The Embodying Politic
Hunger as Resistance and Refusal
Erin Clancy
In late May 2024, Cambiare Rotta, an Italian Communist youth organization, posted several photographs on Instagram from one of Milan’s university campuses. The first image is of two students holding signs. One reads: “STUDENTI IN SCIOPERO DELLA FAME! IANNANTUONI VOGLIAMO UN INCONTRO. Rompere ogni complicità tra Italia e Israele.”[1] The second one zooms out to reveal more of the scene: The students are sitting outside the rector’s office with a Palestinian flag hanging above them. We glimpse a tent where the students camped for the strike’s duration. Over the next four days, students posted updates. On the fourth day, the organization announced: “È ARRIVATA L’AMBULANZA MA NON UNA RISPOSTA!”[2] Due to the students’ health and the continuing silence from the rector’s office, paramedics arrived on the scene. The hunger strike failed, and it would be another month before the rector met with students.
A four-day hunger protest may seem like a blip amid the international struggle for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza. Yet such a protest doesn’t arise in isolation. It stretches to past and future hunger strikes, undertaken by both individuals and collectives. Hunger strikes have a long history in Palestinian anticolonial resistance, dating back to (at least) 1967. Palestinian scholar Lena Meari describes this history as “messy, non-linear, and made up of various acts of singular and collective suffering, sacrifices, gains, and retreats,” which is also part of a longer international turn to the tactic of hunger striking taken from Russian political prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Milan student hunger strike is part of a transnational constellation that stretches back to this history, to others hungering now, and will surely echo into future fasts. This lineage also includes active-duty U.S. air force officer Larry Hebert who underwent a hunger strike for ten days outside the White House with the sign “Active duty airman refuses to eat while Gaza starves.”
Part of a hunger strike’s power arises from the way it seizes the violence usually inflicted by the state—though those striking in the imperial core embody the violence inflicted not upon them directly, but upon others elsewhere. The location of these hunger strikers highlights the dialectical relationship between the conditions of life—having food to refuse—and state-sponsored forced starvation in the name of Empire. By contrast, hunger strikes undertaken by political prisoners in colonial prisons seize the violence that would otherwise be inflicted on them directly from without. They evoke the spirit of past strikes as well as the ghosts of those who have resisted death, maiming, and indignity outside the prison walls. We must contend with the difference between these self-starving subjects’ locations and their materialities. And when dealing with the gendered politics of hunger strikes, we also summon the anorexic ghost.
The relationship between the hunger striker and the anorexic has always existed in tension; they slide into one another metaphorically as much as they are made to resist one another in practice. Through the long ’60s, anorexia and its causes, prognosis, and purpose were remade, and psychotherapists used hunger strikes to understand anorexia. Clinical work was based on iterations of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, such that anorexia could become a protest of psychosexual development. Because of this, such metaphors and comparisons typically discounted the political force of anorexic practices. This is perhaps due in no small part to anorexia’s genealogical connection to hysteria from the late 19th century, when clinical literature narrowly indexed the spectacles of both the Hysteric and Anorexic Body as feminine, white, and emaciated. This patient–subject–object ideal would be endlessly reaffirmed in late 20th-century scientific discourse and practice, such that pathologized self-starvation became a frustrating and indeed agonizing—but still apolitical—problem of girlhood.
Further, in the history of Christianity, hunger striking has been a largely feminized and whitewashed tactic, such that the evocation of a good self-starving Christian spirit is inexorable from the figure of the “holy anorexic.” The well-told stories of Santa Caterina di Siena and Santa Chiara d’Assisi fill many pages on the topic: Italian medieval saints painted with porcelain skin retroactively diagnosed as anorexic, whose own ascetic rituals emerged out of exclusion from valued and legible pious practices. From this position, the figure of the holy anorexic is rhetorically flexible: She may be captured by the discourse of piety, yet her practices could be eschewed as heresy or witchcraft when politically expedient. This flexibility extends to shifting authoritative discourses to exclude these women from institutional recognition. By the late 19th century, the Church was partial to disqualifying such women from canonization. Instead of turning to sorcery, officials turned to the burgeoning psy-sciences to deem them crazy, not saintly.
“When dealing with the gendered politics of hunger strikes, we also summon the anorexic ghost.”
The work of depoliticization and disempowerment via pathologization in this case is troubled by the similarities between the anorexic and other political self-starvers like the hunger striker. For one, both are figures ever haunted by what Debra Ferreday terms their “future ghost”—meaning that they both sometimes die.[3] The threatening reality of biological death, though, is bound up with investments in life: to create space for “life-as-struggle” and “weaponization of life,” as Lena Meari and Banu Bargu argue, respectively. In this sense, self-starvers’ future ghosts are actualized when these modes of resistance are ignored or refused. What’s more, such ghosts never haunt alone; they’re inter-spectral. Indeed, self-starvation confounds binaries of loss/resistance, passive/active, and object/subject[4] that organize biased taxonomies of protest, pathology, and violence. Surely, such hungry ghosts cannot be contained within rigid codes of (self-)starvation. Instead, such ghosts traverse the shaky walls that buttress these very codes.
Hunger strikes and anorexia are at once incommensurable and intertwined—a contradiction that raises crucial questions. Is there an ethical mode of engaging them together that neither collapses nor artificially isolates them? How might we rethink anorexia’s allusive protest for our current moment, in which advocacy networks addressing eating disorders are reporting unsupportable increases in use of their limited resources and forced starvation has been used by the State of Israel to kill and maim Palestinians?
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During the 2024 hunger strike, I was in Milan researching 20th-century Italian alternative care for eating disorders. I found that in March 1968, students and faculty at L’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (henceforth referred to as La Cattolica) also undertook a hunger strike. Protests had started in January after the announcement of an effective 50% increase in tuition. By March, the protests unfolded along with the wider student movement against academic authoritarianism and in solidarity with “la maggior parte dell’umanità che ancora lotta contro la ignoranza, la miseria e la fame.”[5] The March hunger strike would be the first of several in the coming months at the university, the Vatican, and other sites across Italy. At La Cattolica, according to one journalist, “è sempre in atto lo sciopero della fame” (“a hunger strike is always underway”). This line references not just the chain of them that extended the protest, but also the staggered and recursive ethos of the hunger strike as always collective and ongoing, even if it’s not always clear where or with whom. In this sense, the 1968 and 2024 Milan hunger strikes connect, with echoes of the former reverberating through the latter.
In response to the wider 1968 student protests, which included several student occupations of campus buildings, La Cattolica’s administration closed the university in early spring. Administrators censured student protesters widely, such that students’ primary written demands centered on the necessary first step of recognition: “VOGLIAMO UN INCONTRO” in 2024 echoes the 1968 Cattolica hunger strikers: “chiediamo oggi ad ogni persona responsabile di dare una risposta alle richieste degli studenti.”[6] While in 2024 university administrators refused recognition of the hunger strikers, this was not the case in ’68. From the outset, these earlier strikes were addressed in the media as nonviolent or “non-bloody.” Newspapers quoted clergymen affiliated with the university saying the fasting students were upholding “the Christian spirit.” These holy exaltations of food refusal ultimately shifted the focus away from the protest of institutional violence and toward individual suffering and moral principle. The hunger strikers themselves cited nonviolence to either distance themselves from other parts of the movement or because of the anticipated effectiveness of the tactic. Many of the strikers and those in solidarity identified their protests as catholic resistance and as living the Christian spirit. This contraposed their practice with La Cattolica’s use of the police force to oppress student activism, which decidedly does not embody such grace.
The tension between the protesting Catholics and the institution of the Church was intense during this historical moment when many were turning away from Christianity and its various institutions. This souring is linked to the Vatican’s silence and compliance under the German occupation and the Republic of Salò. In 1943, German Nazi forces rounded up over 1,000 Roman Jews. Only 16 would survive the ensuing detainment at Auschwitz; the rest were gassed, starved, and worked to death. The Church’s refusal to recognize the horrors unfolding “under the very windows of the Pope” is continuous of the institution’s long history of forced starvation and mass death that reinforce its moralistic hierarchy of life. In this context, the hunger strikers’ claim to the Christian spirit speaks to the contradictions of the Catholic university’s actions in that moment and evokes the violence of the Church’s averted gaze from decades prior.
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I visited the university archive because of its importance in the history of Italian psychology and transnational psy-knowledge production. It is where the so-called magicians of anorexia treatment, sometimes called the Milan Group, had studied and taught. This équipe, led by Dr. Mara Selvini Palazzoli, moved through psychoanalysis, communication, and systems theories to develop an epistemology of the anorexic symptom in a non-medicalizing framework. Palazzoli wasn’t invested in the mission of the Catholic university; teaching provided an income that allowed the équipe’s continued work at their non-profit clinic. She had become obsessed with the postwar phenomenon of gendered self-starvation. Others across U.S. and European post-war geographies had become similarly preoccupied with this question, perplexed by why women and girls would starve themselves amidst postwar plenty. Distinctly, the Milan Group explained “why” via the term uno sciopero della fame non dichiarato, or an undeclared hunger strike: “defining neither the subject nor the addressee nor the aim.” This concept helps us glimpse the psychic-material realities that undergird modes of self-starvation despite expressed intention.
In early clinical monographs, the hunger strike metaphor for anorexia as developmental protest sat uneasily alongside evocations of starvation as weaponization by the state (Nazi Germany and British occupation of Ireland) and self-starvation as an anti-imperial tool (Irish political prison hunger strikes). The biological effects of starvation, it was argued, connected the anorexic, the hunger striker, and the forcibly starved. Their contexts and intrapsychic forces are what distinguished the anorexic from other cases. These discussions were part of the project of clarifying the diagnostic parameters of the disorder, ostensibly to allow for development of more efficacious therapeutic interventions. Yet these repeated debates ultimately reproduced the image of the “true” or “primary” anorexic as the gendered, classed, and racialized figure so spectacularized and abjected today.
A major argument for anorexia as a hunger strike is from feminist psychotherapist Susie Orbach’s polemical 1986 book Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. She insightfully suggests that self-starvation “is an act of extraordinary desperation and courage.” More myopically, she ultimately argues that the anorexic’s “cause” is a woman’s protest of the patriarchy’s circumscriptions of life. It is a provocative argument, and one that is routinely critiqued for the tendency to reduce women and girls to their media consumption, while also universalizing these gendered categories from an unmarked white position. This universalization is complicit in the spectacular–diagnostic production of the Anorexic Body, which overrides the subject’s own narration and experience in the name of (white) feminism’s fight against the patriarchy.
This overriding logic is carried through in the conceptualization of intention and communication that shapes anorexia. Part of a wider sanist-ableist hierarchy that positions language as the highest form of communication, the anorexic is distinguished from the hunger striker in this way: The latter has a clear demand and aim, while the former communicates primarily through behaviors and rituals. This difference is stressed by Susan Bordo in Unbearable Weight:
The anorectic, of course, is unaware that she is making a political statement . . . Through embodied rather than deliberate demonstration she exposes and indicts [cultural] ideals, precisely by pursuing them to the point at which their destructive potential is revealed for all to see.
The anorexic person not only does not express her demands but cannot; Bordo only concedes to call anorexia protest to label it a “counterproductive” and “tragic” one. Yet, this passage echoes arguments on the power of the hunger strike: how the practice collapses state violence into the starving body “for all to see” and thereby seizes (constrained) control. Such revelations point to how hunger strikes also undermine passive/active binaries upon which other discursive binaries—of violence/non-violence and protest/ pathology—rely.
In this context, instead of the anorexic figure functioning as a metaphor for women’s protest of the patriarchy, the undeclared hunger strike for the Milan équipe frames the anorexic patient as protesting her role in the nuclear family, though not necessarily consciously, nor through normative modes of communication. While Palazzoli comments on the difference between the anorexic and the hunger striker vis-à-vis expressed intention, she follows the axiom all behavior is communication to its logical end: There is a therapeutic need to grapple with “the allusive and threatening aspect of the symptom as a protest and invocation to change.” The clinical tendency to neglect such challenging aspects of the symptom results in mere therapeutic tinkering of the identified patient’s family. Yet, as Lara and Stephen Sheehi have written, psychoanalysis also allows the reading of such allusive protest as shaped by and in response to the oppressive assemblages and their “dialectics with family and internal dynamics.”
Clinical refusals to engage with such complexity result in widespread denigration of the anorexic patient, which works as part of a wider schema of pathologization and depoliticization. Reductive readings of anorexia and of the death drive position the anorexic person as slowly committing suicide, as fulfilling the drive to return to inanimate matter. The invocation of suicidal intention doubles down on the pathologization of the anorexic patient. Indeed, the assertion of suicidal intent is used more widely to capture extreme forms of protest into pathology to resignify acts such as self-immolation and hunger strikes or death fasts, clearly demonstrated in the past year with the protest and death of Aaron Bushnell.
“These repeated passive actions express protests of the impossibility of life as it is and demand other ways to live—which may at least let a person die on their terms, as much as possible.”
A stronger reading of the death drive, though, offers another way of considering the psychic entanglements of the striker and the anorexic, and their relation to life. In “The Problem of Death and Suicide in Anorexia Nervosa,” Palazzoli argues from clinical experience that anorexics do not have a death wish. Rather, she argues, “It is, essentially, an unrealistic tension and a rejection of existence qua living and dying in one’s body.” With an existentialist flair uncommon for Palazzoli, she suggests the anorexic patient doesn’t pursue death but turns away from it and its inevitability. In less dramatic and oppositional terms, this framing suggests the paradoxical pursuit of life via a path that may or may not lead to death.
To refuse food by undertaking an un/declared hunger strike—and to have attention drawn to that refusal/strike—isn’t a triggered death drive but rather an affective encounter with the drive as the “fundamental negativity implied in life,” to borrow Alenka Zupančič’s wording. Like the death drive, anorexia puts one “out of joint both in relation to life and in relation to death,” while the spectacle of the Anorexic Body paradoxically obscures and announces this out-of-jointness. Zupančič calls this affect “ontological fatigue,” which is visceral and indeed spectral in the repeated choice to refuse sustenance, as well as in the event of witnessing the culmination of such refusals. The specter of future death is thus conjured by the witness/ audience—an excess of the gaze. Or it’s felt in the violent embodied effects of self-starvation. They work together via the banal repetition of food refusal that consolidates momentarily into spectacle, forcing an encounter with the death drive not as oppositional to life but inextricable from it. In this way, these repeated passive actions express protests of the impossibility of life as it is and demand other ways to live—which may at least let a person die on their terms, as much as possible.
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The connective possibilities that could emerge from such psychical recognition become constrained at the level of the Imaginary. Bordo in this instance makes a good point: The anorexic person’s apparent refusal to identify what she’s protesting makes her vulnerable to abstraction and resignification to whichever political ends—anorexia as a mode of resistance or to total capitulation to patriarchal and white supremacist demands. Codes of hunger emerge from diverse ideological sites; they overlap, collude, and at times contradict each other. They reinforce fixations on specific starving persons/bodyminds, orienting attention away from the colonial violence that ensures the context of plenty for the “true” anorexic to refuse. Or the anorexic’s refusal is conditioned by the forced starvation and famine imposed upon occupied and oppressed peoples “elsewhere.” This remains true for holy anorexic figures. Their “perfect, fleshless whiteness,” to use Ferreday’s term, is constituted in relation to those subjugated and starved by the combined forces of the Church and military power across the centuries and around the globe.
This is felt in the accounts of embodiment in an atypical canon of anorexia and disordered eating. For example, Chris Kraus’s diaristic letter to Walter Benjamin from Aliens and Anorexia describes rejecting food as “temporarily withdraw[ing]” from the “cynicism” that feeds the global capitalist food and waste circuits. Eating disorder activist Gloria Lucas teaches us about the ongoing effects of settler colonialism that produce disordered eating in Indigenous and other oppressed persons who go unrecognized by the psyindustrial complex: the disruption of traditional foodways, forced food scarcity, and alimentary normalization, along with bearing witness to the settler colonial horrors still presently unfolding.
Hunger strikers from privileged sites within the imperial core gesture to these dependencies, such as in evocations of forced famine in Gaza. These strikes are shaped by drastically different material conditions within colonial prisons, maximum-security political prisons, and other carceral institutions. The specter of future death materializes via the force of the spectacle into a temporally contained encounter—one that loses its power as time passes and the self-starver endures without the appropriate audience, witnesses, or recognition. From the United States, this spectacularization also occurs in the waning engagement with forced starvation outside the core, which further obscures the international and structural components of famine, as well as starvation’s inherent connection to the land.[7]
Accordingly, reading for allusive protest should resist abstraction via psychical processes. The desire to forge such a rift can replicate the universalizing move the psy-sciences are guilty of and which results in epistemic injustice: the overriding of individuals’ positionalities, singular psyches, and social environment. Flying in the face of such homogenizing desire are ethnographic accounts of the anorexic lifeworlds. Medical anthropological reports on the “subjective experience of eating disorders among Jewish Israelis,” for example, center the narratives of eating disorder patients. In a jarring set of cases, two women cite their military roles in catalyzing their eating disorders: One was a pacifist and restricted her food with her growing fear of harming other people; the other was upset for not acquiring a socially respected or elite position in the Israeli military. The former highlights the potential use of self-starvation to evade mandatory military service. Yet the latter chillingly and forcibly reminds us that the anorexic as a figure is not only conditioned by histories of colonial violence and extraction: In practice, “she” may also be directly contributing to, and perhaps desiring, the forced starvation and death of others—in this case, Palestinians.
These connections are not always so direct, but they’re surfaceable. In the 1960s, La Cattolica was invested in repairing the Church’s standing in the postwar public eye. The administration joined with the Cristiani Democratici—the political party many fascists would join after 1945—in crafting a narrative of Catholic university resistance during the war and of the role of Christian activism more broadly. La Cattolica ran a program called “Celebrazione Resistenza” (“Resistance Celebration”) that recouped the university and Church’s silence between 1943 and 1945 as strategic to permit resistance to continue inside its walls. Yet the wartime failures of the Vatican—and by extension La Cattolica—could not be easily forgotten. In 1942, the founder of the university wrote Mussolini that La Cattolica was continuing to fulfill the regime’s goals, emphasizing that 2,500 students were then serving in the military “combattendo in cielo, in terra e in mare.”[8] After the war, it was reported that approximately 200 Cattolica students had been killed.
Such ghosts are also present at the hunger strikes—in undeclared hunger strikes. Ghosts past, future ghosts—not just of politicized and depoliticized self-starving but also of those starved, killed, and maimed in the name of the Christian spirit, of religious claims to divine righteousness. To aid the ghosts haunting sites of self-starvation is to transgress the walls that buttress hegemonic categories of violence/non-violence, protest/non-protest; it is to reject such prescriptions for life and death. Social violence that connects the diagnosed anorexic, the hunger striker, and genocidal imposition of starvation is exposed. The allusive protest here isn’t locatable in the individualized psyche or necessarily in the Oedipal family. Rather, we can spot it in a strained collectivity forged through the illumination of such violent linkages. Such a reading doesn’t negate the self-narratives of self-starving individuals and collectives, nor does it seek to resolve the contradictions that emerge from it. Instead, it suggests we face this impasse without suturing it: by foregrounding the material grounds and imperial entanglements that shape self-starvation. And, crucially: by recognizing the collectivity embodied in individualized acts of hungering for life without negating the violence such hunger can spur and justify.
[1] “STUDENTS ON HUNGER STRIKE! WE WANT A MEETING, IANNANTUONI [the rector]. Break all ties between Italy and Israel.”
[2] “THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED BUT NOT A RESPONSE!”
[3] Ask any eating disorder researcher and they will emphasize that eating disorders continue to have some of the highest mortality rates of any clinical psychological disorder
[4] Patrick Anderson makes this point in his book on self-starvation and performance, So Much Wasted.
[5] “The major part of humanity that still fights against ignorance, misery, and hunger.”
[6] “WE WANT A MEETING”; “today we ask each person responsible to respond to the demands of the students.”
[7] Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, made this point, speaking at the webinar “Food Security and Palestinian Liberatory Ecologies”: “You can’t separate the issue of starvation from land itself.”
[8] “Fighting in the air, on the ground, and on the sea.”