Becoming flesh: refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in German necropolitical spaces
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 459 |
Number of pages | 474 |
Journal | Citizenship Studies |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 5 |
Publication status | Published - 26 May 2018 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Externally published | Yes |
External IDs
ORCID | /0000-0003-0317-2492/work/142245464 |
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Scopus | 85047439545 |