Abstract:
ABSTRACT
FASTING AS DISSENT: EXAMINING THE BODY DISCOURSES
AND PUBLICITY OF MAHATMA GANDHI AND
IROM SHARMILA
by
Arjun Buxi
Master of Arts in Communication Studies
California State University, Chico
Summer 2011
In this thesis, I explore the efficacy of hunger striking as a method of exposing
the unjustness of a powerful, repressive State. I confront the exclusion of oppressed
minorities from the arena of public debate based on the attributes that make them ‘different.’
As recourse, I argue that the minority dissident’s last resort for resisting the
State is the creation of bodily discourses and a spectacle of his/her suffering. However,
what are the effects of the minority hunger striker’s attributes of ‘difference’ on his/her
fast? Conversely, what are the effects of fasting on behalf of a minority group? I attempt
to advance some answers to those questions through a comparative analysis between
Mahatma Gandhi and Irom Sharmila, who respectively fasted on behalf of, and as a
member of, an oppressed minority. Through analysis of news media discourses,
documentary footage, and biographies, this thesis examines the implications of a hunger
striker’s battle for autonomy while imprisoned and subverted by the State, and his/her
efforts to gain publicity and sympathy from an audience.
I demonstrate the limitations Sharmila faced as a female, ethnic minority
hunger striker, and the implications of the State’s counter-discourses upon a fast-untodeath.
It is shown that by a problematic application of the law, force-feeding, and hospitalization,
the State weakened Sharmila’s spectacle of suffering, and framed her humanitarian
crisis as a problem of ‘national security’. As contrast, I present how Gandhi
successfully framed his fast as confronting first and foremost a social problem, using a
dual argument of political and social reform to successfully implicate both State and
society for moral transgression. Though Gandhi enjoyed a more well known persona
and achieved more tangible reform, Sharmila has gained some public support and spoke
up against injustice. The sheer longevity of Sharmila’s fast-unto-death (10 years and
still going) demonstrates the efficacy of hunger striking in enabling a desperate, forgotten,
minority citizen to continually and determinedly resist a State with his/her last resort,
the body.
