Resistant Bodies: Gender and the Hunger Strike in Modern American History

ABSTRACT This essay examines the gendered legacy of the hunger strike in modern American history, first in the trans‐Atlantic suffrage movement and then in the linked pacifist and civil rights movements. Hunger strikes were integral to resisting patriarchal and racist power structures in twentieth‐century America, both within the prison system and in the larger society. However, the origins of the modern hunger strike in the suffrage movement have been largely obscured. Instead, the starving Irish nationalist Bobby Sands or the fasting image of Gandhi dominates our image of the hunger striker. In the mid‐twentieth‐century male pacifists such as Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger gain notoriety for their wartime hunger strikes. However, radical women also protested militarism and white supremacy and carried out dramatic hunger strikes during the cold war. Contemporary political prisoners continue to practice the embodied resistance of these pioneering activists.