UC Berkeley

My dissertation project studies the practice of force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay detention camp and how incarcerated individuals mobilize their bodies against indefinite confinement. Using the critical-analytical methods of feminist science and visual cultures studies, I examine force-feeding within longer histories of racially gendered subjection such as vivisection and behavior modification in order to consider how the feeding tube came to be used as an instrument of punishment on the orientalized body of Muslim men perceived to be terrorists. Through empirical research, textual interpretation, and aesthetic analysis, my dissertation intervenes in the fields of critical prison studies, and science and technology studies by foregrounding genealogies of biomedicalization and how those incarcerated reclaim corporeal agency through practices such as hunger striking. Ultimately, I argue that force-feeding is commensurate with other interrogation techniques that have become more mainstream since the Cold War, emphasizing the medicalization of war tactics and punishment.

Chapter one, “Vivisectional Mandate: Behavioral Science and Torture from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” follows the ways that the Cold War’s experimentation sets the stage for the war on terror. In particular, I situate the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques of the war on terror within Cold War behavioral science in order to track the role psychology has played in the progression of biopolitical torture techniques that aim to discipline racialized bodies. The second chapter, “From Cracking the Mind to Bodily Abjection: Situating Force-Feeding in the Torture Archive,” considers how force-feeding transforms the medical clinic into a site of punitive suffering. How is this transformation linked to the emergence of biotechnologies geared towards the optimization of life in the early part of the 20th century? These questions expand outward to be considerations of patient and prisoner autonomy in the wake of right-to-die litigation and the use of the feeding tube in US domestic prisons. My third chapter, “Suspended Animation: Force-Feeding and the Visuality of Pain,” analyzes a policy manual on techniques for managing hunger striking at Guantánamo Bay detention camp alongside the visual testimonies of prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel and activist Yasiin Bey. This chapter investigates how the state frames medical ethics inside of the camps and how the emphasis placed on care obfuscates not only the demands of the prisoners but also the feeding tube as carceral technology. The fourth chapter, “Staging Incapacitation: Hunger Striking in the Wake of Force-Feeding,” considers the practice of hunger striking and self-harm at Guantánamo Bay. Here I examine prisoner’s testimonials of hunger striking and how such resistance to policies of corporeal wholeness functions as a viable form of political self-expression.

By situating force-feeding practices at Guantánamo Bay into a history of medical experimentation, I reveal the inadequacies of prevailing theories of biopower, theories that are not capacious enough to account for how state sponsored torture is underwritten by the operation of Islamophobia and institutionalized racism. Tracing out an archaeology of state torture with the tools of critical prison studies and science and technology studies reveals Guantánamo Bay as neither a space of life nor death, but rather of what I refer to as suspended animation, a pointedly medicalized mode of living death.