An Apprehensive Approach

The multivalence that attaches to the term “apprehension” means that it is possible to engage with it in its cognitive, affective, and material forms. As a rhetorical device, then, it can be used to shed light on the multiple and varied elements that are constitutive parts of the violence of the state, “even if they remain largely invisible, buried underneath its foundation.”^{Footnote 6} Apprehension thus offers itself as a particularly generative mode of thinking, wherein its multiple meanings—namely, perception, dread, and forceful encounter—can be used to frame an understanding of the processes at work in Guantánamo, as well as how they unfold within a framing of Muslims as ontologically and materially distinct, and as embodying ideological affinities in particular ways. Moreover, it offers a framework of understanding that more clearly articulates the ways the sensorial becomes intertwined with state violence, as the cumulative force of these processes of apprehension reveal how the multiple techniques deployed by the state in the “war on terror” become concretized and legitimated and work reflexively to shape the ways in which certain bodies are known, encountered, and met with violence.

Central to my use of “apprehension” then is the notion that Muslim subjects, and Muslim bodies,^{Footnote 7} are apprehended in specific ways. These apprehensions depend as much on pre-figurations of this body as they do on actual encounters with it. I use the term to refer not just to immediate or direct forms of cognition, or perception, but to the movement between non-knowing and knowing, between ephemera and signification, and between uncertainty and categorization. In the slide from uncertainty to knowledge, apprehension, as perception, takes shape via what I call the semi-sensorial; it collects and orders the raw sensorial experiences that are offered by the fact of corporeality, even as these experiences are fragmented and splintered by the conditions of possibility that frame their cognition. I also take apprehension to indicate a kind of anticipatory, affective response, marked by underlying anxiety, dread, and disquiet. As opposed to stark fear, or terror, which flares up and overwhelms the senses, apprehension as dread, anxiety, and disquiet settles in the bones and lingers in and between encounters. It builds upon a presumption of danger before that danger materializes—indeed, it does not ever require danger to occur, and needs only the assumption or anticipation of it in order to do its work. In this guise, apprehension morphs senses, so that the very sensorial capacities of certain kinds of bodies become aligned to and coextensive with the violence that is thought to inhere to them. Finally, I use the term apprehension to refer to the capture or seizure of someone (or something), usually as an extension of authority. However, it is not only what occurs when authority and subjection collide, and where both the reach of power and its void may be felt. It also points our attention towards how, in these moments of material entanglement between sensing and sensed bodies, state violence further justifies itself by both drawing and building upon processes of apprehension. These definitions then, are not mutually exclusive. Apprehensions, as semi-sensorial graspings, as suspenseful pricks of dread that puncture bodily capacities, and as material collisions, operate in tandem and alongside each other, as mutually constitutive moments that, in the case of state force, crescendo towards the deployment of specific forms of violence. My analysis dovetails with scholarship around the “war on terror,” which is dominated by conversations around the war’s (il)legality, its colonial underpinnings and rationales, and the ways in which it is marked by intersections of race, gender, nationalism, and Islamophobia.^{Footnote 8} It seeks to open a space within which the rationales of this violence can be conceptualized beyond its categorizing work (“us” vs “them,” “civilized” vs “uncivilized,” “terror” vs “freedom”), and to the manner in which it is both sustained by and finds expression through processes of apprehension. Here, I offer a caveat: apprehension and sensing are reciprocal, albeit uneven, relations. Inasmuch as Muslim bodies are apprehended and sensed, they are also themselves engaged in apprehending and sensing. However, Guantánamo is a space and context that is especially (although not uniquely) riven by state violence and marked by deeply unequal relations of power and agency. Reciprocal, yet unequal, processes of apprehension speak not only to these disparities, but also to the ways in which sensorial entanglements with specific kinds of bodies, as they become bound up with processes of apprehension, take on deeply reflexive, self-affirming, and intractable trajectories.

I begin by examining the underlying rationales that shaped how Guantánamo’s detainees were first grasped, or perceived. Framed as carrying within themselves the intent and capacity for specific expressions of violence, detainees were both signified and sensed as certain kinds of subjects and bodies, and as being uniquely fit for consignment to a space of expulsion. I then examine how, pre-figured as such, detainees were understood as sensing, in ways that necessitated the use of specific forms of torture: namely, sensory deprivation. This tactic can be understood as pre-emptive, anticipatory action, geared specifically towards rupturing the intent that is thought to direct the violence that is expressed by Muslim bodies. It also speaks to how the very sensorial capacities of the detainees were distorted, made perverse, and rendered co-extensive with violence itself. Pre-figured perceptions and the transformative force of dread come also to collide and to direct encounters with detainee bodies, which manifest in specific techniques of physical control that transform acts of resistance into “asymmetric warfare.” In these encounters, detainees are forcibly apprehended in such a way as to underscore the inherent violence of resisting Muslim bodies, even as they are in the midst of self-directed harms (e.g., hunger striking). The order of this article should not be taken as an indication of the orderly procession of the processes of apprehension that unfold in Guantánamo. Indeed, perceptions flash up simultaneously alongside forceful encounters with detainee bodies. Perceptions and encounters are also shot through with anxiety and dread, which in turn draw on pre-figurations to transform bodies and delimit what becomes understood as necessary force. Read in such a way, an apprehensive approach allows for both a broader and a more precise rendering of the logics and rationales that inform the uniquely pernicious forms of state violence found in Guantánamo and that work to legitimate its enterprise, shape the scope and limit of its exercise, and sustain its continued existence. Moreover, it allows for a more complete understanding of how state violence works in relation to the Muslim body, wherein this figure operates as both the antecedent to and specific target of such force.

Perception

Leading up to the establishment of Guantánamo, American officials sought to legitimate the use of an off-shore, legally ambiguous, if not outright illegal (by international law standards) wartime detention camp. This was done, in part, by establishing that the men captured for initial transport to Guantánamo bore primary responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, images of the camp’s first prisoners emphasized their culpability, alongside both their extreme otherness and legal rightlessness. This was reinforced not just by their transport to a remote, semi-legal, colonial space, detached from basic legal protections afforded to “legitimate” prisoners of war, but also in a more visceral way that played upon their physical alterity. Photographs showed men who were “chained, gloved, ear-muffed and masked [and who] arrived soaked in their own bodily waste,” causing one reporter to note: “[they didn’t] look natural. They look[ed] like giant orange flies.”^{Footnote 10} While it is beyond the scope of this article to delve into the significance of the visual practices that occur in Guantánamo, it is worthwhile to make note of what exceeds or circulates around images of racialized bodies and/or subjects. To cite a parallel case, in analyzing the role of visual evidence in the Rodney King case, Judith Butler describes how images of King’s beating by police were read in such a way as to mark him as dangerous, “prior to any gesture, any raising of the hand,” and to make violence an “imminent action” of his black body. The visual representation of the black male body, Butler finds, proceeds within a Fanonian “white paranoic” interpretative framework, wherein these bodies are agents of violence even as they are in the midst of suffering violence. The “phantasmic production of ‘intention’” means that bodies receive violence in recompense not only for what they do, but for what they are about to do—indeed what they cannot avoid doing. In this framing, where violence is pre-emptively and defensively enacted against bodies that emanate danger, seeing and attributing become indissoluble, and the black male body becomes “the origin, the intention, and the object” of the violence directed at him.^{Footnote 11} There is a distinct overlap, then, between images and visual practices, and the extent to which violence becomes mapped onto certain bodies; this suggests that violence can become embedded and entangled within, and produced by, visual practices themselves.^{Footnote 12}

I would like to linger in the moments between seeing and attributing, before capture and incapacitation, and prior to the donning of the orange jumpsuits and chains that concretized detainees as criminalized, terrorist bodies and as appropriate for detention in Guantánamo. It is in these interstitial moments, I argue, that it is possible to see both the work of apprehension and to trace what facilitates the slide from not-knowing to knowing—what comes to bridge the gap between. These gaps are vital moments in the formation of meaning and in the expression and legitimation of power. These were moments where pre-figurations of the “Muslim” allowed for the presumption and presentiment of culpability to attach to detainees, before they were known as such. They allowed for the concretization of criminality to occur, and to close the breach between mere perception and absolute knowledge. This is apparent in that, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, dead hijackers presented a dilemma. While death forestalled these men from receiving retribution, the state was quick to find suitable replacements. The men captured under the pretext of being responsible for the planning and carrying out of the 9/11 attacks were more than mere proxies, however. They were perceived as the hijackers, insofar as the violence enacted by the actual perpetrators was understood to be a portion of a share, a share that encompassed the Muslim men seized for detention. In the gap that directs such slippage, “before one has caught sight of the threatening figure of the … other, one senses or ‘feels’ that spectral presence that radiates precognition, tacit, ‘intuitive’ danger and threats of violence.”^{Footnote 13} In keeping with this, Donald Rumsfeld emphasized that total incapacitation was a necessary measure to prevent detainees from killing “again,”^{Footnote 14} even though there was, and remains, scant evidence to support this claim. Detainees were likewise described by then President Bush as “suspected bomb makers, terrorist trainers, recruiters and facilitators, and potential suicide bombers. They are in our custody so they cannot murder our people.”^{Footnote 15} The implications were not only that the detainees were “beings whose very propensity is to kill [and that] that is what they would do as a matter of course.”^{Footnote 16} In the eyes of the American state, these men had already killed, and were poised to kill again. Violence was read as immanent to the detainees, wherein it mattered little (if at all) whether the men captured were directly involved with the 9/11 attacks. What mattered was how these detainees were apprehended as the culpable parties, through shared likeness and what was intuited as inherent to them.^{Footnote 17} I suggest that this likeness further emerges from a blending of materiality (race, ethnicity, gender) and immateriality (ideology and religion) that fuse typology and corporeality and from which a particular topography, perforated by violent intent, of the detainee body emerges. Apprehension, in its first guise, is at work in this melding, as Muslim bodies are marked by pre-figurations that draw on both the semi-sensorial and on cognitive frameworks of culpability and violent intent. In the moments before incapacitation and indefinite detention, then, it became possible for the living to stand in for the dead,^{Footnote 18} and for dead bodies to become alive again, as the bodies of detainees were written over by the deeds of dead men. This was not a matter of deliberate misrecognition—it was an extension of the ways in which these men were perceived as violent, as culpable, and as fit for certain forms of deprivation, the violence of indefinite detention being but one of its manifestations.^{Footnote 19}

With regard to those who have been detained or incarcerated via extra-legal logics of the “war on terror,” Colin Dayan notes that what matters are “hunches about the essence, nature, or type of creature who is ripe and ready for domination.”^{Footnote 20} Hunches, of course, operate in the realm of intuition, and although they precede fact, they also conspire to frame its apprehension. How can we further understand the basis upon which the hunches of the American state proceeded? Fundamentally, Guantánamo is a space wherein “the abstractions of geopolitics are folded into the intimacies of the human body.”^{Footnote 21} As has been established, however, this is not just any body. The detainee body is not only raced and gendered in specific ways, but is also shaped by an understanding of religion—specifically and especially the Muslim religion—as adhering to the body in particular ways. This is a distinction that lies at the heart of the phenomenon that is Guantánamo and much of the state violence of the war on terror, but it is one that is often overlooked. I argue that religion is not just what Judith Butler calls a “matrix for subject formation,”^{Footnote 22} but is also borne by and lived through bodies in distinct ways. “Muslimness” thus functions to imbricate detainees in particular ways that mark them as culpable and as apt targets for specific forms of detention and violence. These tactics are framed as precautions taken against bodies that are uniquely and persistently violent, wherein this violence demands expression through the body. It also goes beyond the kind of violence that “merely” murders and maims; rather, it is geared towards the ideological and material destruction of a world. Then President Bush described the situation as such: “We’ve seen the enemy [and] they recognize no barrier of morality. They have no conscience [and kill] not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. [They seek] to remake the world in their own brutal images.”^{Footnote 23} Discourses and practices that construct Muslims as driven by a desire to destroy the world and remake it anew render them as particularly and radically imperilling to life itself, to the very “biopolitical and biocultural facets of life.”^{Footnote 24} Framed as such, detainees were thus made exceptional as bodies that are engaged “in permanent and perpetual war.”^{Footnote 25} As a reflection of this prolonged and pervasive state, a perpetuity that has been met in response by a never-ending “war on terror,” it is no mistake that they were apprehended as being fit for a space of indefinite detention before and in spite of evidence of guilt or innocence. These perceptions facilitated and concretized the slippage from collective suspicion (Muslims perpetrated 9/11) to specific guilt (these specific Muslims perpetrated 9/11) and continue to hold sway, as the majority of detainees left (or remain in) Guantánamo without ever having been charged with a crime.

Dread

In an American federal law enforcement guide profiling would-be suicide bombers, it is possible to trace the ways in which a combination of bio-typologies and sensorial associations work to further characterize the “terrorist.” In the guide’s characterizations, terrorist bodies function as both the extension of ideological intent and as tools of violence. Explaining how to spot a terrorist, it asks: “does the individual act oddly, appear fearful, or use mannerisms that do not fit in? Examples include repeatedly circling an area on foot or in a car, pacing back and forth in front of a venue, glancing left and right while walking slowly, fidgeting with something under [their] clothes, exhibiting an unwillingness to make eye contact, mumbling (prayer), or repeatedly checking a watch or cell phone.”^{Footnote 27} It is not just mannerisms or movement that betray intent, as even smell operates as an indicator. “Is the individual wearing too much cologne or perfume, or do [they] smell of talcum powder or scented water (for ritual purification)?”^{Footnote 28} This guide, and the logics which underpin it, mark the Muslim body as “already in excess of [itself],”^{Footnote 29} as intent not only leaks from its corporeal confines but is, for the observant observer, expressed through this body and its capacities, aversions, and sensorial inclinations. The materiality of the Muslim body is thus not only made coextensive with discourses of pathologization and violent intent;^{Footnote 30} it is also made the primary vehicle for the expression of ideological will. The specific dread that attaches to the Muslim does so via an understanding of religion—specifically and especially, the Muslim religion—as being borne by and through the body. This mutually constitutive relationship means that both the presence and absence of physical markers of religion can be causes of disquiet. As the guide states, “a male with a fresh shave and lighter skin on his lower face may be a religious Muslim zealot who has just shaved his beard so as not to attract attention.”^{Footnote 31} The apprehension with which such bodies are met thus becomes an anticipatory process, wherein even the most simple of mannerisms or practices—shaved or unshaved, walking too slowly or too quickly—should be the cause of anxiety, disquiet, and the anticipation of violence. In this sense, Muslim bodies are anticipated—are dreaded—as ideology given material shape, wherein material capacities, as movements and gestures, and both the presence or absence of physical markers, become transmuted into extensions of ideological will. This (im)material shape thus takes form via its attachments and capacities and by the physical markers it bears (or does not bear) as much as by the perceptions that precede it and circulate in its wake.

It is in resting in this space of the (im)material that we may examine specific techniques of state violence occurring at Guantánamo through a different lens. In the immediate years after the establishment of the camp, as the pressure to extract information from alleged terrorist master-minds increased, the American state regularly made use of tactics that either skirted or outright contravened international law conventions on the use of torture. In doing so, it rationalized torture as a “means for gathering … life-saving information.”^{Footnote 32} In its modern guise, torture often relies upon “stealth technologies” designed to prevent (or hide) the physical markers of violence; it “is aimed at bloodlessness and invisibility,” and makes use of such tactics as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, exposure to the elements, physical intimidation, and sexual humiliation. Long a favourite tool of the CIA, sensory deprivation was one such practice put to use in Guantánamo. Originally embraced during the Cold War because of its potential for altering and controlling the minds of those subjected to intensive deprivation,^{Footnote 33} in Guantánamo, and other spaces, it has been used, ostensibly, to make easier the task of eliciting information from unyielding prisoners; it “soften[s] prisoners up mentally by plunging them into a sensory void”; a “remarkably simple concept, it can be inflicted by immobilizing individuals in small, soundproof rooms and fitting them with blacked-out goggles and earmuffs.” The result of such treatment is often a rapid psychological decline, marked by extreme hallucinations and psychosis. ^{Footnote 34}

While intensive sensory deprivation techniques have been used against detainees, particularly against those deemed “high-value,” the initial images of detainees transported to Guantánamo indicate the rapid deployment of a rudimentary form of this tool. The first arrivals to the camp were photographed in transit and on the ground wearing earmuffs, surgical-style masks, padded gloves, and blacked-out goggles. These tactics, used so early in the encounter between state force and detainees, cannot be understood as a method for extracting information, although they may be seen as an attempt to disorient and unsettle detainees, and as a display of state power over abject and objectified bodies.^{Footnote 35} Returning to the notion of apprehension as a kind of dread that lingers in and between spaces and moments but that nonetheless carries a kind of transformative force, I would like to suggest it is possible to think about sensory deprivation techniques as responses to the notion that detainees were apprehended as bearers of particular forms of violence, to the extent that their bodily capacities became coextensive with not only violent intent, but violence itself. Sensory deprivation is thus not just a disciplinary tool, or a reaction to the dread that arises in the wake of such anticipations. It is also a form of state violence that draws upon processes of apprehension in order to morph the very physicality of detainees, marking their sensorial (in)capacities with fear, suspicion, and violent intent. It is thus also possible to understand this form of violence as both emerging from and gaining legitimacy through the perceived coalescence of the material and immaterial that marks the detainee body. In other words, the ideological intent or drive that marks this body as uniquely dangerous demands that for a proper and total subduing, its very sensorial capacities must be contained. In this way, sight, hearing, touch, and even smell, become intimately associated with the promise of violence, while their erasure, or quelling, become expressions of the anticipation and containment of this danger.

Encounter

Guantánamo Bay detainees do not merely languish in their conditions. Subject to indefinite detention, largely excluded from legal and political community, and framed as the “worst of the worst,” they resist. In a space that mutes, they transform their bodies into signal flares of rage and despair. They throw cocktails of spit, feces, and urine at guards.^{Footnote 37} They carve into their arms and use their blood to write on the walls of their cells.^{Footnote 38} Sometimes, they kill themselves.^{Footnote 39} The most common form of resistance in Guantánamo occurs in the form of hunger strikes. Wide-scale hunger strikes have been a feature of the camp since 2005, when the number of strikers peaked at an estimated 130 to 200 detainees. In Guantánamo, and other penal spaces, hunger strikes can create the conditions for the radical resurgence of a certain kind of humanity for those who have been systematically dehumanized. This has been the case for the well-documented hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, Turkey, and at Pelican Bay prison in California,^{Footnote 40} and the hunger striking detainees in Guantánamo have been located on the continuum of this particular form of political resistance. Indeed, prisoners at Pelican Bay were directly influenced by a hunger strike that swept the camp in 2013, when they organized the largest protest in California penal history in response to the use of solitary confinement.^{Footnote 41} In doing so, it was “prisoners themselves [who] broke through the wall separating concern for torture abroad and in the United States.”^{Footnote 42} While there is clear overlap between the carceral conditions that give rise to hunger-striking campaigns and the political aims of the hunger strikers themselves, I would like to suggest that Guantánamo Bay and its detainees can also be understood through a different lens, one that not only is based on the specific conditions that shape this camp, but that also takes into account the particular and peculiar state of its detainees, as Muslim bodies. In the temporal miasma that is indefinite and legally ambiguous detention, hunger striking can be read as particularly and viscerally meaningful. The process of starvation makes readily apparent that there is a definite and finite end that can and will occur, and in relying on the vulnerability and mortality of the physical body amidst such conditions, hunger strikers not only highlight these conditions, they also create a new kind of temporalization, where conditions cannot persist. In rupturing the indefiniteness of their own detention and asserting biological, finite time into the temporality of Guantánamo Bay, hunger striking detainees morph indefinite, suspended time into a pressing, immediate present and future. Starvation can thus offer a strategy out of the specific bio-political temporality that marks perpetual and indefinite detention. In this space, where the autonomy of detainees is reduced even more so than in other conditions of detention, to the point where it has become synchronous with the most basic autonomous functions of the body (ingesting or refusing food),^{Footnote 43} the hunger strike can be read as transforming, or as returning to (human) form, the bodies of detainees. Indeed, the hunger strike involves “the profoundly human,” revolving as it does around the “messy, unabstracted, and inescapably human” realities of the body.^{Footnote 44} For bodies read as uniquely and persistently violent then, as the Muslim body is, hunger is an especially evocative tool of resistance: it not only highlights the profoundly human, but also makes even starker the division between power and power-lessness, while also, quite literally, shrinking the available expanse of flesh onto which state violence may be enacted. An elegiac gesture to the frailty of the human body, to the incapacity of bodies regularly rendered as spectacularly violent, hunger works to reinscribe, or re-embody, detainees not only as politically and socially meaningful bodies, but also as bodies that are vulnerable, all-too human, and disconnected from the violence that attaches to them. Weakness, in this sense, is more than a political ploy for sympathy. For the Muslim body in Guantánamo, the claim to frailty and incapacity is simultaneously a disavowal of danger, of threat, and of the very logics which confine him to this space.

Despite the potential such considerations have for reimagining the role of hunger strikes in penal conditions, it is in keeping with the singular nature of Guantánamo that certain events conspire to complicate such analyses. In recent years, the number of hunger strikers has sharply declined. This is due to two related factors that hinge on the manner in which detainees’ acts of resistance are understood, and which in turn determine how they are apprehended, both physically and in relation to how they are perceived and anticipated, while in the midst of resistance. First, the American state has undertaken violent measures to counter hunger strikers. Second, the government and military have legitimated such measures by reframing acts of resistance as acts of “asymmetric warfare.”

In early 2006, in order to break the most stubborn strikers, military command began to use what was referred to as an “emergency restraint chair,” described by its inventor as a “padded cell on wheels.”^{Footnote 45} The chair allowed for detainees to be strapped to six-point restraints, with their hands, feet, head and torso immobilized.^{Footnote 46} Thus incapacitated, nasogastric tubes were forced up their nose and down their esophagus.^{Footnote 47} Detainees were then left in the restraint chairs for several hours after force-feeding, and/or placed in isolation cells where they were monitored to ensure that no vomiting took place. In 2013, in an op-ed editorial published in the New York Times, detainee and hunger striker Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel described this process:

Lawyers for hunger-strikers report instances where feeding tubes were inserted and removed so violently as to cause fainting and bleeding, large quantities of food being intentionally passed very quickly through nasogastric tubes so as to induce vomiting and defecation,^{Footnote 49} detainees left to sit in their own urine and defecation or made to wear diapers during feedings,^{Footnote 50} and large-sized tubes used deliberately in place of smaller-sized ones which would cause less discomfort. Hunger-strikers have also describe how force-feeding methods have evolved over time to become more violent; for example, when restraint chairs were first used, nasogastric tubes would be left in the detainees for days to reduce discomfort. Later, military medical personnel turned towards inserting and pulling out the tubes each feeding time, a process that has been described as causing sharp pain and frequent bleeding.^{Footnote 51} Standard Operating Protocols released by the government in 2013 also detailed how force-fed detainees were required “to wear masks over their mouths while they sat shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours with a tube snaked down a nostril.” In the face of condemnation by human rights organizations, who argued that such procedures were tantamount to torture, the state claimed this was not a tactic of warfare on their part, but occurred because detainees were purposely vomiting.^{Footnote 52}

For military command, hunger strikes are nothing more than “an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government.”^{Footnote 53} They have also ceased referring to forced feedings as such, instead adopting the term “assisted feeding[s],”^{Footnote 54} which is described as “a necessary tactic brought upon by the detainees themselves.”^{Footnote 55} Such responses belie the notion that force-feeding occurs as a response to moral or ethical imperatives (the imperative of maintaining life above all other considerations). In penal spaces, and in the encounter that is necessitated by the force-feeding regime, force-feeding can more aptly be described as coterminous with the extent, reach, and logic of state power. It is, as Corinna Howland argues, “an exteriorisation (state control) rendered interior (both physically and mentally), [via] the forcible insertion of the long arm of the state into the body of the prisoner through the feeding tube—often with physical pain as a “constituent element … of the penalty.”^{Footnote 56} What is particular in the context of Guantánamo is how state force becomes further legitimated as it becomes reconstituted as a response to acts of war waged by specific kinds of bodies. In violently apprehending the body that is in the midst of what is an act of passive resistance and subjecting it to a force-feeding regime, state power restructures this resistance, and reinforces this body, as active and intentional in particular ways. In this encounter, perception and dread collide in the same time that the starving detainee body and the force of law meet. In these moments, self-injurious acts, transformed into outwardly-directed tactics of war (just as the sensorial capacities of Muslim bodies are transformed as coextensive with their violence), both necessitate and legitimate the show of force, and the violence of the force-feeding regime becomes a violence that targets both the bodies of detainees and the ideological intent they are thought to embody. Within such an encounter, the restrained and invaded resisting body is made powerless, not only by physical force, but also through the disruption of will that is thought to find purchase through this same body. Hunger strikes are never entirely self-directed; they are designed to injure the state, calling attention to its failings and rupturing its authority. However, self-injury, as it occurs in and through the Muslim body, takes on both a different purpose and effect. It is useful to recall here how the “terrorist” couples suicide and homicide in particular ways, so that self-injury is transformed into a manifestation of an ideological will to “die for a cause.”^{Footnote 57} The hunger strike, indeed, draws attention to both “the mind and body of the prisoner [which] are fused in a unity of purpose.”^{Footnote 58} For the Muslim detainee, this fusion does not spring anew, and the hunger strike is reframed as giving further weight to what is already encountered as a synthesized, purposeful, violent, and (im)material body.