Since 2002, prisoners at Guantánamo Bay detention camp have been force-fed as punishment for hunger striking, prompting the question of how to understand the feeding tube’s various uses as both a form of medical treatment and torture instrument. By placing force-feeding practices at Guantánamo Bay within a larger history of medicalized punishment, this talk tracks how the functions of the feeding tube are altered and reimagined by the US military. The talk also explores end-of-life politics at Guantánamo Bay by investigating the recent possibility of palliative care for aging prisoners at the camps. I consider how the military’s plans for hospice is made possible by humanitarian logics of war that continue to centralize care in similar ways to that of force-feeding.
Michelle Velasquez-Potts is an educator and writer working at the intersections of feminist and queer thought. Broadly, her work attempts to imagine more relational ways of approaching questions of state violence and punishment. Her first book project, Suspended Animation, focuses on the relationship between medicine and punishment, and in particular the rise of force-feeding post-9/11. She has published essays in Women and Performance, Public Culture, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Abolition Journal, and Art Journal Open.
Date | Time
April 27 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, April 27th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
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