Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T00:08:46.977Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Agustí Nieto-Galan
Affiliation:
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Get access

Summary

“Politics”, describes how hunger artists became a trending issue for the morality and politics of industrial societies of the late nineteenth century. Their controversial performances challenged hygiene policies, issues of individual and social discipline, and added new factors to be considered by social reformers. Since hunger artists entered the popular culture of their time, their ‘heroic’ stories contributed towards the debate on the possibility of human beings living with less food, so the social conditions of wellbeing and health, especially for the working class, could be revisited. Public fasting became a sort of physical prowess, a metaphor of self-discipline, a commodity to be bought and sold in the logic of the industrial capitalist society, at the same time, opening the door to a more popular, eclectic medicine that challenged academic authority and established power. Equally, despite the global nature of the land of the hunger artists, these popular, controversial performances became a tool of national pride or national humiliation. Hunger artists played a role in standardisation processes of the calories required to properly feed the citizens of the nation. They evoked the health, resilience, and discipline of the average citizen as a key agent in the making of the modern nation, as a future, collective project.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Land of the Hunger Artists
Science, Spectacle and Authority, c.1880–1922
, pp. 139 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Politics
  • Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
  • Book: The Land of the Hunger Artists
  • Online publication: 09 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009379540.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Politics
  • Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
  • Book: The Land of the Hunger Artists
  • Online publication: 09 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009379540.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Politics
  • Agustí Nieto-Galan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
  • Book: The Land of the Hunger Artists
  • Online publication: 09 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009379540.007
Available formats
×