“The savage reduction of the flesh”:¹ violence, gender and bodily weaponisation in the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strike protest

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between performativity, the body and violent identity politics in HMP Maze from 1976 to 1981. In it, I outline a theory of ethnic violence that highlights the exposure of the body to abjection, focusing specifically on the violence against the bodies of Irish Republican hunger strikers during the protest of 1981. I pursue two lines of argument. First, that self-starvation was a means by which the hunger strikers could turn their bodies into weapons, rather than serving as the site of a passive or non-violent protest. Second, while the sexualised abuse of prisoners sought to feminise them, I conclude that the Hunger Strike Protest not only weaponised the bodies of the strikers, but also re-constituted them as masculine.

Keywords:

• political violence
• performativity
• Northern Ireland
• abjection
• sexualised violence

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr Dawn Lyon and Dr Martin Coward for their assistance in writing this article, the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions and critiques, and Naomi R. Armstrong and Benjamin P. Armstrong for volunteering their comments on and criticisms of early drafts. I also thank the attendees of the Critical Terrorism Studies Working Group Annual Conference 2013 and Monash University’s Writing and Publishing in the Social Sciences Workshop for their comments on early formulations of the argument.

Notes

1. Ellman (1993), fourth cover.

2. The super-ego is one of the three strata of the psyche according to Freud. In contrast to the Id, which is given over to more primitive, hedonistic desires, and the ego, which is largely pragmatic, the super-ego is that part of the psyche that governs the Self towards a normative outcome. It is helpful to conceive of the super-ego as a policing force, a conscience.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan A. O’Branski

Megan A. O’Branski is in the final year of her doctoral degree at Newcastle University’s School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology. Her thesis examines the role of the sexualised body in violent identity politics.