What do refugees want? Reading refugee lip-sewing protests through a critical lens

ABSTRACT

Through a close reading of lip-sewing protests by refugees over the past two decades, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding lip sewing as a form of protest and political agency. I consider various lip-sewing protests by refugees and the strategic use of speechlessness and corporeality in these protests to uncover the conditions in which contemporary refugees are imbricated. I argue that this unusual form of protest, as well as the demands that protesters make on states and international institutions through dissensus, reflects the existence of a new kind of refugee that has emerged in response to the contemporary refugee management system that criminalizes displacement.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• protests
• lip sewing
• Europe
• crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nithya Rajan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the experiences of refugees, particularly women refugees in the Global South, and she studies the intersection of feminist theory and refugee studies. Rajan has Master's degrees from the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University and the Department of Social Work at Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi).

Notes

1 There are some exceptional cases of non-migrants performing lip-sewing protests. For instance, controversial Russian performance artist Petr Pavlensky sewed his lips together. Prisoners in Kyrgyzstan and Venezuela have also sewn their lips as part of protests against poor living conditions.

2 I use the term “refugee” as an umbrella term to refer to refugees, stateless people, asylum seekers, and those fleeing various forms of displacement and violence who are ambiguously referred to as “migrants” now.

3 In Bargu’s (2014) analysis of hunger and death fasts in Turkish prisons, the protestors are political prisoners detained by the state for their political activities. They differ from refugee protestors who perform lip-sewing protests in two ways. First, unlike the participants in lip-sewing protests, there is no question that Bargu's subjects have political subjectivity and that their actions constitute political action. The prisoners have been detained for the political nature of their work. By contrast, lip sewing as a form of protest is not unambiguously political action. Second, the protestors that Bargu talks about are citizens of the state, although some who are Kurds (for example) are on the margins of citizenship. But the prisoners relate to the state as citizens, while lip-sewing protestors are not even acknowledged as refugees. The hunger strikes in Guantánamo examined in Pugliese’s (2016) analysis also differ from lip-sewing protests with regard to the space in which they take place. Lip-sewing protests are performed at borders and within territories of the states to which protestors make demands, and therefore differ from protests that take place in offshore detention spaces like Guantánamo due to their geographical distance from the nation-state.

4 “What We Do,” UNHCR (n.d.), http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/what-we-do.html.

5 In this 2016 deal between Turkey and EU, all “migrants” from Turkey to the Greek Islands would be returned to Turkey. For each returned migrant, the EU promised to resettle one Syrian refugee located in Turkey. The EU would give Turkey €3 billion to build facilities for refugees.

6 The only clue to refugees’ intentions are the phrases – such as “Where is your democracy, where is our freedom?,” “Representatives of the United Nations and human rights, come and bear witness – we are humans,” “Open the border,” and “Shoot us or save us” – that are written on chests and signboards held by some protestors (Al Jazeera 2015). While these words point to the demands of the protestors, they do not tell us anything about why the protestors chose to engage in the specific act of lip sewing.

7 In her book On Photography (1977), Sontag argues that while photographs that depict people's suffering can arouse indignation and empathy in viewers through the element of shock, the repeated viewing of such suffering desensitizes the viewer over time. Further, the anesthetizing tendency inherent in photography inadvertently neutralizes the distress that it tries to convey.

8 In a more recent essay, Butler draws attention to this physical, spatial dimension of protest, albeit in a different context. She writes, “The material conditions for speech and assembly are part of what we are speaking and assembling about” (2016, 13).