Spectacular suffering: Transgressive performance in penal activism
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618819796 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
819796TCR0010.1177/1362480618819796Theoretical CriminologyCorcoran
research-article2019
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2020, Vol. 24(4) 651 –668
Spectacular suffering:
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in penal activism
Mary S Corcoran
Keele University, UK
Abstract
The spectacle of the body in pain has long functioned heuristically in crime and justice.
Within this phenomenon sits a counter-cultural tradition of re-enacting outrages in public
view to rally against injustices. This article starts from the established claim that bodily
suffering comprises a core matter of humanitarian campaigning. However, if ‘spectacular
suffering’ has predominantly been discussed as a visual experience, this article examines
its performative aspects. Transgressive performance is evident in demonstrations of
forced-feeding, hunger strikes, self-immolation and lip-sewing carried out by prisoners
or by their intermediaries with a view to publicizing their cause. During such exhibitions,
the body in pain becomes a heuristic device for converting suffering into a medium for
public consumption. However, tropes of corporal suffering are susceptible to cultural
contestation and resistance from spectators. These possibilities call the publicity of
suffering into question as an inherently progressive strategy.
Keywords
Cultural criminology, performance, prisoners, public sphere, resistance, the body
Introduction: The body speaks
Physical pain has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story.
(Scarry, 1987: 3)
Corresponding author:
Mary S Corcoran, Keele University, Chancellor’s Building, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: M.Corcoran@keele.ac.uk
652
Theoretical Criminology 24(4)
The suffering bodies of the confined are familiar signifiers of resistance to penal oppres-
sion. There is by now an established scholarly literature on the radical subversiveness that
is claimed to inhere with corporeal and self-destructive techniques in relation to prison
struggles. Tropes of sacrifice, suffering and weaponization of the self are interwoven into
accounts of prison mutinies, hunger strikes, dirty protests, suicide, immolation and muti-
lation as evidence of an undiminished will on the part of the confined to defy the prison’s
power to punish (Abdo, 2014; Feldman, 1991; Foucault, 1991). Scholars assign the phe-
nomenon of autalgic (self-induced) pain to a distinct order of signification where this type
of suffering is thought to be semiotically fertile and therefore, politically meaningful
(Bargu, 2016; Caldwell, 2012; Ellmann, 1993). From an empirical perspective, such
events are rarely directly observed, but transmitted to the world in mediated forms, via
mass media reports, academic scholarship, transcripts of trials, official inquiries and pub-
licity campaigns for example. In this context, the role of humanitarian intermediaries, as
well as the meanings and forms of mediating practices, assume critical importance.
Elaine Scarry’s (1987) influential philosophical work, The Body in Pain: The Making
and Unmaking of the World, is a useful point of departure for grasping the hermeneutics
of embodied resistance.1 Central to Scarry’s thesis is that unbearable pain ‘destroys lan-
guage’, leading to the destruction of victims’ capacity to articulate their hideous plight. If
extreme pain annihilates the sufferer’s voice, it becomes all the more necessary that their
ordeals are given shape through ‘those who are not themselves in pain but who speak on
behalf of those who are’ (Scarry, 1987: 6). Intense suffering leaves only vestigial forms of
‘verbalisation’ at the disposal of ‘those who are themselves in pain and […] those who
wish to speak on behalf of others’ (Scarry, 1987: 9). Furthermore, this has political conse-
quences for ‘making overt precisely what is at stake in “inexpressibility”’ (Scarry, 1987:
19). That is to say, the point of publicity is not only to tell others about punishment and
suffering but to reveal the conditions of silencing, censorship, mendacity or suppression
of the ‘conditions of knowledge that others are allowed or disallowed’ (Scarry, 1987: 19).
These barriers have not closed off non-verbal modes of communication, of course. Rather
they have inspired myriad artefacts via a host of ‘mediating structures’ for arousing
humanitarian consciousness. In short, as Scarry’s work implies, the body emerges as the
main communicative medium when written and spoken language fails.
As this article argues, one significant and overlooked example of ‘mediating struc-
tures’ relates to activist campaigns which publicize inhumane penal conditions by utiliz-
ing material and cultural practices that rely on ‘a corporeal language of pain’ (Scarry,
1987). Whereas a great deal of scholarly commentary has illuminated the visual gram-
mar of suffering, its interpretation and meanings, by reference to graphical and written
genres, the focus here is performative and embodied forms of ‘protest theatre’ (Caldwell,
2012; Cho, 2009; Ellmann, 1993; Finburgh, 2017; Van Leeuwen, 1995). The conception
of performance as an embodied communicative form as well as disruptive force has com-
mon purchase across the visual and theatrical arts and the history of penal protest (Bargu,
2016; Butler, 1993; McLagan, 2002; Sontag, 1983). The dramatization of bodily suffer-
ing in campaigning activism, therefore, is a vital route through which events in hidden
custodial settings are conveyed to the public gaze. Such performances are exemplified by
commemorative parades by supporters or relatives of the detained, for example, or re-
enactments of notorious instances of forced-feeding, torture, confinement or executions
Corcoran
653
by artists, performers or activists. The public restaging of extreme acts of punishment are
also didactic events which are intended to spur spectators into political action.
Performative exhibitions of suffering are, therefore, intended to be doubly transforma-
tive: in the first instance, the process of translating performance into spectacular events
converts private suffering into matters of public consumption and political discourse. In
the second instance, such performances render the suffering body into a heuristic medium
through which public censure for those responsible for injustice can be secured.
From spectacular to performative publicity
The spectacle of the body in pain has long functioned heuristically in the history of crime
and justice, with the visual economy of punishment and suffering receiving extensive
attention in the criminological literature. The concept of ‘spectacular suffering’ derives
from the scholarship of slavery (Mallipeddi, 2016), colonial harshness (Brown, 2002),
corporal punishment (Foucault, 1991), judicial killing (Seal, 2014) and the rape or tor-
ture of non-combatants in war (Stiglmayer, 1994) to encapsulate cultural interventions
that respond to atrocities and seek to arouse public denunciation while furthering new
political goals. For nearly two centuries, reformers and abolitionists have combined vis-
ual, theatrical, literary and political elements in ways that pay attention to these practices
as instrumental and expressive projects. In crime and punishment, such appeals to the
edifying gaze stood in contrast to the awesome spectacle of harsh judicial punishments
which functioned to reiterate the sovereign authority of the ruling order or, as Guy
Debord (1992: 24) put it, to propagate the state’s narcissistic ‘self-portrait of power’.
Indispensable as visuality is to criminological critique, this article turns to the com-
paratively understated performative aspects of the representation of penal suffering. The
importance of performance is recognized in the burgeoning criminological literature on
prisons as sites of unique aesthetic, ritualistic or sensual properties, as soundscapes
(Rice, 2016), and loci for sport (Meek, 2013), music and the performing arts. That schol-
arship gives further substance to the value of the performative as a vital extension of
cultural production ‘whose temporal duration (in both physical presence and cultural
resonance) fluctuates according to both specific social contexts of production and recep-
tion’ (Hallam and Hockey, 2001: 51). Furthermore, the performative may be conceived
of as belonging to a history of re-enacting outrages in public view for rallying public
awareness and mobilizing against injustices. In this field of practice, the dramaturgical
and the visual are inexorably linked in communicative action. This tradition of transgres-
sive publicity, as a concept and set of practices for refining ‘the affective structure of
man’, is not only steeped in (western) civilizing processes (Elias, 1978), but simultane-
ously emerged with the ‘public sphere’ of modern communications as the basis of rational
civic life (Habermas, 1992). As argued here, elements of that legacy underpin contempo-
rary humanitarian campaigning practices in their commitment to oppositional advocacy
and appeals to the citizenry as affective witnesses.
This article analyses such campaigns with a view to establishing an approach that can
get to the heart of our understanding of the power of performative representations of suf-
fering. The first part foregrounds the imprisoned body in pain from a...
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