so screws slaughter him with batons, boots, and punches, while dragging him by the hair along a corridor, or when they squeeze his privates until he collapses, or throw scalding water around his naked body. It is also inconceivable for me to describe, let alone for you to imagine, our state of mind just waiting for this to happen. I can say that this physical and psychological torture h as brought many men to the verge of insanity (Sands 1982, 82-83).

The relations of violence expressed by Bobby Sands in his account of life in the H-block leading up to the 1981 hunger strikes are vivid reminders of the entanglement of subjectivity and embodiment with violence, material objects and other bodies. International Relations has two

main ways of thinking about agency, subjects and bodies. In the bulk of international relations theory, human bodies are not explicitly theorized. Rather, they are implicitly substances that encase subjects. They are only a location where consciousness is located, providing spatiality for
1

Acknowledgments: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Renee Marlin-Bennett, Rose Shinko, Sam Chambers, Alex Livingston, audiences at Johns Hopkins and American University, Millennium.

the subject. Human bodies, in one sense, are the material form that makes agency possible, as they are a necessary precondition of the subjects interaction with the world. However, the body itself is seen as lifeless or passive, only given life and animated by consciousness. Bodies also pose a limit on human agency, in their ability to be harmed and killed. Wendts articulation of the body as analogous to the states territory in that it has an independent material existence and is not constituted by ideas or discourse is exemplary of the dualism that pervades IR theory in general. Alex Wendts constructivism is the primary example of this, not because he is alone (most of the broad perspectives of rationalism and constructivism falls in this category), but because he is more explicit about his assumptions than most theorists. Wendts articulation of the body as analogous to the states territory in that it has an independent material existence and is not constituted by ideas or discourse is exemplary of the dualism that pervades IR theory in general. Wendt explicitly relegates the human body as only a brute fact that exists outside of politics. Fearon and Wendt suggest that the internal structure of the body and its ability to move and act, serve as a platform on which actorhood is constructed (2002, 63). Fearon and Wendt write that while the meaning and social position of bodies varies, prior to the process of meaning-making, bodies must be structured by an internal organization in order to acquire meaning. For individuals, this is the bodys biological structure. For states, the collective action of biologically given people is shaped by the structure of the state (2002, 63). Embodied subjects exist prior to the process of identity formation and meaning-making in politics. In this framework, the capacities of bodies to weaken, show signs of pain and deterioration, and die could only be a barrier to political action, or something that could be calculated and used by conscious subjects. Bodies are formed before the social process of meaning-making, and cannot contribute themselves to this process. Here, the relevant question is what the body is. The positing of pre-existing agents with material characteristics prior to their formation in political practices has come under criticism by scholars affiliated with post-structural theorizing in International Relations precisely for this pre-political understanding of subjects as possessing certain forms or characteristics prior to political processes (Zehfuss 2001, Doty 2000, Neumann, Uses of the Other: "The East" in European Identity Formation 1999, Epstein 2010). Inspired by theorists such as Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault, work associated with post-structuralism in IR takes the concept of discourse to be central to understanding the relationship between subjects, power and representational practices such as language. In Foucaults words, discourse analysis

consists of notof no longertreating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak (Foucault, 1972, 49). Theorists associated with post-structuralism have insisted that they do not deny the existence of a material world, but rather there is no way to know that world outside of discourse, and that discourse is inherently material (Campbell 2000 [1992]; Hansen 2006, 21-25). The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition . . . . What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 108). Discourses are productive of certain subject positions, of ways of being, knowing, and acting in the world. They are thus productive sites of social power because they define what is imaginable and possible in ordinary practices of life (Barnett and Duvall 2005). Our bodies are produced as objects in discourse. They are essentially cultural constructs, and thus have no agentic properties in themselves. Here, the primary question concerning bodies is what the body means. While this theory seeks to undermine the Cartesian dualism between culture and nature, mind and body by insisting upon the discursive (and thus contingent) foundations of objects and categories, this position reverses the causal attribution of agency: discourse constitutes agency. Even in sophisticated variants such as that of Hansen or Paul Edwards in which discourse contains more than speech acts to refer to the endure field of signifying or meaningful practices to consist of these social interactionsmaterial, institutional, and linguisticthrough which human knowledge is produced and reproduced (Edwards 1996, 34), suffer from this issue. Discourse still treaties material practices to be effects rather than causes, and a dualist ontology is preserved.2 In invoking the performative capabilities of bodies to enact discourse, Lene Hansen writes, it is the question of the body which pushes the discursive approach most fully to its limits (Hansen 2000, 301). In this piece, I argue that the embodied practice of hunger-striking does indeed push the discursive approach to its limits. Rather than a fixed substance, or a product of social meanings, bodies should be understood as processes, as bodies-in-formation that
2

Footnote here about Chambers and the argument about discourse and bodies.

interact with multiple bodies and discourses to effect political transformation. Such a bodily ontology enables a posthumanist theory of agency, which I argue is necessary to theorize the agentic capacities of the hunger striker. In recent years, some feminists and political theorists have sought to reassess the relationship between the cultural and natural, mind and body, by overcoming not only discourses of biological determinism, but what they see is excessive weight granted to the cultural or linguistic in previous work in feminist and political theory in theorizing the embodied subject. Such theories are collected under headings of new materialisms or material feminisms. These theories are important in their attempts to formulate a space of agency for bodies and materiality more broadly, without falling into either trap of biological determinism or the idealism of post-structuralism in which bodies are produced by language or discourses all the way down. A key argument of this emerging movement is tha t nature punches back in ways that humans and their technologies cannot predict (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 7). Materiality is re-theorized not as a limit to, or foundation for, cultural inscription, but as agentic in such a way that it cannot be ontologically separated from cultural or discursive forces. The category of nature is not what halts or forms a barrier to human liberation, but can introduce dynamism into the human world in unpredictable ways. As two leading proponents insist, For materiality is always something more than mere matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable (Coole and Frost 2010, 9). The practice of hunger striking gives us an opening to think about bodies as having a capacity to push back against their inscription and formation in discursive practices. In other words, human bodies can be productive as well as produced. Such a perspective would also not defining subjects or bodies as a priori individuals; rather, individualism is only one possibility for understanding the subject. A post-humanist perspective of agency would entail a plane of immanence in which not only are nature/culture, materialism/idealism, mind and body given the same status, but these very distinctions do not exist. This entails a rejects of both vulgar materialism and most variants of the discourse approach, even most of the practice turn (Pouliot 2008, Adler and Pouliot 2011). Posthumanist agency also requires a foregrounding of relations rather than either subjects or objects (Jackson and Nexon 1999). Third, a posthuman conception of agency requires an ontology of movement, complexity and assemblage. Rather than incorporating an ontology of substance, or viewing bodies as a repository of meanings,

theorizing bodies as agentic in their relations with other bodies requires a method for thinking bodies and embodiment as processes and means, rather than looking at bodies, turning ones attention to processes that form bodies in assemblages. Assemblages are made of parts that work together, that have no meaningful existence outside of the relations. My argument in this piece is twofold: one, human bodies possess agentic capacities in that they can they can produce political affects in reassembling assemblages and second, that these agentic capacities exist insofar as bodies are components of broader assemblages. Bodies are assemblages, but they are also parts of assemblages. In an assemblage, every element has a vital force, but this is not a solid block, but a collective, so that the parts have their own inflectionthey are not subsumed by the assemblage. Components of assemblages have no independent function or meaning, but only work to produce effects as joined in assemblages. Rather, elements from within can disrupt it. Assemblages are not solid or stable, but are generative, in the process of combining and recombining functions, removing elements and functions and bring out new ones. Here, I refer both to human bodies as assemblages, and to bodies as elements or components in another assemblage, which for ease of reference I call the prison assemblage. Posthumanist performativity is a term Barad uses to restore agency to materiality, but not as a force existing outside of the productive powers of discourse: neither materiality nor discourse is given causal efficacy on its own as in dualist ontologies. Specifically, she describes how the materiality of bodies comes to play an active role in the discursive production of bodies, rather than a basis for the passive inscription of social forces. Barad posits an account of phenomena as the basic epistemological unit that is not individual but relational: phenomena are relata, part of relations that do not precede these relations. These phenomena are constitutive of reality, as reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things behind phenomena but things-in-phenomena (2003, 817). Barads work is influenced by her reading of quantum

physics, but it shares much with Deluezian concepts of assemblages. Agency, according to new materialist approaches, is a distributed phenomenon, meaning that it emerges from interactions between bodies (and can include both human and non-human bodies) (see (Krause 2011, Barad 2003). Bodies undergo change when they act upon or are acted upon by other bodies. In terms of affect, bodies may be thought of as what they are capable of

doing. Bodies have more power in relation to other bodies. This kind of metamorphosis in the powers of a given body or assemblage is what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 54)3 Objects in assemblages have agency in that they produce effectsagain, the material or discursive nature of such effects is not a relevant distinction. Causality is complex and emergentneither objects nor structure pre-exist, but are the result of complex interactions. Bodies and assemblages are always becoming rather is, becoming something other than they werein motion rather than static. The agentic capacities of bodies, or their involvement in practices of resistance do not take the form of dichotomous opposition or a great refusal but rather, lie in their capacity to form new connections and assemblages with other bodies. To theorize the body of the hunger striker as an agentic component in a broader assemblage, I start with the prison. Much has been written about the prison as a coercive and disciplining institution, most famously of course by Foucault, who considered what people thought about prison design as an exemplary moment of disciplinary politics. I begin with the prison precisely because it is an extreme example of bodily coercion, violence, and isolation as such, it presents us with something of a hard case for seeing the agentic capacities of bodies in formation with one another. The material structure of prison does not only consist of walls and bars, but the showers, the bodies of guards, the food, the blankets, the uniforms, the bodies of prisoners, and their letters, smuggled in and out. Prisons are not isolated units either, but are parts of broader assemblages including (but not limited to): a history of English colonialism and Irish nationalism, the families and comrades of the prisoners, and the meaning of hunger strike. In the case of Guantnamo, the prison is part of an assemblage of the war on terror, the whole prison complex, the legal justifications, and the sedimented history of the hunger strike, the meaning of terrorist and Islam. The prison is also the site of torture, in which the states power is produced through the harming and injuring of bodies. Sands writing quoted above tells of the implements of torture as other critical bodies in this assemblage, such as the showers and brushes which formed part of the collection of elements that become part of the assemblage. Torture and abuse are welldocumented parts of the prison experience for hunger strikers in the examples I have mentioned;
3

For clarity, although Deleuze and Guattari refer to bodies in a broad sense as things in existence in relation to others, Im referring to components in an assemblage and keeping bodies to mean human bo diessince my point here is twofold: bodies have agency, as components of broader assemblage.

Irish Republicans, prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, and those affiliated with the PKK in Turkey. Torture has the effect of producing certain subjects, or rather, non-subjects reduced to bare or biopolitical life. Torture marks the body not only through injury, but by performatively making the body of the torture victim into a subject that can be tortured, or as Judith Butler writes, one locates injurability with the other by injuring the other and then taking the sign of injury as the truth of the other (Butler 2009, 178). Torture is a technique that acts in and through bodies to constitute certain political subjectivities and relations. These relations that are constituted through torture make the body of the prisoner into a key battlefield. As Feldman writes of the British torture of Irish Republican paramilitary prisoners, the performance of torture does not apply power; rather it manufactures it from the raw ingredient of the captives body. The surface of the body is the stage where the state is made to appear as an effective material force (Feldman 1991, 115). The bodies of prisoners are thus produced in relation to a state power and the bodies of their torturers in the prison. Bodies of prisons become part of an assemblage in the prison aimed at making prisoners into docile subjects and furthering the states aims in maintaining rule in N. Ireland. The hunger strike as a form of prison protest is a site in which bodily agency as part of bodily assemblages becomes visible. The hunger strikes of imprisoned Irish Republican Nationalists in the early 1980s (led by Bobby Sands) are some of the most well known. In this context, hunger striking has a long history in both Irish Nationalist politics and is legitimated by references to Irish tradition, in which sitting on the front steps of someone who has aggrieved you and refusing to eat has a historical basis within the culture. In this sense, the practice of hunger striking can be compared to self-immolation or suicide bombing as a kind of performative witnessing (Roberts 2007) in which causing harm or death to yourself is a particularly powerful way of making a statement that your cause is just. Indeed, hunger strikes have been used by organizations that also deploy suicide bombers, such as the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and the PKK in Turkey. Hunger strikes by members of Irish Republican nationalists, political prisoners affiliated with the PKK and prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were all designed as a protest against prison conditions that had to do with how bodies were controlled and made into certain symbolic options. Not all hunger strikes take place in prisons or as a protest of prison conditions, of course. I focus on the hunger strike as a form of prison protest in order to demonstrate one site in which the politics of bodies is especially evident; the examples I refer to

are relevant not only to international politics, but because they are examples of a phenomenon that allow us to ask questions about the functioning of bodies in international politics. In beginning not with the hunger strike, but with the prison, I also seek to take seriously the dual nature of materialism: The political appeal to materialism is always twofold: we must both recognize how bodily life has unfolded historically to produce certain relations, and we must acknowledge that freedom from those relations requires recognition of our materiality (Colebrook 2008, 63). The prison setting highlights the exteriority of bodies; while the story of hunger striking can be told as a story of the bodys rebellion and refusal, the prison is a dramatic example of the body as a site of coercion, victimization and inscription. The hunger strike and other bodily practices such as the Dirty Protest reveal the body not only as locus of the states power, but also as an agentic source of resistance. At issue is not the prison per se but the question of the possibilities of transformation in relation to the ways in which contemporary regimes of power control, shape, mold, invest and inscribe bodies. At stake in Foucaults words, all these movementshave been about the body and material thingsthey were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power (Foucault 1979, 30). Following Foucaults logic, it becomes clear in the enclosed world of the prison has implications for the study of power, agency and embodied more broadly in International Relations. The body takes on meaning, and a range of possibilities for action, in the process of forming assemblages. Theorizing the agentic capacities (Coole 2005) of bodies moves us from the enclosed, modular view of the prison as a set of material practices of coercion and disciplining to a view of bodies and agency more attuned complex nature of power in the contemporary world of multiple and overlapping flows of power rather than fixed, stable institutions. We can view torture in the prison as an attempt to mold and shape the bodies of prisoners, making them into docile, individualized subjects that are thoroughly subjected in the sense of dominated by sovereign power. Torture is a continuation of prison as a practice to write the bodies of prisoners through and through with the power of the regime and deny its victims a subjectivity outside that of the regimes will. Thus far, however, we have not departed from what discourse theory in International Relations theorizing about our bodies: they are given meaning

through discursive practices, they are inscribed by power, and it is through discursive formation that we know bodies. We can begin to transcend this view that fails to delineate an active or agentic role to the materiality of bodies themselves by thinking about how bodies play an active role in producing political effects and can usher in a transformation in the prison assemblage. Hunger striking involves a decision by a subject to refuse food. That human emotion and cognition is involved does not mean that bodies as/and assemblages cannot be agentic, for as Coole argues, the operations of agentic capacities in politics will always exceed the agency exercise by rational subjects (Coole 2005). Here, some may object that the body here is no more than a tool to be used, and that we need not depart from the Cartesian view of the body as mechanistic, or passive material to be manipulated by active subjects in order to theorize the body of the hunger striker. However, this view is inadequate for a number of reasons. First, human subjectivity cannot be separated from experiences of the body. Contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science theorizes the mind as a category not only of the brain, but as always situated in a body (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). We experience emotions or sensations as a result of our bodys attempts to maintain equilibrium (Damasio 1999). For example, the experience of hunger is a felt experience that is a result of a drop in blood sugar, which is detected by neurons in the brain, which activate a bodily statethe sensation of hunger. This is what is known as a molar view of the body, in which the body is made up of organs, of which the brain is only one. If we were to follow this line of reasoning instead of the instrumental view of hunger striking (that the actions of hunger strikers are driven, at least after the initial decision to undertake a hunger strike, by the biochemical processes in the body), we would subvert a dynamic sense of embodied agency as a process. While theorizing the hunger strike from an instrumental perspective reinforces a view of the body as substance that subjects manipulate, a biochemical view of embodied give us only a partial understanding of bodily experiences by reducing them to interactions within a singular body. The lived body is always, in Iris Marion Youngs terms, enculturated (Young 2002). Ones bodily experience is not separate from the social and political context in which one lives. The experience of prison life contributes to ones cognitive and emotional stateas Sands struggles to communicate in the prelude to article. The subjects cognition is only one part of his or her bodily assemblage, as bodies are written upon, produced by, social and political forces as

well. This is the contribution of Foucault, Butler, and others who theorize the formation of subjects through subjection to power that works on and through the body. The body is enacted materially through its interactions in the environment. Living in spaces and participating in their organization forms the body in characteristic ways, which in turn provides a matrix of permutations for thought and action (Hayles 1999, 203). Bodies are lively, self-organizing assemblages. They are assemblages because they are not closed entities, but are dependent upon its openness and connectedness for survival and for imagining its place in the world as a subject. Food, water and air are environmental elements crucial for the survival of bodies, while clothes and shelter are needed other environmental elements that provide protection from other elements (such as the weather). The existence and agency of bodies depends upon the interaction and cooperation of bodies and other elements and forces (see also Bennett 2010, 21). They are assemblages, as they are not closed entities and rely. The body as assemblage is not a stable configuration of forces, as processes of growth and aging make plain. The same foods that nourish one in ones youth may cause weight gain as one ages, for example. The body as a self-organizing assemblage is, however, not completely openthere must be some kind of boundary membrane between bodies and the outside milieu. This is necessary for oneself to experience life as a body, to experience bodily sensations and feelings. The self-organization of bodies revolves around this principle (Colebrook 2011, Damasio, 1994). Bodies as assemblages (in Deleuze and Guattaris terms, as bodies-without-organs) are not bounded in a given territory, they do not end at the skin. They only exist in their relations with other bodies, human and non-human. What bodies do, in hunger striking, I want to suggest, is not only act in the only way possible, out of desperation which is a way of describing a rational, or at least, cognitive actor using his or her body as a tool. Such an explanation is inconsistent The agentic role of bodies, in acting on other bodies and disrupting the prison assemblage is, in combination with cognition and a broader media landscapeof entering into new relationships by their capacities to weaken and die. Bodies enact and reassemble assemblages. The hunger strike took place after a blanket protest in which prisoners refused to wear the prison uniform that would visually label them criminals rather than political prisoners. The protest intensified into a dirty protest involving a refusal to wash and the smearing of

excrement on cell walls, as reaction against abuse related to meals and bathroom shower trips such as inedible food, beatings, and invasive bodily inspections. The bodys need for food and its processes of elimination played a key role in the struggle for control over bodies and to control the meaning of bodies. These components of the human-body-as-assemblage entail both the means of abuse and the means of resisting this abuse. The hunger strike involves a subject refusing her or her bodys needs for food. Food is taken out of the assemblage of the body. In doing so, a disruption is caused in the body assemblage, and in the broader prison assemblage. The hunger striker refuses food, denying the body some of the material supplementation it needs to exist. The body of the hunger striker, in turn, acts by weakening, feeding on its own tissues, causing a great deal of pain and eventual death. The vulnerability of bodies is a necessary condition for the agentic effects of hunger striking. As such, the body of the hunger striker enters into politics on terms that refuse to occupy the docile subject position of inmate. Because assemblages are not stable but defined by movement, vitality, and even life in their combining, rearranging and discarding, the death of the body assemblage of the prisoner is a denial of a crucial component of the prison assemblage: a body to act upon. The transformation of the prison assemblage through hunger striking comes in no small part through the manipulation of time. Body assemblages have their own time in the lifespan of human beings, in which bodies strive toward equilibrium but which is affected by outside forces and choices by subjects as well as eventual weakening and death. The prison assemblage works on bodies to create a sense of urgency for those who could not be docile bodies out of a sense of desperation at the tactics deployed by the prison assemblage. For example, those involved in the Dirty Protest and blanket strikes that preceded the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland prisons in 1981 reported a sense that, after five years of various forms of prison protest, there was an increasingly feeling that something had to be done to break the stalemate (Feldman 1991, 249). A similar dynamic is reported from Guantanamo Bay detainees over not knowing how long they would be detained and when, if ever, they would be released. Hunger striking prisoners in Guantanamo Bay demanded to be set free or put on trial; in short, to end their legal limbo (Worthington 2007, 271-276; Stafford Smith 2007, 189). Shaker Aamen, a spokesman for the prisoners, wrote on the verge of a renewed hunger strike, I am dying here every day. Mentally and physically, this is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for four years. Rather than humiliate myself, having to beg for water here in Camp

Echo, I have decided to hurry up a process that is going to happen anyway (Stafford Smith 2007, 207). The prison assemblage is relatively static assemblage, moving toward fixity and closurewhile bodily assemblages are relatively open. The temporality of the hunger strike differs from similar practices of self-harm as political tactic such as self-immolation or suicide bombing. By undertaking a hunger strike, one is open to negotiation, or the possibility of coming off the hunger strike if certain conditions are met. The hunger strike prolongs the time to death of the suicide, but it condenses the time of the regular life span of the body. As such, hunger striking makes a weapon out of life as a naturalized process (see also Bargu 2011). The practice of hunger striking fus[es] the subject and object of violent enactment into a single body (Feldman 1991, 264). The practice of hunger striking is a means of resisting the control over the body and its performance of political relations by shifting the orientation of violence in the prison assemblage. The body of the hunger-striker enacts the progression of the body toward death in a reduced time, amplifying the effects of the bodys inevitable decline toward death. As such, the self-destructing bodies force a certain crisis to take place. Death is inevitable if the strike continues, but it is also unpredictable, as it is based in an internal logic of body assemblages that is not necessarily accessible to human subjects., sometimes including the will to live. Whether action is taken to acquiesce to demands, if the demands are ignored, if the hunger strikers are force-fed, or if some other intervention takes places, new relations are forged and the shape and movement of the assemblages shifts. The becoming-(dead)bodies of hunger strikers transform the relations of power in the prison by reassembling elements in cross-cutting assemblage. Hunger striking relies upon yet other elements in an assemblage: the audience whose attention is drawn to prison conditions via the hunger strike. Here, the assemblage extends spatially beyond the architecture of the prison. When Bobby Sands and others went on a hunger strike to demand classification of IRA members as political prisoners, rather than criminals, the Thatcher government decided not to intervene and allowed them to die. Rather than acknowledging their actions as a political protest, Thatcher declared the prisoners had committed suicide. The hunger strikers who died were celebrated as martyrs and their funeral parades attended by a hundred thousand, and Bobby Sands was elected as an MP during the hunger strike. Most of the demands of the prisoners were eventually met. The hunger strikes

served to radicalize the population and led to the success of Sinn Fein in electoral politics. The British won the battle of the bowels but lost the war for the hearts and minds (Coogan 1997 (1980), 261). The prison was politicized from a site of punishment for crimes and surveillance, to a site of struggle that echoed broadly through the assemblage. One case of a hunger striker who was taken off the strike illustrates how bodies can exert a kind of agency even against the speech-acts of subjects. Turkish hunger striker Fatma Sener is quoted by journalist Scott Anderson defending her choice to undertake a death fast: I dont want to quit life, I want to live very much, but I also came to see that I had to make a stand for what I believed in, to fight for the kind of life that I want to live (Anderson 2001). Seners body in its weakness and deterioration has ambiguous effects. Described as an extraordinarily beautiful woman, with an infectious smile and penetrating brown eyes by Anderson, Seners frail embodiment leads him to intervene and work with her family to take her off the hunger strike. Would he have done this if not for her embodiment as a woman and moreover, her attractive appearance and affect: serene, ethereal with the aura of an angel? Anderson paints Sener as a misguided teenager, a damsel in distress who needs to be under the guidance and care of her family. As she grew increasingly weak and close to death, Anderson frantically communicates with both the Turkish official in charge of the prisons and Seners family to convince Sener that her hunger strike was pointless and the demands would not be met. Despite Seners political commitments, it seems evident that her feminine, dying body acted upon Anderson, causing him to intervene to apply pressure to Sener and her family to get her to stop her hunger strike. Seners body acted against her conscious mind, and acted upon Anderson to become its ally in ending Sener-the-intentional-subjects hunger strike. And yet, this kind of agency is not possible outside of a particular discursive structure of gender and heteronormativity: Seners body acted in concert with certain gender norms and Anderson as the repositor y of such norms to end Seners hunger strike. In the case of Binyam Mohammad, Shaker Aamen and the other hunger strikers at Guantnamo Bay the main effect of the hunger strikes was to force their jailers into a kind of recognition or apprehension of them. The US was, in essence, forced to care for them. To be sure, this care took the form of painful force-feedings against the will of the hunger strikers. However, by force-feeding the prisoners, the prisoners were discursively produced as

dependents, as psych patients as only those considered unable to make decision on their own behalf such as those in mental institutions have historically been force-fed. Of one prisoner, naval surgeon Louis Louk said, Hes refused to eat 148 consecutive meals. In my opinion, hes a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesnt get his way (Stafford Smith 2007, 189). A Pentagon spokesperson has responded to charges of ill-treatment in forcefeeding by saying that Defense Department officials believe that preservation of life through lawful, clinically appropriate means is a responsible and prudent measure for the safety and wellbeing of detainees (White 2006). While this subject position as dependent is far from the status as rights bearing subject that the hunger strikers sought, this instance does show that the starving body can be disruptive enough to cause a change in the political relations between jailer and prisoner. In this case, we could say that the prisoners (as already assemblages) and the jailers (likewise assemblages) were transformed because of the transformation of their relations with the broader prisoner and war on terror assemblage. Furthermore, the body is also acting against the conscious wishes of the hunger strikers in absorbing the nutrients from the force-feeding. The bodys nutrient absorption energies are used by the state to overpower the conscious subject, but not without a shift in the discourse surrounding the prisoners. We cant call hunger striking in this circumstance an act of pure freedom, or an uncomplicated victory for one side or the other, we can, I think, say that this causes a kind of shift and disturbance, bringing in new objects and discourses the feeding tubes, the chairs, the protests of doctors representing medical ethics, discourses to the overall assemblages, trying to incorporate them into the assemblage. The hunger striker demonstrates that subjectivities cannot be reduced to discursive phenomenon but are also constituted by bodily affects. In short, bodily experiences may be shaped by language or discursive formations, but bodily experiences also wield a force that shapes linguistic and other choices in a recursive process. In the figure of the hunger striker, matter has a history, an agentic capacity of its own. It is not entirely written. Rather, it enters into relationshipswith meaning, with other bodies, with objects and structures. By weakening and dying, or threatening to, the body assemblage works on the broader prison/state/media assemblage to acquire a new meaning, and to perhaps change the function of the prison assemblage or apparatus. Subjects become subjects by taking possession of the means of bodily violence, even if this is intended to, or even just risks, bring about the demise of the subject. Hunger-striking can be read as a re-appropriation of the mechanisms of power that seek to

dominate, shape and mold bodies. It is thus not a pure form of resistance to power, but a form of power itself (Foucault 1978, 101). The political act of the hunger strike is enabled by the human body in a way that exceeds frameworks of agency that posits the human body as a platform for human agency, or of bodies that are only knowable through discourse. The agentic properties that enable the hunger strike to work as a political protest have to do with the obvious, yet undertheorized, aspect of embodied subjectivity: the unpredictable yet inevitable weakening and death of the body. The reading of bodies in pain as communication in non-representational terms and as a call for recognition, can be thought of as exposing, and contributing to, a particular relationality in the acknowledgement of the realities of pain and the mutual constitution of subjectivity as embodied in particular context that includes other embodied subjects as well. Hunger striking is, at one level an individual act, but it is an act that produces new bodies and new assemblages. Guantnamo Bay prisoners and hunger striker Binyam Mohammad declared, I do not intended to stop until I die or we are respected suggests that it is an I who embarks on a hunger strike, but a we that is to be brought into being, recognized as a political entity with certain rights. This statement suggests the practice of hunger striking is a performative practice conjuring a multiplicity of bodies in the action of a singular body. Furthermore, this we depends on a certain audience that is addressed, whose attention is drawn to the prison by the wasting body of the hunger striker. Veena Das argues that the expression of pain is a call for recognition in the body of the other. The experience of pain cries out for the response of the possibility that pain could be reversed, that it could reside in your body instead of mine in a kind of remembrance or imagining (Das 2007). The pain materialized in the body of the hunger striker acts through the body to form connections with other bodies. As Asad reminds us, What a subject experiences as painful, and how, are not simply mediated culturally and physically, they are themselves modes of living in a relationship (Asad 2003, 84). Bodily pain is a way of possibly entering into a relationshipbut what relationship depends upon the response to pain, how it is allowed to be expressed. Asad gives us a way of thinking about how we can differently establish relations and rethink connectionsthrough attention to the material body in its social and political relations. The subject of torture/hunger striking in this way is not an autonomous subject trapped in his or her own body but bound in relations of recognition with fellow prisoners, prison guards/doctors, and a broader audience beyond the prison. The practice of hunger striking transforms the

violence that produces the vulnerability and criminality of the prisoner into a form of sacrifice with different performative effects; making the bodies of hunger strikers into more fully political actors with different relationships to their jailors and the broader community. Conclusion: Theorizing bodies as assemblages with agentic capacities is not only to broader questions about agency, subjectivity and discourse. A methodological focus on practices of bodies and embodiment has much to offer IR, which as a discipline is just beginning to think about the ways that human bodies are relevant in the formation of subjects in international relations. Readers of Foucault are well aware of the states investment in not only disciplining individual bodies but in managing the states population in terms of movement and migration, health, longevity and reproduction by marshalling apparently natural forces. Of particular note are theorists who have used Agambens concept of bare life to denote subjects who are produced as just bodies, who live on the terms of animal or biological life rather than as political subjects in such examples as the indefinite detention camps Guantnamo Bay, Bagram Air Force base and elsewhere, internally displaced persons and refugee camps, occupied lands, detention centers for asylum seekers or who become collateral damage. (Enns 2004; Seshadri 2008; Tagma 2009). If practices of sovereign power routinely take the form of the biopolitical investment in the lifeprocesses of certain bodiesto make live while demarcating and producing other bodies as those who must die, and if biopower comes to characterize the functioning of power globally in terms of a generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations (Mbembe 2003, 13) see also (Dillon and Reid 2009; Reid 2006; Dauphinee and Masters 2007) it falls to us to take seriously not only the power that forms bodies either constituted as bare life or as unlivable lives (Butler 2004) but the terms of bodily existence which resist, which strike back and that are not entirely written or determined by power. Besides hunger striking, various forms of protest have explicitly involved self-harm, from the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi that sparked a chain of events that become known as the Arab Spring, to asylum seekers in Australia who have sewn their lips shut in protest of their living conditions and uncertain political status. The practice of suicide bombing can also fall under this category, along with what might be considered more mundane, everyday bodily

practices. Given the importance that IR theorists have given to thinking about the way that power shapes the political meanings given to certain bodies, as well as the ways in which how certain ways of theorizing bodies give rise to certain forms of politics, IR would do well to consider the implications of a more robust, vibrant and deeply political understanding of bodies as both constituted by, yet in excess to themselves, constituting our world in their relations with one another.

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