Claiming Agency in the Disappearing Body: Performing Hunger as Necroresistance and the Decolonial Self

Abstract

In my performances, installations, and writing at the nexus of social justice and stories of marginalized and minoritized identities, I contemplate the psychophysical implications of lack of fundamental necessities caused by withholding of company, sleep, letting go, food, water, movement, and agency. Whether such lack is imposed on bodyminds by torture, protest due to oppression, or experimentation, it creates deprivation and hunger for breath, rest, nutrition, contact—nourishment and healing not just for the physical body but for the entire self. The effects of such physiological lack is always social, emotional, and mental. The mark of such hunger remains on the mind even when the body heals. Like air, shelter, and water, food is a fundamental human right—and it has been widely evidenced that the planet has enough resources for all. However, states and institutions use slow violence of hunger to perform power and practice control over others, often minoritized, impoverished communities of color or disadvantaged countries. In this paper, I discuss how educator activists in hunger strike, fighting for their right to make a living, subvert the dynamics of control hunger provides by claiming agency of their own bodies, in Turkey. I trace hunger as a performative in the silent and still protest of these university and college teachers whose careers were ended due to political retaliation by the state and discuss how performing hunger serves as a disidentification strategy for the already starved minoritized groups. I also engage with the connection between corporeal and metaphorical agency of the body/self as I also claim that these protests of what I call necroresistance do not belong within traditions of nonviolent protest.