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Bodies in Feminist In-Prison Protests: American Suffragists’ Hunger Strikes and Forced-Feedings
Kraus, Lindsey Nicole
Kraus, Lindsey Nicole
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Abstract
American suffragists were arrested and sent to prison in 1917 for picketing the White House. While incarcerated, the women continued to protest for the right to vote. The suffragists’ in-prison protests remain salient in the 2022 Lucy Burns Museum (LBM), despite occurring over a century ago. How did imprisoned suffragists’ bodies generate rhetorical force? And how is their body rhetoric re-presented in the LBM? I seek to understand how the imprisoned women used their bodies rhetorically and how social actors use bodies more broadly as a symbolic resource for protesting injustice. Further, I investigate how suffragists’ body rhetoric is displayed and memorialized over a hundred years later and its implications. To answer the research questions, I analyze suffragists’ body rhetoric and body-based arguments in 1917 and the exhibits and news coverage of the LBM using a bodies-in-protest heuristic following Endres and Senda-Cook’s (2011) approach to place in protest. I offer two additional theoretical frameworks to analyze bodies as rhetoric, including seeing bodies as material, symbolic, and performative, intersectional forms. My analysis shows that suffragists enacted many embodied protests through their picketing, imprisonment, hunger strikes, and force-feedings to challenge and reify dominant ideologies assigned to women’s bodies in 1917. Their embodied protests are also made legible for visitors to the LBM. I argue the historical accounts and displays of the women’s body rhetoric focus primarily on their self-interests (i.e., gaining the right to vote for middle/upper-class, white women only) versus more universal suffrage goals. I find that the same worldview is used in the LBM at the expense of a nuanced collective memory surrounding suffragists’ imprisonment. I conclude that suffragists’ body rhetoric gives scholars a framework to account for bodies generating rhetorical force in highly contextual protests and not without limitations or constraints that impact how people can leverage and use their bodies rhetorically.
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Date
2022-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Communication, American Suffragists, Force-feeding, Hunger strikes, In-prison protest