Becoming flesh: refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in German necropolitical spaces

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Contributors

Abstract

The securitization of the EU’s external borders and repressive asylum policies biopolitically control and discipline the bodies of refugees. In Germany, these developments hark back to a longer colonial history of racialization that the state collectively disavows. To approach this continuity of racialized citizenship, I will analyse a series of hunger strikes that were staged by refugees from 2012 till 2014 in Germany. By asking which possibilities lie in staging the hunger strike, I will argue that Germany’s necropolitical geography of detention, asylum, and deportation marks the racialized refugees’ bodies as disposable within the logics of citizenship. I propose that hunger strike is a form of becoming flesh, which makes visible how racialized violence is enacted on the refugees’ bodies. Becoming flesh articulates a politics of refusal that subverts the logics of recognition, empathy and suffering liberal rights discourses rely on and, instead, performs an embrace of the refugees’ abjection.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)459
Number of pages474
JournalCitizenship Studies
Volume22
Issue number5
Publication statusPublished - 26 May 2018
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-0317-2492/work/142245464

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

Library keywords