Document Type

Honors Project

Comments

It took a village to complete this honors journey from ideation to execution over a year. I am grateful to everyone in this village, including my honors supervisor, Dr. Paul Dosh, for their unwavering kindness and support in this journey.

To all immigrants who pursue many difficult journeys daily, I see you, I hear you, and I thank you. This paper is dedicated to our stories.

Abstract

Gendered, classed, and racialized bodies differentially experience state-sanctioned violence and societal norms. Body protests — when the body manifests the political messages by drawing attention to itself — manifest in these intersections. Women engaging in body protests garner more attention; a body that is sexualized, controlled, and subjugated draws attention to itself as a political act. To understand this, I ask, what explains the specific tactics that women employ in acts of political resistance? By employing subaltern agency and feminist social movement theories, I use process tracing and comparative analysis of three body protest cases: the incarcerated Armagh women in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, the female suicide bombers of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, and the female self-immolators in Tibet in the 2010s. I theorize that gender as a salient grievance alone cannot explain why women adopt body protests. I argue that three factors — gender/feminist grievances, tactical innovation, and self-sacrifice framing — shape women’s choice to use body protests in social movements. This holistic approach challenges dichotomous perceptions of women and tactics as docile vs. corrupted and peaceful vs. violent.

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