{"id":35810,"date":"2026-01-20T22:13:24","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T22:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/bir-protesto-yontemi-olarak-aclik\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T14:42:34","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T14:42:34","slug":"hunger-as-a-method-of-protest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/hunger-as-a-method-of-protest\/","title":{"rendered":"Hunger as a Method of Protest"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Hira Selma KALKAN<\/strong><\/p>

Despite the fact that enough food is produced worldwide each year to feed the entire population, it is wasted due to preventable reasons, and people are dying of hunger.<\/strong><\/p>

Approximately twenty-five thousand people die of hunger every day. One child every ten seconds… More than the total number of people who die from tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS and influenza. On the other hand, overeating and obesity are a global problem, and the surgical field dedicated to this issue generates considerable revenue. The world’s eating, drinking and starvation situations seem to be based on injustice. There is a connection between hunger and justice.<\/p>

Believing that the more a child eats, the healthier they will be, parents who constantly try to feed them, establishing a kind of control through food, and who feel inadequate and rejected when they cannot feed them, are met with the child performing the only action they can control. A child who cannot resist sleep or urination can resist eating. In this way, they realise they can control their family. Children may sometimes use food to punish their parents when they are angry with them. The behaviour that will resolve the situation must come from the person who started it, the parent.<\/p>

A parent who can give \u2013 usually the person responsible for feeding, known as the mother \u2013 enables the development of a child who knows how to receive. A weak, insecure, unable to give, and self-centred mother prevents the child from receiving in a healthy way. Traces of this imbalance in the oral phase can be found in many people with eating disorders. A mother with a controlling character can unconsciously turn this exchange into a show of power against the baby. Likewise, the baby… A parent who decides when the child will be hungry and when they will be full is important in the dynamics of eating disorders. In the unconscious development of the eating disorder mechanism, hunger ceases to be an unpleasant stimulus and takes on new meanings. The feeling of hunger is now under the individual’s control and has become an indicator of success and self-worth.<\/p>

Those who focus on the similarity between hunger strikes and eating disorders overlook the unconscious aspect of the mechanism. While eating disorders are unconscious mechanisms and can be treated by working with unconscious material, hunger strikes are a conscious choice. Yes, it can be said that at their core, both are a stance against domination. It can be a cry of \u2018I am here.\u2019 In eating disorders, the person who does not know how to solve the helplessness they feel establishes a relationship with food through an unconscious defence, while in hunger strikes, the person puts their body forward to find a voice, a remedy for their helplessness.<\/p>

Power establishes control over the individual through their body. It threatens to starve, maim, take away, or kill anyone who demands any rights. A prisoner confined within four walls, whose fate has been decided, subjected to various forms of torment, renders power impotent by putting forward their body, the object of power’s control. They take away the object of power’s power. The aim of a hunger strike is to secure the right to life. By risking death… Just as there are those who compare hunger strikes to eating disorders, there are also those who compare them to suicide and say that intervention is necessary. A hunger strike is not suicide. Yes, there is a possibility of death, but while suicide is an act aimed at ending one’s life based on desire or depression, the aim of a hunger strike is to live. In fact, it is a protest carried out by risking death in order to live, rather than living unjustly in an area where the right to life is not recognised. It is an exposure of the fact that existing laws or practices prevent a person from living. Prisoners who take action by not eating generally aim not to die, but to change a policy or practice they do not want, and they aim to exert pressure on those concerned with their actions.<\/p>

Our country was introduced to hunger strikes in the 1950s through the poet Naz\u0131m Hikmet. And in recent days, we have again witnessed hunger strikes by artists. Unfortunately, we have also witnessed their deaths… Hunger strikes became a social issue in our country, like all human rights violations, with the 1980 coup. The history of hunger strikes, however, goes back much further. In response to the prevalence of murder and torture during the reign of Roman Emperor Tiberius, Nerva, Tiberius’s close friend and lawyer, went on hunger strike because he no longer wanted to witness the savagery around him. Despite all of Tiberius’s attempts to persuade him, Nerva did not want anything to be done to him; he honestly preferred to die. The death of his close friend would shake Tiberius and make him reflect on his actions. That was the hope. With this action, Nerva forced Tiberius to question his actions, calling him from the political to the ethical realm. He reminded Tiberius of the boundaries of life and death. This is also the ultimate goal of hunger strikes or death fasts.<\/p>

Thousands of years later, lawyers in our country are still on hunger strike, just like Nerva of Rome. Nerva’s action, believed to be the first known hunger strike in the world, is comparable to the actions of lawyers today who demand justice.<\/p>

Since Roman times, hunger strikes have continued in many parts of the world, challenging state policies. Used as a method by many political actors, such as the IRA in Ireland and Mahatma Gandhi, hunger strikes have pressured those in power and led to the attainment of certain rights.<\/p>

Foucault, who studied power mechanisms in prisons, clinics and factories, noted that power has focused particularly on the human body since the 18th century and explains this phenomenon with the concept of biopolitics. Capitalism emphasised the development of collectivisation and socialisation in the workforce and found control in controlling the body. Therefore, the body is the foundation of everything and the basis of power in capitalist society. The operating logic of prisons, clinics, factories, schools and family institutions contains very few differences. Within a life planned for them, individuals act according to the rules of power, whether consciously or unconsciously. Except for small gaps, it may not be possible to escape the control of these power relations even in private life. According to Foucault, power has a hold on life but not on death. When death occurs, its policy on the body ends; in fact, its basis of existence also ends. Because it has power over life, power decides what will be done while one is alive. Dying by one’s own will is prohibited through morality, law and religion. For some, death means an end and the loss of thoughts and life, while for others it may mean the freedom to speak about one’s own life.<\/p>

A hunger strike is an individual act, but it requires witnesses to be effective. The power that determines how to bear witness to the person who says, \u2018Look at me, I am dying,\u2019 takes a stance that condemns this situation, declares it illegal, and resorts to methods such as force-feeding. Its own power is shaken, and it strives to neutralise this situation. It tells the spectator, \u2018Do you see how these evil people don’t go to the trouble you go to for food?\u2019 This is a difficult issue for the spectator to face. Their own hypocrisy is thrown in their face. So, it is best for everyone to reject it altogether. Sometimes this rejection can also be by idealising the action taken.<\/p>

As in the story of Irom Sharmila, the Indian human rights activist who undertook the world’s longest hunger strike. Living in Manipur, on the border with Myanmar, where ethnic violence was taking place, Sharmila began a hunger strike to demand the repeal of a colonial-era law granting immunity from prosecution to the security forces.<\/p>

For 16 years in prison, she was force-fed through a tube in her nose. Her determination not to eat was admired and idealised by people. Like anything that is overly idealised, when it fails to live up to that idealisation, it is dragged through the mud. Those who once praised her like a goddess hurled insults at her, accusing her of selling out the cause. Saying she was tired of being worshipped, Shamela states that she no longer believes in the hunger strike, that she feels idolised and that her voice has been silenced, and she ends the strike by putting honey in her mouth. “People praised my courage, treated me like a hero, a saint, but they didn’t listen to what I wanted from them. A collective, mass struggle was necessary; my hunger strike should have triggered such a transformation, but instead I experienced isolation.” While resisting control by the authorities, she began to be controlled by those who idealised her. Yet she wanted to be a human being, not a saint. She ended the hunger strike she had begun of her own free will by her own free will.<\/p>

The legitimacy of using death as a form of freedom of expression is a matter of debate, both legally and morally. Those who condemn the action and those who praise it are far from understanding its true meaning. Therefore, those who contribute to the continuation of power are those who cannot bear witness well. I believe that respecting the individual’s will, understanding the concrete conditions and psychological processes of the action, and seeing the injustice demonstrated through the action is all that can be said to the observer. Yet, people who put their bodies on the line, risking death, deserve to be understood.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite the fact that enough food is produced worldwide each year to feed the entire population, it is wasted for preventable reasons and people are dying of hunger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":35693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[115,120],"tags":[121],"post_template":[58],"top_category":[],"class_list":["post-35810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychebulletin","category-starvation","tag-starvation","post_template-opinion","pmpro-has-access"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35810"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35815,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35810\/revisions\/35815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35810"},{"taxonomy":"post_template","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_template?post=35810"},{"taxonomy":"top_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psikesinema.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/top_category?post=35810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}