A History of Force Feeding

Front matter

A History of Force Feeding

Tan Miller

A History of Force Feeding

Introduction

‘A Prostitution of the Profession’?: The Ethical Dilemma of Suffragette Force-Feeding, 1909-14

‘The Instrument of Death’: Prison Doctors and Medical Ethics in Revolutionary-Period Ireland, c.1917

‘A Few Deaths from Hunger Is Nothing’: Experiencing Starvation in Irish Prisons, 1917-23

Tve Heard o’ Food Queues, but This Is the First Time I’ve Ever Heard of a Feeding Queue!’: Hunger Strikers, War, and the State, 1914-61

‘I Would Have Gone on with the Hunger Strike, but Force-Feeding I Could Not Take’: The Coercion of Hunger Striking Convict Prisoners, 1913-72 viii CONTENTS

The End of Force-Feeding?

8 Conclusion

Index

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2.1 2.2 6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4

6.5

LIST OF FIGURES

Torturing women in prison: vote against the government

A suffragette is force-fed in Holloway Prison

Number of recorded hunger strike incidences responded to, and not responded to, with force-feeding in English Prisons, 1913-40

Number of times prisoners were force-fed on individual hunger strikes in English prisons, 1913—40

Instruments used for force-feeding in English prisons, 1913-40 English prisons in which incidences of force-feeding occurred, 1913-40

Recorded motivations for hunger striking in English prisons, 1913-40

162 163 ix

OPEN

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

In March 2013, a group of detainees at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Cuba, went on hunger strike. At the height of their protest, 106 individuals were refusing to eat. For detainees incarcerated for over a decade without charge or trial, food refusal offered a potent way to rebel. Having been stripped of their capacity for political communication and placed in an institution that severely restricted personal freedom, the simple act of not eating allowed detainees to reassert control over their bodies. It granted autonomy and self-determination, posing a challenge to Guantanamo’s disciplinary ethos. These hunger strikes were also highly political. By rejecting food, detainees openly defied the authority of the American government which had incarcerated them. They used their bodies as weapons, the last remaining resource available for remonstrating against adverse institutional conditions.’ In turn, the newsworthy nature of these protests drew international attention to allegations of institutional torture and violence seemingly supported by the Obama administration. The protestors knew that hunger strikes attract worldwide interest from journalists, human rights activists, politicians, ethicists, and doctors. They had posed a formidable moral question: Is it acceptable to allow a prisoner to starve to death?

Corpses present problems. A dead hunger striker can offer evidence of deplorable prison conditions. A death also goes some way towards validating dissident political perspectives. These, after all, had been worth dying for. Surely they must have some value? In the event of a death, less sympathetic

© The Author(s) 2016 1 I. Miller, A History of Force Feeding, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31113-5_1 observers always assert that hunger striking amounts to suicide and that the corpse was once a ‘terrorist’ intent on endangering the public with mindless violence. Why, they ask, should anyone care about a dead ‘terrorist’? Yet, in politically charged circumstances, a lifeless hunger striker can swiftly transform into a martyr, a victim of political cruelty whose desperation led him/her to perform the unthinkable act of mutilating one’s own body, entirely eradicating it in a grotesque act of disfigurement that (s)he could have halted at any time simply by eating.

Throughout the twentieth century, the emaciated bodies of hunger strikers provided a powerful symbol of determined resistance to aggressive states, not least in Ireland. Hunger strikers who died there did so for a national or collective cause, not to selfishly escape individual suffering or institutional misery. Their deaths were altruistic, selfless acts performed for the greater good of a national, religious, or political cause.” They became ‘good deaths’, not suicides. In turn, death by hunger strike reshaped public perceptions of victim and aggressor. Bobby Sands provides a compelling example. Allowed to starve in a Northern Irish prison in 1981, the image of his emaciated body still raises claims of political intransigence and cruel, unnecessary treatment at the hands of Margaret Thatcher. Now valorised as an emblem of Irish self-sacrifice, Sands metamorphosed from ‘terrorist’? to martyr while the British state adopted the role of violent oppressor. Alternative perspectives on Sands’ death exist, but this account predominates.* On a less ideological level, Sands’ death sparked rioting throughout Northern Ireland, aroused international concern about the treatment of republican prisoners, and altered the trajectory of Northern Irish politics throughout the 1980s. Meanings became attached to Sands’ withered body; his corpse became politically encoded.* Both his hunger strike and death provided a public spectacle.

For most governments, deaths from hunger strike are best avoided. But what alternatives are there? At Guantanamo, at the time of writing, detainees are being force-fed. Force-feeding (or forcible-feeding, as it was once termed) involves inserting a stomach tube into the mouth of a prisoner/patient which is then passed downwards through the throat and oesophagus before eventually arriving in the stomach. The passing of the tube causes most patients to gag, choke, and vomit over themselves. Once the patient has been calmed, liquid food is then poured into the top of the tube, and it descends into the stomach. Digestion is resumed. Force-feeding can also be performed using a nasal tube. It shares similarities with artificial feeding, a procedure that keeps mentally ill patients who refuse to eat alive, as well as coma patients.° Yet subtle differences exist. Unlike artificial feeding, force-feeding tends to be performed against the will of patients (mostly prisoners) who have decided not to eat. Moreover, most hunger strikers are not mentally ill. A lack of food by no means impairs the human capacity to make rational judgements. Hunger strikers often experience hallucinations and mental distress, but rarely go insane. This complicates matters. According to accepted medical ethics, sane patients have a basic right to be able to refuse medical treatment (including force-feeding) if they wish. Moreover, force-fed prisoners typically insist that the procedure is used primarily to punish, degrade, and harm. They claim that the passing of a stomach tube through the inner body is intensely painful, as well as emotionally traumatic. Force-feeding has also been known to kill when liquid food has accidentally been decanted into the lungs rather than stomach, the end result being a rapid death from pneumonia. Force-feeding emerges from the historical and present-day record as physically dangerous, ethically precarious, and irrefutably unpleasant.

This study examines force-feeding from historical perspectives. It unearths prisoner experiences, public reactions, and ethical debates. It situates force-feeding within broader ideas on pain and suffering, recaptures the emotional and physical sensation of being fed, and assesses the contrasting meanings attached to force-feeding in the various socio-political contexts in which it was performed. The main focus is on England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland, a complex geo-political region in which heated debates on force-feeding first emerged and recurrently resurfaced throughout much of the twentieth century. Although Russian prisoners went on hunger strike in the nineteenth century,’ it was English suffragettes who first demonstrated the political potency of hunger striking in groups.® Between 1909 and 1914, imprisoned suffragettes refused food collectively and exhibited an absolute determination to fast until death, if necessary. To avoid a martyrdom, the Home Office authorised force-feeding. Incensed suffragettes and an array of unpartisan critics posed a number of challenging ethical questions. Is force-feeding safe? Can it kill? Are doctors who force-feed acting ethically, in line with the norms of their profession? Or, instead, have they become pawns in a battle of wills between government and prisoners? And do these doctors really believe that they are saving lives? Or are they perhaps more interested in disciplining recalcitrant prisoners?

When suffragettes stopped hunger striking in 1914, these questions remained unresolved. Undeterred by hostile public opinion, and perhaps impressed by the efficacy of feeding technologies in quelling prison rebellion, the British government maintained its policy of feeding hunger strikers. Just as the suffragette campaign quietened during wartime, the Irish republican movement began to gain considerable momentum. Irish national independence was ultimately secured in 1921. As had been the case when dealing with the suffragettes, the British government used imprisonment extensively to tackle republican dissidence. Inspired by the suffragettes, a large number of republicans went on hunger strike, only to be fed against their will. The contentious death of prominent Irish Republican Army (IRA) member, Thomas Ashe, in 1917 ultimately forced a change in hunger strike management policy in Ireland.’ Ashe was the first political casualty of force-feeding; pneumonia infected his body following a botched feeding attempt by an inexperienced doctor. But even despite this prominent fatality, prisoners outside of Ireland continued to be fed against their will. In England, conscientious objectors were force-fed throughout the First World War, often in a brutal, degrading way, despite firm evidence that the procedure could kill.

After 1917, England and Ireland had contrasting hunger strike management policies. In Ireland, republican prisoners continued to hunger strike throughout the War of Independence (1919-21) and Civil War (1922-23). In the latter conflicts, approximately 8000 republican prisoners staged hunger strikes.'° However, Irish prison doctors were reluctant to force-feed and grappled instead with the uneasy task of caring for patients as they slowly, and deliberately, wasted away. Most notoriously, the former Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died in 1920 after enduring seventy-four days without food, causing an international uproar.’ After securing national independence, the Irish government never authorised force-feeding. In contrast, force-feeding remained common in English prisons throughout much of the century. Numerous convict prisoners— including murderers, anarchists, and peace protestors—went on hunger strike only to be subjected to the stomach tube. The commonplace nature of both hunger striking and force-feeding in twentieth-century English prisons passed mostly unnoticed until 1973 when four Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) prisoners, including two young sisters Marion and Dolours Price, decided to refuse food. Their feedings attracted international attention. The death of PIRA prisoner, Michael Gaughan, in the following year following complications with force-feeding finally encouraged the Home Office to change its policies. Partly in response to the British government’s mishandling of its politicised prisoners, the

World Medical Association formally declared force-feeding as unethical in 1975." For the first time, the medical profession clearly outlined ethical standards on hunger strike management, even though force-feeding had by then proven controversial for nearly sixty years. Prisoners could no longer be fed against their will, one consequence being that ten PIRA members starved to death in Maze Prison, Northern Ireland, in 1981. These included Bobby Sands. Evidently, hunger striking was an important feature of the medical and emotional landscapes of the twentieth-century prison. A complex interplay evolved historically between two contrasting options: force-feeding and allowing self-starvation. Prisoners who went on hunger strike endured deep physical and emotional suffering. Those who were force-fed found themselves subject to pain, degradation, and, in many instances, physical and verbal intimidation. In turn, force-feeding called into question basic tenets that underscored medical ethics and modern understandings of liberal western society itself. The wilful infliction of pain clashed profoundly with expectations of medical professionalism and civilised behaviour.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Why is a historical study of force-feeding important? Such an investigation fills a significant historiographical lacuna. When studying broader political campaigns such as republicanism, historians of Ireland have routinely denounced force-feeding as unsavoury and vicious. Their discussion has been condemnatory but rarely reflective. In his study of Irish imprisonment between 1912 and 1921, William Murphy briefly alludes to the ethical problems posed by force-feeding.’? Popular accounts of Irish hunger striking, such as Barry Flynn’s Pawns in the Game, condemn the procedure as brutal and torturous.'* Yet the ethical issues that surround force-feeding are far more intricate than these passing mentions suggest and warrant a more focused inquiry. Such a study would also shed light on the ethical, physical, and emotional aspects of hunger striking yet to come to light due to a tendency among historians of Ireland to focus almost exclusively on the political dimensions of twentieth-century prison protests. Recent oral history research into the Northern Irish Troubles undertaken by Greta Jones, James McKenna, and Farhat Manzoor has opened up possibilities for examining fresh aspects of Irish conflict. In their Candles in the Dark: Medical Ethical Issues in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the authors highlight the complexity of providing and receiving medical care in a conflict zone and the day-to-day challenges in adhering to medical ethical norms.'° In their study, the authors firmly demonstrate that hunger striking is a form of protest with implications that extend far beyond the political. For those who willingly starve themselves, food refusal bears physical, psychological, and emotional consequences.

Suffragette historians have proven more attentive to the medical and socio-cultural aspects of force-feeding. The technologies used to feed suffragette prisoners, and their emergence in Victorian asylums, have been illuminated by Elizabeth Williams and Sarah Chaney.'” Elsewhere, I have situated debates on force-feeding within a broader context of criticism directed at the Edwardian medical profession as supporters of violence against both animals and women and also investigated the medical ethical debates that emerged during the British suffragette campaign.'* Feminist historian, Jennian F. Geddes, has rebuked the Edwardian medical profession for failing to speak out against force-feeding and supporting state policies.!? These studies highlight the ethical conundrum presented by force-feeding. Yet considerable scope exists for examining the endurance of force-feeding policies beyond the suffragette hunger strike campaign. Force-feeding remained in use in English prisons throughout much of the century. But historians have yet to critically evaluate the ruthless feedings of First World War conscientious objectors, unearth the harrowing experiences of convict prisoners subjected to the stomach tube, or examine the public uproar caused in the mid-1970s by the force-feeding of PIRA prisoners.

The issue of force-feeding taps into far broader historiographical themes including the history of medical ethics, gender, liberal political culture, Anglo-Irish relations, institutional welfare, prisoner well-being, radical movements, and social power. Historical analysis also has much to offer present-day debates. While it cannot hope to resolve the thorny ethical debates that currently surround the body of the twenty-first-century hunger striker, a historically grounded study could certainly help make sense of these controversies by offering historical insight and rooting discussions currently being waged by bioethicists, human rights activists, and politicians at the time of writing in a broader lineage of concern about force-fed prisoners. Although historically disparate, the presence of similar—almost identical—fundamental medical ethical concerns about force-feeding in historical and present-day incidences demonstrates some degree of continuity across time, as well as geographical space. Group hunger strikes tend to occur decades apart, meaning that medical communities often lack an immediate ethical framework based upon recent practice to refer to when the state initiates force-feeding policies. Today, the nearest focal point for western doctors is, perhaps, the hunger strikes staged during the Northern Irish Troubles. Yet the force-feedings that took place in that period have been mostly forgotten about outside of Northern Ireland. Concerned doctors are perhaps cognisant of the fact that suffragettes were once force-fed. Some (particularly in Ireland) may be familiar with the death of Thomas Ashe. Yet few would be conscious of the intricacy of the discussions recurrently played out throughout the twentieth century in the pages of Votes for Women, British Medical Journal and the Guardian, or in the tense atmosphere at the public inquest on Thomas Ashe’s body in Dublin, 1917. Few would recognise the relevance of historical debates to current ethical discussion. Given the temporal distance of large-scale prison hunger strikes, historiographical analysis of past experiences and debates holds the potential to inform current approaches to hunger strike management and help make sense of a persistent ethical conundrum.

Wuy HUNGER STRIKE?

In 1975, the World Medical Association formally declared force-feeding as unethical. Why, then, is the procedure still being used? Force-feeding has been resorted to once again in the context of an alarmist concern over ‘terror’ and the wilful refusal of the Bush and Obama administrations to adhere to international human rights practices. It has helped to tarnish twenty-first American policies. On 11 September 2001, Islamic fundamentalists destroyed the World Trade Center, New York, in an unprecedented display of ‘terror’. Two months later, President George Bush authorised the indefinite detention of anyone suspected of involvement in ‘terrorist’ activity against America. The first group of detainees was transported to Guantanamo from Afghanistan in January 2002. Upon their arrival, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, announced that members of this group were to be held as ‘unlawful combatants’, not as prisoners-of-war. He defended this loss of entitlement to special status on the basis that Al-Queda was not a recognised state party, meaning that its members were exempt from the Geneva Convention, a series of treaties on the treatment of civilians and prisoners-of-war. Al-Queda, Rumsfeld insisted, was an international terrorist group.”°

In the tense years that followed, experts heavily debated the legal status of Guantanamo, a site in which individuals could be housed indefinitely without trial. Critics denounced Guantanamo as a ‘legal black hole’.?! The site seemed exempt from normal rules of law and warfare as well as standard judicial processes.” As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggested, the legal status of detainees was radically erased at Guantanamo, producing legally unnameable and unclassifiable beings. Ominously, Agamben compared this to the loss of Jewish identity in Nazi concentration camps.’ Providing a counter-argument, influential political thinkers such as Michael Ignatieff insisted that the removal of a certain degree of privacy and human rights was a ‘lesser evil’ than the ‘greater evil’ which would ensure should the ‘terrorists’ win.” Yet many disagreed with him.?5 Even Ignatieff himself eventually tempered his arguments. During his election campaign, Barack Obama opposed the Bush’s administration’s handling of Guantanamo, although he made few changes to the camp upon coming to power in 2008.”°

Since 2002, detainees at Guantanamo have protested by hunger striking.” In doing so, they have drawn international attention to their treatment and detention without trial. The camp’s first hunger strike started in January 2002 and peaked at 150 detainees. It ended in the following month when officials apologised for mistreating the Quran. A more sustained period of hunger striking began in 2005 when detainees decided to protest their innocence and rally against their institutional treatment by refusing food. Hunger strikes took place intermittently at Guantanamo until 2013, when the aforementioned mass hunger strike commenced. In December 2013, the US military announced that it would no longer disclose information about hunger strikes. Force-feeding is known to have taken place since 2002.8

Does the nature of these protests share any commonalities with historical hunger strikes? In many ways, yes. Part of the detainees’ anger stems from having been classified as ‘enemy combatants’ rather than prisoners-of-war. Historically, classification was a common motivation for hunger striking. In the 1910s, the Home Office refused to grant suffragettes political prisoner status, rousing numerous women to go on hunger strike. Similarly, Irish republicans often fasted (in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1970/80s) in protest against the British government’s obstinate refusal to recognise their special status within the prison, to distinguish them from everyday criminals and thieves. Many politicised prisoners viewed having to associate with ordinary criminals as defilement and sought to secure space from the polluting influences of rapists, murderers, and thieves. According to their line of argument, politicised prisoners are different from ordinary criminals and should be treated as so.” Yet special category status also held symbolic value. It might have confirmed that dissidents have valid political perspectives. This was ideologically problematic. How could female suffragettes have been awarded political prisoner status in a country that actively denied women political participation? Were individuals who expressed their political views by planting bombs and murdering civilians really deserving of special category status? And would such an acknowledgement have in some way validated political violence?

Evidently, hunger strikes are very much concerned with identity. By criminalising political offences, politicians actively undermined the political agendas of suffragettes and Irish republicans by casting their offences as terrorism or simple crime. A similar line of thought pervades government approaches to Guantanamo today. But this begs the question: What precisely constitutes ‘terrorism’? A century ago, many viewed the militant suffragettes as akin to ‘terrorists’. Yet few, if anyone, would consider them in this light today. In the 1910s and 1920s, Irish public opinion was deeply divided on the extent of violence being perpetrated for the cause of national independence. Yet the IRA members who then helped to secure Irish independence are today valorised in Ireland as heroes who successfully overthrew centuries of British oppression. Precisely who becomes defined as ‘terrorist’, ‘dissident’, or ‘criminal’ depends heavily on historical and political context.*? Nonetheless, political discourses of ‘terrorism’ and ‘criminality’ undoubtedly shape prisoner experiences, define terms of imprisonment, and provide the starting point of many incidences of food refusal. They also help governments justify harsh bodily interventions such as force-feeding unlikely to be considered acceptable in ‘normal’ circumstances.

Hunger strikes, past and present, are equally concerned with bodily autonomy and institutional conditions. For philosophers such as Michel Foucault, the modern prison is a site in which power runs ‘through’ the body.*! Prior to the nineteenth century, criminals who had committed even relatively trivial crimes were liable to be hanged. The gallows provided a visible and potent public symbol in place to deter the living from pursuing crime.* In contrast, imprisonment became more common from the early nineteenth century. Western prisons were systematically reformed, although this reorganisation took the form of solitude, silence, isolation, the control of personal time (as exemplified by rigidly prescribed meal times), and the introduction of physically and psychologically exhausting regimes such as the treadmill. In Foucault’s model, the modern prison system became inherently disciplinary and punitive; all punishments were now firmly directed towards the body and mind.** The casting of politicised prisoners as ‘terrorists’ or enemies of the established social order further encouraged harsh institutional treatment, particularly if prison staff viewed their prisoners as part of an enemy threat to the nation, if not western liberality itself. To worsen experiences even further, politicised prisoners were more likely to rebel while incarcerated, to see their imprisonment as unfair and unjust. Pain and force were far from incompatible with the disciplinary tendencies of the prison and were routinely directed at prisoners with unshakeable political views.

Conflict between prison staff and politicised prisoners is regularly played out on the level of the body. Accusations of physical and mental torture—or at least cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment—have recently solidified the idea that Guantanamo constitutes a serious human rights threat.** If anything, Guantanamo is now a byword for injustice. Upon returning home, released detainees have reported regular beatings, rape threats, psychological intimidation, and the cutting of body parts including the genitals.*° Torture can be difficult to define. Psychological torture is immeasurably harder to gauge than physical torture as it tends not to leave an array of physical marks and bruising as evidence.*° However, it certainly exists. Sociologists have gone so far as to depict Guantanamo as the archetypical Foucauldian prison, an establishment where penal discourses, practices, and technologies are directed towards the bodies and mind of detainees. According to criminal rights expert Michael Welch, Guantanamo couples penal technologies with harsh interrogation, torture, repressive confinement conditions, and few prospects for release. Power relations act unfavourably on inmates who find themselves confined in a panoptican-like institution where they are constantly monitored by CCTV cameras and forced to sleep in brightly lit cells.*” The Pentagon’s power over their bodies is absolute.

Suffragettes, conscientious objectors, and PIRA prisoners similarly complained of receiving exceptionally harsh institutional treatment due to their political views. Conditions for suffragette and Irish republican prisoners were perhaps not as imposing as they now are for Guantanamo detainees. However, many suffragettes (particularly those drawn from middle-class backgrounds) left the prisons horrified at the conditions which they had encountered, as did a considerable number of conscientious objectors during the First World War. Similarly, the widespread use of internment in Northern Ireland from 1971, followed by the construction of the formidable Maze Prison complex in which Bobby Sands died, raised concern about deplorable prison conditions and the manner by which the government chose to treat its incarcerated political opponents. The so-called ‘dirty protest’, in which Northern Irish republican prisoners smeared their own excrement over their cell walls and refused to wear anything other than a blanket, perhaps exemplifies the lengths politicised prisoners have gone to in order to rally against their institutional treatment.

How can autonomy be regained in such contexts? Fasting offers an important opportunity to reassert bodily control in an environment deliberately designed to curtail individual choice and decision-making. Food is central to prison life. It helps to structure time, conditions custodial life, and is symbolic of the prison experience.** Refusing food directly challenges the normal disciplinary workings of prisons. It disrupts day-to-day schedules and represents a firm rejection by prisoners of the regimented power systems that structure institutional life and the harsh, discriminatory conditions which they often face. It also invokes the idea that a prisoner or detainee has a right to die if they wish, perhaps the ultimate, most extreme, assertion of control over one’s own body. If prisons are concerned with controlling life at its most basic levels, then hunger striking (with its potential to rescue a prisoner from unfair judicial systems, political injustice, and institutional brutality through death) signifies a complete dismissal of the basic principles that undergird the modern prison. Hunger striking subverts the power relations that run ‘through’ the prisoner’s body. It also self-consciously presents an open challenge to the government which oversees the prison network and uses it to tackle political dissidence.

Moreover, hunger strikes can be remarkably effective. In numerous historical circumstances, the decaying body of a hunger striker has transformed into an object of political currency, allowing dialogues to open up between prisoners, the public, and the state. As James Vernon suggests, hunger strikes proved their worth in the twentieth century as a means of articulating political critique in a number of contrasting scenarios (including England, Ireland, and India). Hunger striking itself is a form of political expression transmitted via the body. Given that prisoners can no longer express their political views through traditional means such as voting, publishing, or donating to public organisations, food refusal allows prisoners to articulate their concerns and perspectives.*° Hunger striking is a highly communicative act.*! As Bobby Sands’ example once again demonstrates, it can force the public to rethink the meanings attached to terms such as ‘terrorism’ and how the state enacts violence upon the body within institutions.*”

Nonetheless, governments are armed with their own weapon: the stomach tube. Force-feeding robs prisoners of a scarce opportunity to assert sovereignty over their own bodies. It provides a powerful example of how institutional power and authority can be inscribed onto the bodies of prisoners. Force-feeding is a remarkably intrusive procedure that requires considerable force. Most prisoners struggle against the prison doctor’s efforts to secure access to the most innermost of body regions: the digestive system. To avoid impending pain, they might hit or attack the doctor and his/her attendants and struggle violently against the agony of a tube being forcefully inserted through their bodies. For such reasons, prisoners are often pinned down and restrained during the procedure, further adding to a sense of degradation, subjugation, and humiliation. Force-feeding ultimately negates the prisoners’ self-declared reclamation of their own bodies and strips them of their proclaimed right to die. In that sense, it bears a psychological function, discouraging protests by undermining the mental will to continue fasting. In Foucauldian terms, these prisoners become subject to sovereign power acting directly upon their bodies. Force-feeding at Guantanamo can certainly be considered as an expression of sovereign power, a political management of subjects whose lives need to be preserved.** However, force-feeding is an imperfect solution. The most determined prisoners choose to withstand pain and discomfort due to a firm conviction in their moral cause. Such prisoners also attract significant levels of journalistic attention which helps to damage the government’s reputation. Moreover, the procedure calls into question basic tenets of western liberal society relating to the acceptability of inflicting pain upon institutionalised groups already bereft of independence and autonomy.

EXPERIENCING FORCE-FEEDING

What does it feel like to be force-fed? And how does it feel to perform the procedure? The experiences of Lady Judith Todd provide some insight. Born in 1943, Judith was the daughter of Garfield Todd, the president of Rhodesia between 1953 and 1958. In the early 1960s, Judith became politically active and openly opposed the minority government of Ian Smith, leader of the predominantly white government that declared independence from the UK in 1965. Smith—the personification of white Rhodesia—was widely criticised as an unrepentant racist whose policies caused the deaths of thousands of native Zimbabweans. In January 1972, twenty-nine-year-old Judith was arrested and dispatched to a jail in Marandellas, Zimbabwe. Her father, Garfield, was imprisoned elsewhere at the same time. While incarcerated, Judith briefly went on hunger strike to protest against her detention. She was force-fed. Judith’s protest proved successful. Her feedings garnered international media attention, and both Judith and Garfield were released several weeks later, although they were expelled from the country. Judith decided to relocate to London where she continued to protest against Smith’s government and, later, Robert Mugabe’s regime.**

Judith had been placed in solitary confinement indefinitely without charge or trial. Like many detainees at Guantanamo, she went on hunger strike to rebel against her circumstances. News of Judith’s plight spread internationally. In an hour-long interview on London Weekend Television, Smith casually stated that if Judith chose not to eat, ‘it does not worry me a great deal’. When asked if he intended to authorise force-feeding, Smith commented that he was unaware of the hunger strike, that the matter was ‘of little consequence’, and that he did not receive daily reports.*° Yet under his disinterested facade, Smith was determined to break Judith’s hunger strike. Embarrassingly, it coincided with Smith’s efforts to placate a Peace Commission’s concerns that his government was using emergency powers to muzzle political opposition.

During the first few days of her protest, prison staff left tempting food in Judith’s room in an effort to break her will power. She steadfastly refused all meals.*° Visitors reported that Judith was tremulous and shaking.“ After nine days of refusing to eat, Judith was led from her prison cell to the doctor’s office and asked to take a seat. She then found herself being forcefully held down while a nurse pushed a tube into her throat. Judith vomited the tube out eight or nine times. Adding to the sense of intimidation in the doctor’s office, prison officials warned Judith that this process would continue as long as her fast lasted. Exhausted and shaking, Judith immediately gave up her protest against (what she later described as) ‘the vindictive reaction of the Smith regime to those of us who reject the Anglo-Rhodesian settlement proposals’. When the prison authorities allowed Judith’s mother to visit her, the distressed prisoner reportedly said ‘you must go away and tell people I couldn’t take it. I failed. I would have gone on with the hunger strike, but force-feeding I could not take’.** Evidently, Judith’s encounter with the stomach tube was marred by intimidation and physical force. Her protest was ultimately broken by l4 I. MILLER force-feeding, a procedure which she felt physically and mentally unable to cope with. Force-feeding also broke Judith’s emotional resolve to persevere with her fast. Prison discipline had been successfully enacted upon her body to restore institutional order. It seems clear from Judith’s account that she experienced force-feeding as a violent assault upon her body and mind, accompanied by physical and verbal intimidation. Its main purpose seemed to be to bring her protest to a sudden end for political purposes and to normalise institutional power relations. It represented an enactment of sovereign power upon the inner body itself.