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

Abstract / Excerpt

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.

About the Author

Kim F. HallKim F. Hall
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Citation “In this article, Kim Hall offers a multi-layered analysis of the student protests on Columbia and Barnard campuses in 2007. What I really loved about this article was the ways in which Hall analyzes the actions of the hunger strikers (how the protest came about, what was significant about how and where they engaged in this protest etc.) as well as the rhetoric around the protestors (other students’ reactions in campus newspaper, counter-protests, blogs, social media etc.) and situates these within the context of both Columbia’s institutional history and the history of student protest and activism at large. Hall also considers how the activists engaging in this protest were racialized and gendered in ways that sought to minimize and undermine their radical actions. The main impetus behind the process - Columbia’s relentless gentrification of Harlem and its insufficient support for Black students, students of color and ethnic studies initiatives of the time - seems eerily current even 15 years on. I can see this article being an excellent choice for humanities and social sciences courses that are interested in institutional histories, histories of student protests and activism, racialized and gendered dimensions of how we read bodies in public spaces and/or in spaces of protest, or simply an excellent example of a thick description/multi-layered analysis of a cultural and political action.” - Duygu Ula, English & First Year Foundation