The Body as Weapon: Bobby Sands and the Republican Hunger Strikes

Chris Yuill

Sociological Research Online, 2007, vol. 12, issue 2, 111-121

Abstract: The 1981 Hunger Strike marked an important point in the Northern Ireland conflict, shifting its focus away from city streets and country lanes into the H-Block prison. Here republican prisoners used their embodiment to resist and fight back at attempts to recast them as criminals as opposed to the soldiers they perceived themselves to be. Given the centrality of the body and embodiment in the prison struggle this paper will theorise the ‘body-as-weapon’ as a modality of resistance. This will begin by interrogating key themes within the sociology of the body before discussing and dismissing an alternative explanation of the Hunger Strike: the actions of the hunger strikers standing in the traditions of heroic Gaelic myths and Catholic martyrdom. Finally, drawing from the sociology of the body, I will then proceed to discuss how the body and embodiment deployed in this manner can be effective, concentrating on how the ‘body-as-weapon’: (i) acts as a resource for minority political groups; (ii) destabilises notions of the body in modernity and related to that point (iii) engages in a ‘hidden’ impulse of modernity, that of self-sacrifice.

Keywords: Embodiment; Conflict; Modernity; Northern Ireland; Resistance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.1348 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:12:y:2007:i:2:p:111-121

DOI: 10.5153/sro.1348

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().