Undying, Unliving, Unheard: Framing, Counterframing, and Necroresistance at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Contested Narratives and Discursive Battles

Abstract

Since 2002, the United States government has detained, without charge, almost 800 men in a heavily litigated legal vacuum at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, as a part of the global war on terror. Detained men at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp have participated in large scale hunger strikes and other forms of necroresistance, or bodily weaponization by the weaponless. In these protests, detainees sought due process, an end to torture, and dignity. These claims were counter framed and disputed by the American government through a rhetorical framing and counterframing conflict that mirrored their simultaneous battle over bodily autonomy and necroresistance. I performed a content analysis of publicly available demands and statements made by detained men through their legal representation and statements made by United States government and military officials. Through this, I argue, the dual clashes of framing and counterframing, fasting and forced feeding identify an inherent condition of necroresistance. In necroresistant protest within a total institution, the inability to define the conditions of one’s resistance and political suicide can further the power of the biosovereign. Without such definitional power, body of the necroresister can be appropriated to be to a corporal display of impenetrable might of the biosovereign and the inhumanity of the resister, rather than challenging the social and political conditions of dehumanization and domination. This dually faceted yet interdependent interplay of resistance and repression upon bodily and rhetorical lines reveals the significance of a multidimensional analysis of power in the ability to name the hunger for justice that leads the necroresister to starve.

Author

• Anne Nechama Miriam Getz Eidelhoch, Syracuse University