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Wed 11 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
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    16.30 - 18.30

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Fri 13 April
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    14.00 - 16.00
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Sat 14 April
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Wednesday 11 April 2012 11.00 - 13.00
Y-2 WOM02 A Unified Terrorist Body? Hunger Strike, 1970s Leftist Terrorism and Gender
Wolfson Medical Building: Seminar room 2
Networks: Criminal Justice , Women and Gender Chair: Lessie Jo Frazier
Organizers: Irene Bandhauer-Schoeffmann, Dominique Grisard Discussant: Lessie Jo Frazier
Irene Bandhauer-Schoeffmann : Silenced Bodies. Hunger Strikes of the Radical Left in Austria during the 1970s
This paper discusses the reasons for the lack of memories regarding the hunger strikes of four imprisoned activists from the radical left in late 1970s Austria. Four prisoners who claimed “political prisoner” status – a female member of the German Red Army Faction and three male Austrian students who had ... (Show more)
This paper discusses the reasons for the lack of memories regarding the hunger strikes of four imprisoned activists from the radical left in late 1970s Austria. Four prisoners who claimed “political prisoner” status – a female member of the German Red Army Faction and three male Austrian students who had supported the German “Movement 2nd June”– exercised their political struggle against the state by means of a series of non life threatening hunger strikes during the years 1977–79. Due to the Austrian government’s strategy of de-escalation of tension between the activists and the state, the prisoners on hunger strike were successful in achieving improvements in their prison conditions, but completely failed to mobilize public support.
Whereas the cases of Holger Meins in Germany and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann in Switzerland received massive public attention and are both deeply inscribed into the collective memory of the radical left, the hunger strikes in Austrian prisons are not remembered. In interviews or statements about their experiences with the left wing guerrillas, the former prisoners and their supporters generally avoid the topic of hunger strikes.
Arguing that the lack of reporting and memories of the hunger strikes are a result of the former activists’ shame of having been ridiculed in sexist ways by the state authorities and the media, I aim to analyse the gendered public perception of the body politics exercised by the “political prisoners”. Furthermore, I aim to show how the radical left in Austria failed to establish its own interpretation of the hunger strikes and the hegemonic interpretation drawing mainly on gender deviances was, therefore, by and large uncontested. (Show less)

Clare Bielby : (Re-)Performing the Hunger-striking Body
In memoirs and accounts written by former members of the Red Army Faction and Movement 2 June, the body seems to play an important role, serving in many ways as a memory object through which the author remembers his or her time in the terrorist group and the reader (and ... (Show more)
In memoirs and accounts written by former members of the Red Army Faction and Movement 2 June, the body seems to play an important role, serving in many ways as a memory object through which the author remembers his or her time in the terrorist group and the reader (and the German public) remembers that period of German history. This prominence accorded to the body can be attributed to a number of things. Most obviously and on a more personal level, for a terrorist who has often spent years in imprisonment, at times in complete isolation, and who has submitted the body to the extreme experiences of hunger strike and force feeding, he or she arguably has a particular relationship with that body – he or she is more aware of it than most, of its limits, of what it can do. On a more public level, the majority of former terrorists demonstrate an awareness of how their bodies became very public bodies, treated as public property to be displayed often as monstrous spectacles to the German public, most notoriously in the case of Margrit Schiller who was displayed to the West German media ‘wie gehetztes Wild’ (Stern) after her arrest in 1971, but also in the case of Holger Meins, of whose emaciated body glossy double-page images were published in Stern after his death during a RAF hunger strike in 1974. Finally, these former terrorists are arguably aware that there is a salacious public appetite for information about their bodies and what these bodies experienced whilst both ‘underground’ and imprisoned; It is through narrating or re-performing some of these extreme bodily experiences that these accounts become more consumable as texts.
This paper focuses on the narrative performance or re-performance of the hunger-striking and force-fed body in post-terrorist narrative accounts. It considers the different discourses mobilised to narrate the body undergoing these experiences – for example, objective ‘medical’ discourse, emotive discourses of pain and suffering, discourses in which the body is conspicuous more by its absence. I will ask: To what degree is this narrative (re)performance of the hunger-striking and force-fed body gendered?; What is the author’s investment in this particular performance and construction of the body, and in how far does he or she reclaim or re-author that body?; In what ways might we see the (hunger-striking) body as a site upon which various (ideological) battles are fought out? (Show less)

Dominique Grisard : Gender, Nation and Performance. Leftist Terrorists' Hunger Strikes in 1970s and 1980s Switzerland
This paper theorizes the concept of gendered performance of resistance in relation to leftist terrorism by taking a closer look at the hunger strike performed by imprisoned left wing ‚terrorists’ in 1970s und 1980s Switzerland. On the one hand hunger strike actions reveal to be deeply embedded in hegemonic masculine ... (Show more)
This paper theorizes the concept of gendered performance of resistance in relation to leftist terrorism by taking a closer look at the hunger strike performed by imprisoned left wing ‚terrorists’ in 1970s und 1980s Switzerland. On the one hand hunger strike actions reveal to be deeply embedded in hegemonic masculine notions of war and armed struggle. On the other hand they may be read as a form of gendered body politic that relies on the visible victimization and martirization of the body. The fact that the public was witness to the slow hunger death of a human being not only made the state’s lack of control over its own subjects most apparent, it also revealed a state increasingly dependent on favorable media representation. I argue, however, that less overt and non-intentional modes of resistance may have had just as an unsettling effect on the nation. Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, member of the German Movement 2nd June, spread rumors about her impending marriage to a Swiss journalist leading to virulent debates about fictitious marriages. The great lengths the state was prepared to go to to prevent this marriage point to the threat that seemingly harmless rumors - due to their uncontrollable nature – posed to the state’s interest in containing leftist terrorism. The fact that these rumors not only suggested legal loopholes concerning extradition but also called the bourgeois ideal of romantic marriage into question, only added to this menace. (Show less)

Patricia Melzer : Collective Action and the Feminized Body as Catalyst of Political Subjectivity in the RAF Hunger Strikes
I discuss women’s participation in resistance to state power during hunger strikes organized by RAF prisoners in West German prisons in the 1970s and 80s. A large number of the prisoners who participated in the strikes across West Germany were women. They organized hunger strikes in their facilities and politicized ... (Show more)
I discuss women’s participation in resistance to state power during hunger strikes organized by RAF prisoners in West German prisons in the 1970s and 80s. A large number of the prisoners who participated in the strikes across West Germany were women. They organized hunger strikes in their facilities and politicized their actions by using their bodies as tools for negotiations with the state.

My paper explores the implications of these women’s rebellious act of hungering for their political agency in the context of a feminist discourse on the body. More specifically, since any hunger strike intensely involves the body by expressing political agency in corporeal terms, I am interested in the connections between feminist theories that have critically delineated women’s subjectivity as connected to her body in patriarchy’s political order, and the starving prisoner. Feminists have argued that Western thought constructs the female body as the ideological limit for political subjectivity, denying women access to political power. By restricting the state’s influence in the private sphere, the “social contract” of liberal society rests on securing men’s access to women’s bodies, what Carol Patemen defines as “the sexual contract” underlying the spatial and political division into public and private spheres. At the same time, a growing commodification of the female body insists on its malleability towards a normative ideal. As a result, feminists claim, a woman’s body has become a cultural site she feels she can regain personal control over. I examine the theoretical implication for starvation as gendered expression of agency and subjectivity within the political context of prisons. An analysis of political hunger strikes shifts the relationship between subjective control and the body towards a relationship between state control over the body and political resistance. The context of politicized activism, imprisonment, and –maybe most importantly – collective resistance redefines the politics of starvation and gendered body politics in critical ways. In my analysis of the RAF hunger strikes in relation to feminist body-politics, I draw on published documents, such as the info, hunger strike-demands, and personal interviews with former members of the RAF. (Show less)



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