Becoming flesh

Refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in German necropolitical spaces

Bibliographic Data

ID5131964
AuthorsMichelle Pfeifer (0000-0003-0317-2492, New York University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume22
Issue5
Pages459-474
Publication date2018-07-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCitizenship Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1362-1025 • E-ISSN: 1469-3593
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13621025.2018.1477918
OpenAlexW2803361733
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited20

The securitization of the EU’s external borders and repressive asylum policies biopolitically control and discipline the bodies of refugees. In Germany, these developments hark back to a longer colonial history of racialization that the state collectively disavows. To approach this continuity of racialized citizenship, I will analyse a series of hunger strikes that were staged by refugees from 2012 till 2014 in Germany. By asking which possibilities lie in staging the hunger strike, I will argue that Germany’s necropolitical geography of detention, asylum, and deportation marks the racialized refugees’ bodies as disposable within the logics of citizenship. I propose that hunger strike is a form of becoming flesh, which makes visible how racialized violence is enacted on the refugees’ bodies. Becoming flesh articulates a politics of refusal that subverts the logics of recognition, empathy and suffering liberal rights discourses rely on and, instead, performs an embrace of the refugees’ abjection

Citizenship · Criminology · Deportation · German · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Racialization · Refugee · Securitization · Sociology · State of exception · Gender Studies · Global Security and Public Health · History · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Political Theology and Sovereignty

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