Hunger strikes, detainee protest, and the relationality of political subjectivization

Abstract

This paper attends to the relationships and spatialities through which immigration detention centers, though isolating and constraining spaces, are shaped by detainees. I approach the problematic of detainee resistance and agency through both Critical Citizenship Studies and feminist relational frameworks. I do so through a case study of one particular rupture – the 2014 hunger strikes at the Northwest Detention Center. My analysis of the 2014 hunger strikes at the NWDC directs me to conceptualize detainee activism as a process of political subjectivization, though one that is fraught with physical and political risk to both detainees and the order of sovereignty and citizenship. This process is undergirded by and productive of a series of interpersonal and political relations that mediate detainee actions and statements, and constitute them as a rupture in the order of sovereignty and citizenship.

Keywords:

• Detention
• political agency
• hunger strikes
• political subjectivity
• noncitizen
• feminist geography

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Emily Gilbert and Michelle Buckley for their generous feedback on drafts of this article. Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers and to Associate Editor Anne McNevin for their comments and valuable feedback. Thank you to the activists and detainees whose struggles have taught me.

Notes

1. The number of hunger strikers remains ambiguous: it was estimated at 1200 by the detainees, but reported as 750 in the newspapers.

2. Like some EU countries and Australia, the US also engages in third country agreements, effectively engaging in externalized border control and detention, in addition to the inland and borderland detention described here.

3. Information for this case study was gathered through participant observation in an activist group and a law collective supporting the hunger strikers, as well as through the collection and analysis of an archive of materials produced inside the detention center – letters and statements, video statements, demands lists, illustrations, and audio files – and outside the detention center – press releases, magazine and newspaper articles, bulletins and statements from migrant-rights organizations and state actors, fliers, photographs, social media webpages, and grant applications.

4. Names of detainees and activists with precarious legal status have been changed for this publication.