“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

Abstract

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.

Keywords:

• hunger strike
• student protest
• anorexia
• whiteness
• food refusal
• race and anorexia

Acknowledgements

Erica Woods Tucker assisted with research on this essay. I thank her, Christine Cynn and Constance M. Razza for their insightful comments.

Notes

Notes

1. These five were part of a larger committee of activists. Before the protest was over, six students and one Barnard College professor would hunger strike.

2. I cannot resist pointing out that this group, while protesting that a hunger strike “shelves debate,” called campus security to remove a professor who told them they looked stupid. In contrast, the organizers of the Facebook group, “Students Against the Hunger Strike,” called for town hall meeting to discuss the issues. Jones sees some of these calls for debate within a current insistence on symmetrical debate, in which all sides must be heard regardless of rationality and merit.

3. This is not to say that student protest in the sixties had complete support. For example, Noliwe M. Rooks notes that initial support for the San Francisco State University protest was “tepid,” but grew rapidly after a heavy-handed response from the administration. However, the current opposition to student protest seems to be more wide-ranging and more virulent. Interestingly, the graphic accompanying Jones's piece shows a group of young white male protestors from 1968, resurrecting an iconography of student protest as male.

4. “Pro-ana” (short for pro-anorexia) refers to online communities that promote anorexia as a lifestyle choice rather than an eating disorder. There are a number of “pro-ana” and “pro-mia” (pro-bulimia) groups: they include journals by anorexics, circulate images of celebrities for “thinspiration,” offer tips on how to trick parents and medical professionals and post affirmations like “being thin is more important than being healthy.” Although some of the sites include disclaimers warning that looking at the site may trigger disordered eating, this seems at odds with their emphasis on anorexia as a form of empowerment. The growth of such sites has posed a quandary for medical professionals, internet servers and government officials who may wish to shut them down, but worry about infringing free speech as well as silencing an already isolated population.

5. For more on the link between blackface and misogyny, see Lott (1993, 26–28).

6. On the surface, this seems like a version of an ongoing battle between “race and gender” that is particularly fierce at the moment of this essay, the hotly contested Democratic primaries seem to have driven analysts and pundits alike to a frenzy of dichotomous thinking in which the choice between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is somehow a choice between “race” and “gender.”

7. The preface to 10th anniversary edition of Susan Bordo's Unbearable weight primarily addresses the issues of race and ethnicity, but it somewhat oddly defends and adjusts her original model, seeing women of color and men as the latest “victims” of an empire of cultural norms based on gender rather than moving toward a more intersectional analysis: “ ‘Difference’ was being effaced indeed. But it was mass popular culture that was effacing it, not me” (2003, xxii).

8. However, the actions of the Irish female political prisoners in Northern Ireland would seem to suggest that fasting was not the preferred mode of political action. Three women were involved in the highly visible action, but most female prisoners followed other directions, namely the famed “dirt strike” and no-wash protest (Loughran 1986; on suffragettes, see Ellmann 193, 33–37).