Before Amelia, the protagonist of Anna Burns’ debut novel, No Bones, is raped by her brother and his girlfriend, she is described from the perspective of the latter, who deems her “outrageously, sexually thin,” with the “arm-swinging vigour all six-stone hunger-strikers are very keen on” (123). In 1970s North Belfast, Amelia’s eating disorder is seen as vain compared to the sacrifices of political prisoners. This prioritisation of male suffering reflected in much scholarship on the Troubles. Alan Feldman’s Formations of Violence, for example, analyses the Northern Irish body under state and paramilitary power—imprisoned, beaten, starving or killed—but that body is exclusively male.
View More ‘At war with her body’: the threat of pregnancy in the novels of Anna BurnsTag: biopolitics
Neoliberal Breakdowns: the Biopolitics of the Monstrous
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” suggested George Santayana in 1905. A century of cyclically returning violence later, it is time to re-phrase this question: what if those who cannot imagine the future are condemned to repeat the past?
View More Neoliberal Breakdowns: the Biopolitics of the Monstrous