ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that for many women, feelings of emptiness fill the space where one might otherwise anticipate the psychosomatic unity that constitutes the sense of oneself as a person. A woman who overrides her hunger and systematically refuses to eat is in effect on hunger strike. The hunger strike becomes the means of protest to draw attention to the illegitimacy of the jailer, the moral righteousness of the cause, or in her case, the necessity for action. She is driven to act in a dramatic and seemingly self-punishing way through the conviction that she jeopardizes her cause if she eats, just like the explicitly political prisoner. The chapter also suggests that there is a complex relationship between women's bodies and the fact that their bodies are so very much both commodity and object for them in the world. The world allows women to enter in a circumscribed way, to occupy particular spaces.
