Embodying Resistance: Politics and the Mobilization of Vulnerability

Abstract

How are we to understand hunger strikes and episodes of lip-sewing in immigration detention? Are they simply cases of self-destruction or bare life, as is often claimed, or is there scope to view these embodied acts of self-harm as having a political dimension and to see those engaged in them as resistant subjects exercising political agency? To explore these issues, I draw on recent feminist theoretical work on vulnerability. Received wisdom suggests that vulnerability is an impediment to political action. Rejecting the idea that vulnerability equates exclusively to injurability and passivity, I contend, by contrast, that corporeal vulnerability can potentially prompt action, serve as a resource for collective acts of resistance, and enable the politicization of certain spaces. Since context matters to how vulnerability and resistance intersect, I illustrate my argument by exploring, in particular, the protests that took place at Woomera immigration detention centre in Australia in 2002.

Becoming Visible

“…This means that the possibilities for and perils attaching to corporeal disidentification may vary depending on positionality. Refugees in detention have much more limited opportunities for disidentification, for instance, than other groups, though they still have them (Lloyd 2023). It should also not be assumed that the specific bodily practices I have mentioned (hunger striking, die-ins, and so on) will necessarily or always enable disidentification.…”