Abstract
This chapter provides a theoretical discussion as to how women ex-combatants resisted and created spaces in prison to continue the struggle that they were committed to beyond the walls. It sets out to examine the contours of their prison experience and to chart key moments of the continuum of resistance from individual acts to collective resistance. Political resistance is a constituent of their identity as political freedom fighters and is reflected in the constant dialectic of resistance and institutional response that is mapped in this and subsequent chapters. Resistance is presented and understood as the collective assertion of the political status of prisoners and, by extension, the political character of the Conflict: it is argued that escape, the no-wash protest and the hunger strikes, violence and the use of law have been key elements of that assertion. The present chapter explores the complex interplay of power and resistance as both are shaped by and reconfigure the spacialities of the prison, focusing on the importance of political prisoners’ self-organising and military discipline in controlling space and in maintaining their collective identity as combatants. It goes on to describe the women’s escape attempt and the reprisals which set the stage for the heightening violence, which increasingly positioned the physical body of the female combatant as the focus of power and the site of resistance.
‘Nor Meekly Serve My Time’—a song written by Francie Brolly during the Hunger Strike protest to highlight the situation of the political prisoners.
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Notes
- 1.
Are prisoners convicted of non-scheduled offences.
- 2.
Comms/Teac: Abbreviation for ‘communication’; a note written on cigarette paper or prison-issue toilet paper and wrapped in cling-film. Information was carried within body orifices from one part of the prison to another as a means to communicate with the outside world.
- 3.
Julie Dougan was the first female to die on active service and was from Portadown. She died in August 1972. Vivienne Fitzsimmons died in a premature explosion whilst preparing a device and Ethel Lynch died in an explosion in her flat in what was described as a ‘bomb-making factory’((McKittrick et al.1999:330 1999, pp. 330, 505).
- 4.
Eileen Hickey was arrested in 1973 and sentenced to 9 years’ imprisonment. She was a Volunteer in Óglaigh na hÉireann (Irish Volunteers), 2nd Battalion Belfast Brigade, and was an active member of ‘D’ company. She was released in 1977.
- 5.
The Green Cross was a charitable trust for families of IRA members.
- 6.
In this context, the panopticon is used as a model to describe the disciplining and normalising discourses of the prison and, by extension, society in general. For a fuller exposition of the usefulness of the panopticon as a conceptual device, see Mathiesen (1997).
- 7.
The political prisoners were allowed to receive a parcel of food on a monthly basis.
- 8.
The example Frank uses to illustrate his point is that of fasting amongst medieval holy women. In that example, the institution is the medieval Church; the discourses include not only those doctrines of the Church which eulogise the virtues of fasting, but also discourses on medieval marriage and the role of women. The corporeality of the body poses the practical questions of how much self-starvation and so forth the body can endure (Frank 1991, 1990).
- 9.
Bettelheim also offers an instructive example of how the limits of endurance of the human body may become an instrument for the reversal of power, particularly when that power is applied disproportionately (see Bettelheim 1986).
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Wahidin, A. (2016). Nor Meekly Serve My Time: ‘A’ Company Armagh. In: Ex-Combatants, Gender and Peace in Northern Ireland. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36330-5_7
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