| This project brings together three distinct forms of cultural practice---Anorexia Nervosa, staged fasting, and hunger strikes---and the spaces in which their enactment is most extreme: clinic, theater, and prison. It articulates the similarities between these practices---specifically, the enactments of extended refusals to eat---as significant not only within their discrete institutional domains, but on a register of political action, where subjects perform resistance to larger social forces and structures, and stage their own accession to a viable, if dying, political subjectivity. It explores the political effects of these practices as performances within economies of power that infuse self-starvation with extreme significance. It seeks, in particular, the manner in which self-starvation stages the complicated process that goes by the name subjectivation [assujetissement]: the simultaneous production and subordination of political subjectivity. What does it mean for one to perform a refusal to consume as a strategy of resistance, negation, defiance, and power? How does self-starvation, as a project of refusal aimed towards death, produce violence differently from other practices? How does its meaning change in the clinic, the theater, and the prison? What are the registers of its violence, and against what forces can they be directed? How is the subject of self-starvation---simultaneously the object of self-starvation---refigured in relation to the State?; In pursuing these questions, I argue that practices of self-starvation stage, and interrogate the meaning of, subjectivation in clinical encounters, performance production, and incarceration, and concurrently produce , in their very enactment, new kinds of political subjects. The first chapter of the dissertation contextualizes the study in terms of 20 th century theory on subjectivity and its relationship to cultural performance and performativity. I focus in particular on Sigmund Freud's later work on subjective development---which I argue is based fundamentally on a model of hunger and inanition---as an historical litany about subject formation that informs all 20th century representations of self-starvation. In the second chapter, I turn to significant shifts (since the late 1970s) in clinical diagnostic criteria for Anorexia, focusing specifically on the development of a so-called "male Anorexia" disease entity. The third chapter turns to experimental installation performance and performance art of the last thirty years, in particular the work of Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic. I consider several works performed by each artist involving literal and allegorical self-starvation in the context of Michael Fried's critiques of "theatricality" in modern art, and in the context of the larger avant-garde movement in the 1970s. In my fourth chapter, I explore the context and the conditions of recent hunger strikes in prisons across Turkey, interrogating the rhetoric---both official and local---surrounding what has become the longest and most deadly hunger strike in modern history, and consider the strike's performative value in producing a new model of Turkish subjectivity. My concluding chapter returns to the question "What is self-starvation?" in order to articulate the similarities and differences in these three case studies, and to reposition each in the context of cultural criticism that poses the question of subjectivity in the language of domination and resistance, life and death. |
