Book Review: A better justice? Community programs for criminalized women by A. Nelund
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677231185787 |
| Author | Judy Magill |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Shah’s study focuses on those groups made rightless through the uneven establishment of dem-
ocratic ideals and principles, whether it be due to the social hierarchies of race and gender, disenfran-
chisement, or colonial rule and the legacies of conquest. Through self-starvation, those held captive
by the state invert their deprivation such that the withering and wasting away of the body stand in for
the subjugation under which the excluded are forced to live. The despair expressed through the spec-
tacle of the emaciated body can thus call into question the banality of state violence and repression,
galvanizing the political struggle for rights and justice more broadly. In this way, Refusal to Eat aims
to show how the hunger strike lays bare the politics that underly living and dying in terms of whose
lives are dignified and protected and whose are rendered disposable. The stakes of such politics are
not limited to the state, but, as Shah shows, extends to civil society, medical practice and professional
ethics, and forms of cultural production.
As exhibited by the hunger striker’s commitment to justice, Shah finds solace in the human capac-
ity to endure and overcome the brutal politicization of life and death. As Shah writes, “[state] powers
could not penetrate some quality of being in hungering that is elusive to state control”(pg. 290). Yes,
but what is this elusive quality and how might it extend our theoretical critiques and formulations of
political subjectivity as such? What Shah describes variously as one’s humanity, voice, or self-
determination couches this quality of being curiously in positive terms already preceded by norma-
tive discourses surrounding human rights and justice. But what do we make of the forms of negation
that starvation and refusal articulate, nonetheless? That is, how do we think with the hunger striker’s
claim for justice along with the absence, waste, and emptiness their bodily protest embraces, and
which undermine the established categories of modern political life? Instead of holding out on our
eventual satiation as political subjects (that we hunger for a different world to come) perhaps a
more radical position would engage how the hunger strike confronts us with the loss and lack that
lie at the very core of subjectivity –that which the normative attempts to conceal –and how we
might embody other universalities of the void in being. Refusal to Eat does not offer a way to nav-
igate or resolve these sorts of theoretical questions, which, at the very least, would have allowed for a
more critical interrogation of hunger strikes as mere protests of agency and bodily autonomy.
Most notably, Shah’s book captures the significant role of prison hunger strikes in some of the
most important political movements for rights and justice over the last century. While carceral
power remains brazen and hegemonic the world over, Refusal to Eat offers indispensable insights
and observations on the ways in which people build solidarity through conditions of despair. Just
as state violence has proven mutable in how it renders certain populations rightless, Shah reminds
us that this also opens up the contingencies of meaning and demands that might be mobilized in
the refusal of such violence. Refusal to Eat represents an important empirical account of prison
hunger striking as a political tactic, aesthetic, and global phenomenon. This book should be consid-
ered necessary reading for anyone interested in critical prison studies, political ethics, and interna-
tional social movements.
Nelund, A. (2020).
A better justice? Community programs for criminalized women. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia
Press. 198 pp. $32.95, ISBN: 9780774863636.
Reviewed by: Judy Magill ,Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Ulster University –Belfast Campus, Belfast, UK
DOI: 10.1177/10575677231185787
Amanda Nelund, Associate Professor of Sociology at MacEwan University, Edmonton is a pioneer
of feminist and critical criminology with previous publications in diverse topics including restorative
434 International Criminal Justice Review 33(4)
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