6 - Politics

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.