Embodying Resistance: Politics and the Mobilization of Vulnerability

How are we to understand hunger strikes and episodes of lip-sewing in immigration detention? Are they simply cases of self-destruction or bare life, as is often claimed, or is there scope to view these embodied acts of self-harm as having a political dimension and to see those engaged in them as resistant subjects exercising political agency? To explore these issues, I draw on recent feminist theoretical work on vulnerability. Received wisdom suggests that vulnerability is an impediment to political action. Rejecting the idea that vulnerability equates exclusively to injurability and passivity, I contend, by contrast, that corporeal vulnerability can potentially prompt action, serve as a resource for collective acts of resistance, and enable the politicization of certain spaces. Since context matters to how vulnerability and resistance intersect, I illustrate my argument by exploring, in particular, the protests that took place at Woomera immigration detention centre in Australia in 2002.


Three Frames
Attempted suicide and self-harm are rife amongst refugees and asylum seekers, particularly those held in indefinite or prolonged detention (Silove et al., 2007;Van de Wiel et al., 2021).Reports by statutory bodies, international NGOs, and UN committees indicate that protracted confinement 'in remote and hostile environments', with limited access to adequate mental health care, is 'directly related to the high prevalence of mental disorders found amongst detained asylum-seekers' (Newman et al., 2008: 115).'Psychological distress', Silove et al. (2001) note in The Lancet, manifests itself 'in suicide attempts, acts of mass violence, group breakouts, rioting, burning of facilities, and sporadic hunger strikes ' (p. 1437).It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that deeds such as Ali's have been framed not as political but as acts of self-destruction resulting from psychiatric despair and escalating desperation (see Bailey, 2009).
The second frame deployed I call the site frame.Here significance is given less to the actions undertaken than to their locus.For instance, Ali's suspension on the razor wire is construed as emblematic of his status as an asylum seeker, 'poised on the boundary between the spaces of the citizen and non-citizen', in an 'interstitial position' (Farrier, 2011: 2), 'not really in Australia' but in 'the empty, ungoverned space of their bodies, confined within not-Australia' (Cohen cited in Perera, 2002).Refugee camps and detention centres are, as Perera (2002) notes, sites 'where people are not to be seen' -camps in Agamben's (1998) sense of that term where the 'state of exception' is materialized.They symbolize a space of 'scandalous inbetweenness' (Farrier, 2011: 8), neither within nor outside the polity, a 'suspended space', legally under its jurisdiction but exempted from it (Turner, 2005).Attention rarely focuses on the possibility that such sites -the camp and its fences -might be politicized through internee actions (Hyndman and Giles, 2017: 74).
The final frame is that of 'bare life' (Agamben, 1998): 'damaged life, stripped of its political significance' (Ziarek, 2012: 195).I will not rehearse the discussion here but, as is well known, for Agamben (1998) the refugee, as the 'new living dead man' (p.131), epitomizes bare life.The refugee's life is, thus, a politically unrecognized life, a life that might be disposed of with impunity.It stands in direct contrast to politically qualified life.The crucial feature of this binary for my purposes is that bare life is understood as evacuating the possibility of or capacity for resistance (see Bailey, 2009;Nyers, 2006).To take just one example: as Farrier (2011) notes, writing about Ali, 'his semi-nakedness [atop the wire] expresses the asylum seeker's biopolitical reality, constituted by the nation state as merely bare life, without any kind of political agency', incarnating the 'political and ethical absence to which each asylum seeker is relegated ' (p. 7, emphasis added).This is because, for Agamben, the body cannot be mobilized for oppositional purposes.There is, as he puts it, 'nothing in' it 'to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power' (Agamben, 1998: 187;Ziarek, 2012).Recourse to the body suggests rather the impossibility of politics.So, somatic exploits like lip-sewing or hunger strikes can only be understood as demonstrations of bare life and not as resistive or political.
Each of the three frames identified offers a distinctive interpretation of the acts alluded to at the start of the paper, and important insights into their potential meanings.But none of them explicitly explores whether acts of alleged psychological desperation, like hunger strikes and lip-sewing, conducted in suspended spaces, by lives stripped of legal and social status, might also be resistive, political actions.This is what this paper seeks to do. 3 While some of Agamben's interlocutors have sought to politicize the concept of bare life (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005;Nyers, 2006;Ziarek, 2012), I want to take a different tack and focus on corporeal vulnerability.Such a reframing, I hope, will focus attention on the potential politics of these actions.

Vulnerability as Injurability
In line with its Latin etymological origins, where it derives from vulnus, 'wound', vulnerability is usually understood as the capacity to be harmed by external forces (Fineman, 2016;Schroeder and Gefenas, 2009) or to be injurable, where 'injurability' is an effect of embodiment (Butler, 2004(Butler, , 2009)).Although vulnerability is a potential feature of all human existence, as Margrit Shildrick noted in 2002, it is more commonly characterized as a 'negative attribute' (p.1), 'shortcoming' (p.71) or 'falling short' (p.76) to which the 'weak or unfortunate ' 'succumb' (p. 71).Vulnerability is thus a condition that needs mitigating against, either by attempting to minimize or eliminate risk or harm, or by extending safeguards to those considered unable to protect themselves and who require others to provide the necessary care and assistance (Gilson, 2014(Gilson, , 2021)).
At first glance, such an interpretation might appear analytically apt for apprehending the plight of many refugees and asylum seekers.Fleeing their own countries to escape persecution, violence or war, their journeys to 'safety' often further imperil their lives, attesting to their situational injurability.Jurisprudentially, this conception of vulnerability as exposure to harm, in practice, underpins state and other organizations' decisions about refugee resettlement (Mouzourakis et al., 2017: 10), detention (UNHCR and IDC, 2016: 1), asylum, access to services, and whether refugees 'may be considered to have special reception needs and thus benefit from [. ..] specific support' (European Union, 2013).In fact, in 2016 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Detention Coalition (IDC) launched a 'vulnerability screening tool' precisely to assist governments and other migration and asylum systems in identifying those at risk of harm who would thereby qualify for 'special care, support, and protection' (UNHCR and IDC, 2016: 1).
While more could and should be said about the institutionalization of vulnerability as a legal category and how it impacts positively and negatively on those seeking asylum, what interests me here is how the term is conceptualized.Understanding vulnerability as injurability captures aspects of the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers, but when that is all it is taken to entail it has some limitations politically and conceptually.As others have noted, it risks stereotyping particular groups or persons as vulnerable per se, regardless of any clearly identifiable structural or situational threat to them, such that their identity becomes defined by their purported vulnerability. 4 Treating vulnerability as a 'negative state' (Gilson, 2011(Gilson, : 312, 2014(Gilson, , 2016a) ) leads to the positive -and problematic -valorisation of invulnerability (Gilson, 2014(Gilson, , 2015(Gilson, , 2016a(Gilson, , 2018;;Shildrick, 2002).Additionally, vulnerability-as-injurability assumes an 'asymmetrical model' (Shildrick, 2002: 77), prevalent in, for example, 'humanitarian reason' (Fassin, 2012: 3-4), where others (usually the more powerful, often the state) are considered morally, ethically, or politically responsible for protecting 'the vulnerable'.
For the purposes of this paper, however, the most important limitation presented by this conceptualization of vulnerability-as-injurability is its association with 'powerlessness, loss of control, or loss of agency' (Mackenzie et al., 2014a: 9), which denies the capacity for resistance of the 'vulnerable' and, consequently in my view, oversimplifies the complex relation that exists between vulnerability and resistance.Instead of rejecting the language of vulnerability tout court, because it seemingly connotes passivity and an absence of agency, in the next two sections I explore an alternative understanding of vulnerability that provides a way to think through how it might be possible to challenge conditions of vulnerabilization through embodied actions.

Ambivalent Vulnerability
Critical feminist literature on vulnerability has centred on a range of diverse issues, too vast to cover here.It is the exploration of vulnerability's 'ambiguous potential' (Murphy, 2012: 65) by writers such as Butler (2015Butler ( , 2016)), Cavarero (2009), Gilson (2014Gilson ( , 2015Gilson ( , 2016aGilson ( , 2016bGilson ( , 2018Gilson ( , 2021)), and Ziarek (2013) that I want to focus on.Each of these feminist discussions starts from the position that ontological vulnerability is an inescapable feature of embodied existence universally shared but that lived experiences of corporeal vulnerability are socially produced and differentially distributed (see Gilson, 2018).For Gilson (2014), they are the 'specific forms that vulnerability takes in the social world' (p.37), brought about by policies, governmental actions, discourses, wars, famines and more.As Cavarero (2009) puts it, there is nothing 'necessary about the vulnus (wound) embedded in the term "vulnerable"' (p.30). 5 Specific historical conditions give rise to distinct and sometimes entrenched experiences of vulnerability for determinate fleshy populations.
What distinguishes these feminist approaches, despite theoretical differences between them, is, firstly, that vulnerability is not treated as a disposition or attribute of individual bodies but, borrowing from Jenkins (2015), as a 'modality of being' (p.128) arising from and conditioned by human interdependency.Secondly, vulnerability is perceived to have a dual valence.In Gilson's (2011) words, '[v]ulnerability' is not simply 'a condition that limits us but one that can enable us' (p.310, original emphasis), because, as a condition of intersubjectivity (Gilson, 2015(Gilson, , 2021)), vulnerability is an openness to 'being affected and affecting in ways that one cannot control' (Gilson, 2014: 2).Similarly for Butler (2004), it is a mode of impressionability (p.46): an exposure to what is outside or beyond us.Not just to violence and exploitation but also to what facilitates corporeal life and action.As such it is not reducible to injurability (Butler, 2009: 34, 61).Rather, as Gilson (2021) observes, it is 'a condition of possibility, a plastic potentiality' (p.92) that is also tied to agency.
Consideration of the 'ambiguous potential' of vulnerability has opened up important questions, especially about the moral obligations and ethical responsibilities vulnerability occasions (see, in particular, Gilson, 2014, 2016a, 2018, 2021, but also Butler 2004, 2009, 2015;Lloyd, 2015;Mackenzie et al., 2014b;Ziarek, 2013).What is under-explored in this literature, however, and what interests me, is the relation between politics and vulnerability.Where it is examined, discussion usually focuses on one of two concerns.First, how the language of vulnerability is mobilized in political discourse and by whom (Gilson, 2021;Koivunen et al., 2018;Oliviero, 2018).Second, how inter-relational corporeal vulnerability elicits or enables a political response from another, typically institutions such as the 'responsive state' (Fineman, 2010: 274; see also Vaittinen, 2015), where the emphasis is on what can be done to reduce, eliminate, or mitigate the vulnerability of the other, an approach that risks construing politics too narrowly and effacing the possibility of subaltern agency and resistance.
I want to pursue a different line of inquiry, which explores how those with little or no social, political, or legal standing might nevertheless themselves be able to engage in political struggle to contest the terms of their own lived (situational, contextual, or structural) vulnerability.As such, my interest in this paper is not in the kinds of political actions taken on behalf of 'the vulnerable'.Rather I seek to evaluate the role of vulnerability in subaltern (acts of) politics.
Resistance and vulnerability are typically thought to be mutually exclusive, with vulnerability equating to a lack of agency and the ability to resist, indicating one is not vulnerable.As noted above, corollaries of this position include assuming agency is a capacity that requires restoring to 'the vulnerable'; that they possess little power to make changes to their own lives; and that others are required to protect them.According to this logic, one is either vulnerable or resistant, not both.But what if vulnerability can be 'marshaled or mobilized for the purposes of resistance' (Butler, 2016: 26), forming not just 'part of the very meaning of political resistance as an embodied enactment' (Butler, 2016: 22) but also one of its conditions of possibility (Butler et al., 2016: 1;Page, 2018)?If vulnerability 'enters into agency' (Butler, 2016: 25) and can be thought of, as Gilson (2016b) proposes, as 'the bodily basis for expressive agency' (p.55), this implies that (vulnerable) subjects are not just 'exposed' or 'acted on' (Butler, 2016: 24) but can also act.That vulnerability, to borrow from Ziarek (2013), is also a 'condition of intersubjective freedom, action, and political engagement' (p.68). 6 One consequence of interlinking vulnerability and resistance thus is that agency cannot be understood as the faculty of a self-possessive, independent, rational individual able to author their own actions.Rather, agency, like vulnerability, is conditioned by dependency -on others, on social norms, and on the external world, including organizations, institutions, and infrastructure -and arises out of relationality.Instead of being mutually exclusive, this suggests a complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous relationship between the two, 7  where vulnerability can be both a consequence of resistance and one of its prior conditions, and resistance can be both a reaction to vulnerability as well as made possible by it.
Hitherto, feminist discussions of vulnerability as a force mobilized in resistance have tended, as Butler's work exemplifies, to centre on prominent examples of political protest: the Arab Spring, the demonstrations in Turkey's Taksim Gezi Park, the Occupy Movement (Butler, 2015), or Black Lives Matter (Gilson, 2016b).First, these are all large-scale events involving the mass mobilization of bodies in public.Second, they relate to already recognizable modes of non-violent political action: demonstrations, marches, occupations, and 'die-ins'.Third, although socially, politically, and/or economically vulnerable participants took part, and although, as Gilson (2016b) notes, the protests opened participants to the potential risk of incarceration and/or violence at the hands of another (the police, for instance), the form (Bargu, 2022) of the actions involved does not directly manifest vulnerability (Rozmarin, 2020).Fourth, these examples are rarely examined in detail. 8 The acts that interest me are of another order.They are not conventionally viewed as unambiguously, straightforwardly, or universally political.They involve acts of selfharm or violence against the body, undertaken by smaller groups on their own behalf.They take place in (immigration) detention, not in public.Although they mobilize bodies in concert, what distinguishes them from more traditional forms of protest is that, in resisting, those bodies are transformed 'in violent ways' (Bargu, 2022: 299), thereby exposing the interrelation between corporeal vulnerability and resistance.Finally, their meanings are conditioned by context.
Although the hunger strikes and lip-sewing undertaken at Woomera employ the same modalities of self-inflicted harm as the other cases of refugee protest mentioned earlier, each arises within distinct social, political and historical conditions and takes place at different sites.Together, this shapes their meaning and impact.Both the Afghan Hazaras in Indonesia and the 12 asylum seekers in Mexico who sutured their lips did so in public.The Hazaras were amongst thousands of refugees who set up camps and held 'tentstrikes' (Llewellyn, 2021) outside UNHCR offices and migration agencies in Jakarta, protesting lengthy resettlement times, up to ten years in some cases (Tamer, 2021).In Mexico, lip-sewing and hunger strikes were part of wider demonstrations outside the offices of the National Immigration Institute (INM) office in Tapachula over asylum processing times (Narea, 2022).The hunger strikes at Brook House, like those at Woomera, occurred in detention, but were prompted by the UK government's plan to deport the detainees to Rwanda (Taylor and Weaver, 2022).
Further, all of these cases differ in important ways from acts of hunger striking deployed by those already recognizable as 'political prisoners' (Bargu, 2014) or by members of protest movements (the suffragettes, Irish Republicanism, the anti-apartheid struggles; Shah, 2022), just in the same way that lip-sewing undertaken by refugees in detention signifies differently from lip-sewing protests undertaken publicly by Bolivian sex workers (Reuters, 2007), Indonesian gig drivers (Timmerman, 2022), or by artists such as Petr Pavlensky. 9 This is because vulnerability is what Page (2018) calls a 'located concept' (p.282), experienced by specific bodies in particular ways at precise times and places.This conditions the corporeal resources people can mobilize in any given setting and the types of actions they can engage in, as well as shaping the meanings and effects of those actions.Although embodied vulnerability may be a resource drawn on in resistance, be 'productive (rather than being positive or negative)' (Page, 2018: 282), as both Gilson and Ziarek have proposed, and make possible forms of agency, 10 there is, as Page (2018) suggests, no universal or standardized response to vulnerability across different bodies, contexts, or conditions.To understand how particular vulnerabilities shape, delimit, and are galvanised in acts of resistance, therefore, we need to explore specific cases.While, often, little is known publicly about the particularities of specific instances of refugee hunger strikes or lip sewing, this is not the case with Woomera, where a range of insightful material exists to inform analysis. 11 One final caveat.In proposing that confined or sequestered bodies can act politically I am expressly rejecting three ideas.The first is that politics is restricted to a particular sphere of activity that can be demarcated from other pre-, a-or extra-political realms, such as the social or the private (Arendt, 1958).The second is that certain categories of person ipso facto lack agency and/or are outside of politics, such as those associated with 'bare life' or those, to recall an earlier point, categorized as vulnerable.The third is that the body is a limit to political action, which is more properly conceived of as grounded in speech or language (Arendt, 1958;Rancière, 1999).Instead, I contend that the embodied actions collectively undertaken by vulnerable detainees in detention are resistant acts that turned the Woomera detention camp into a political space.

Vulnerability and Resistance: Reframing 'The Man Who Jumped' 12
Ali's individual deeds stand out because of the publicity surrounding his leap onto the razor wire encircling Woomera.But he was not alone in protesting. 13Quite the reverse, in fact.Department of Immigration figures indicate that over 250 asylum seekers went on hunger strike for 16 days that January.Those in detention say more than 370 were involved.About 70 detainees (men, women, and children) sutured their lips (O'Neill, 2008: 89;Fiske, 2016: 116). 14Performatively, the hunger strikes and lip-sewing episodes in Woomera in 2002 were collective endeavours involving the multiple vulnerable internees who found themselves randomly thrown together in detention.Initially the protests centred on the government freeze on processing Afghan asylum applications, instituted abruptly at the end of 2001 after the fall of the Taliban, and its allied threat of deportation. 15Ultimately, however, the dispute extended to conditions at Woomera, including: overcrowding, delays in receiving medical attention, no access to newspapers, telephones, or contact with others outside the camp during separation detention, little to no air conditioning in searing heat during the summer, limited washing and toilet facilities, problems of under-staffing, and exclusion from legal aid (Fiske, 2016;Jupp, 2007: 189;Mann, 2003;Nyers, 2006: 120;O'Neill, 2008: 89).
The discourse of 'bare life', the third frame identified earlier, locates corporeal vulnerability outside of politics.From such a perspective, as Bailey ( 2009) suggests, actions in detention conducted by way of the body, like lip-sewing or hunger strikes, are considered to have no political value or relevance.They incarnate bare life, 'a life where power relations are absent' (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005: 9).However, the body always materializes in a field of power relations.The concrete vulnerabilities Ali and his fellow detainees experienced, both as Hazaras and refugees, were the effects of a confluence of very particular geo-political, ethno-political, politico-legal and material factors, from the post 9/11 war on terror and fall of Kabul, through Taliban discrimination against and marginalization of the Hazara, and the Howard government's suspension of asylum claims, to the practices operative at Woomera.Like other refugees in different contexts, they were made structurally and situationally vulnerable and their lives actively rendered precarious by specific policies, normative frameworks, government and intergovernmental actions (and inactions).But, to recall Foucault (1978), the (vulnerable) body, though constituted by power, is also a locus of/for resistance (p.95).
How might the idea of vulnerability as a resource for resistance help us to understand practices such as hunger strikes and lip-sewing?Both very obviously mobilize the body's literal vulnerability to harm and injury.Refusing nourishment for sustained periods produces cramps, reduces muscle function, damages the immune system, potentially impairs the vital organs and, continued long enough, invokes death (Fiske, 2016), thereby exposing the fragility and mortality of the flesh.Threading lips shut requires labial tissue to be pierced by a sharp object, causing bleeding and scabbing.At Woomera, such insubordinate behaviours also exposed the bodies of the detainees to potential punishment and further risk including, for instance, handcuffing, the threat of incarceration in the punishment block for breaking the rules, and the use of water cannon against them (Mann, 2003;Moorhead, 2006;Nyers, 2006: 120;O'Neill, 2008: 25).
But these actions in this setting, it seems to me, do more than this.They also testify to the performative relation between somatic vulnerability and agency.Instead of reading hunger strikes and lip-sewing as evidence of the apolitical bare life of the refugee, I am suggesting we read them as examples of concrete resistance enfleshed.As others have pointed out (Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005;Pugliese, 2002), when refugee voices are unheard -when, for instance, their stories of persecution are not believed, basic requests for information are ignored, or governments deny them access to the media or civil society, as at Woomera -suturing lips communicates, through physical enactment, what it simultaneously repudiates and exposes: the silencing and inaudibility of the detainees. 16Detention denies their words' meaning, so internees protest performatively, 'in and by way of a violently embodied silence' (Bargu, 2022: 294).Withdrawal of speech is materialized on and through vulnerable bodies by sewing lips together, an action that reproduces the voicelessness imposed on internees by state authorities just as it resists it.Similarly, in the face of a regime that aims to keep detainees alive but in indefinite detention, the refusal of food functions as a performative embodied refusal to 'live indefinitely in such conditions' (Wilcox, 2015: 65). 17Corporeal life is put at risk, is 'weaponized' to borrow Bargu's (2014) provocative term, to demonstrate and resist the devaluation of the incarcerated lives of Woomera's internees.The hunger-strikers take control of their food consumption to reveal the lack of control over their bodies vulnerabilized through detention.
As Fiske (2016) notes of Woomera, where 'speech without physical action' had failed, 'people in detention began to use their bodies to make their voices heard' (p.123).Flesh was imperilled to oppose vulnerabilization, institutionalized power and dehumanization.(Recall, for instance, that at this time camp detainees throughout Australia, including those at Woomera, were denied their names.) 18Bodies were intentionally exposed to power, to paraphrase Butler (2016: 22), to counter political invisibility and to advance political demands: for the processing of claims, rights to speak and be heard, better conditions, family reunification.To regard these non-linguistic bodily actions only as self-destructive (frame one) or expressing 'bare life' (frame three) overlooks the ways in which they were also collective acts of resistance mobilized through corporeal vulnerability, undertaken to intervene not just in life in detention but also in the wider politico-legal system.The internees, as Fiske (2016) observes, used 'their bodies to reinsert themselves into the polis' (p.123).
The vulnerabilities of detention and displacement at Woomera not only acted as a prompt to action; these resistive mobilizations, I will suggest, helped constitute the camp as a political space.Persons held in mandatory detention are physically and legally excluded from public space, which is conventionally regarded as the space of politics (Perera, 2002).For some (frame two), physical exclusion signals political exclusion.Because they cannot enter the formally constituted political realm, it is assumed that they are unable to engage in collective political action.The suspension of legal rights in detention, particularly rights to freedom of speech and assembly, has similarly been taken to imply the suspension of political life.In the case of Woomera, to recall Perera (2002; see also Nyers, 2006), additional exacerbating conditions might seem to confirm the internees' public exclusion, not least the fact they were contained behind fences and barbed wire far away from public sight in an isolated part of Australia, some 270 miles from Adelaide. 19Such adjudications tend, however, to treat political space as already given rather than as performatively produced.
One of the best-known ways of thinking about the production of political space is Arendt's (1958) discussion of the 'space of appearance': 'the space where I appear to others as others appear to me ' (p. 198).This idea is central to her understanding of the relation between the public realm and politics.As she puts it, although all actions take place somewhere, the 'true space' of the polis 'lies between people' (Arendt, 1958: 198), which means a space of appearance potentially 'comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action' (Arendt, 1958: 199) and disperses as they disperse.The polis is not a specific physical location, then, but a space between subjects, a space of vulnerability we might even say, that can emerge whenever people act in concert, 'no matter where they happen to be', and that 'can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere' (Arendt, 1958: 198) -an account that might, at first glance, appear to support the claim that Woomera became a political space through the defiant collective bodily practices of the detainees.However, Arendt's is a largely decorporealized understanding of politics that prioritizes language and speech, 20 which suggests that, in her terms, embodied actions like lip-sewing and hunger strikes would not ipso facto count as political, at least not without being 'talked about over and over again' (Owens, 2009: 577), and could not, therefore, actualize political space by themselves.
Taking my distance from this view, I nevertheless want to hold on to Arendt's insight that political space is produced performatively via concerted action, with one caveat: that, as well as acknowledging the corporeality of such action, attention is also paid, as Butler (2015) suggests, to the role that materiality plays in the constitution of politics and political space(s).I am interested specifically here in how the corporeal actions of Woomera's detainees drew on the material conditions of detention -the material conditions of their vulnerabilization -in order to resist.My contention is that through their actions, Ali and his peers simultaneously divulged and contested the physical terms, circumstances, and deprivations of mandatory immigration detention materially enacted at Woomera.
Held in a form of extrajudicial detention (Fiske, 2016: 6) and denied freedom by the Australian state to communicate with the outside world (including with family), those who sewed their lips together 'communicate [d] their denied right to speak through the gesture of a muted, legally sutured, corporeality' (Pugliese, 2002), resisting in the process the power of the authorities endeavouring to regulate their conduct.When multiple persons collectively refused to eat, they reasserted control over the very bodies and behaviours that the detention regime sought to micromanage and direct (Fiske, 2016: 136-7), 21 simultaneously exposing its harshness and, for a time at least, undermining its effective operation.The fence and the buildings of the camp became (drawing loosely from Rancière, 1999) a 'stage' for political protest; protest articulated corporeally through, for instance, Ali's deliberate jump onto the razor wire, the detainees' physical occupation of the roofs of camp buildings, and the holding aloft during their rooftop demonstration of placards, proclaiming 'Freedom or death' and 'Release or send back'.
Acting in concert with known and unknown others to deploy 'strategies of resistance that highlight[ed] the politics of their caged bodies' (Nyers, 2006: 119), and which impeded the camp's 'normal' operations, I am suggesting, generated modes of resistance specific to -that is, enabled and supported by -incarceration.Through these actions they challenged what Bargu (2022) calls 'the contours of the political as they are conventionally imagined ' (p. 294).This marshalling of vulnerability produced -for a time, at least -a politicized space, distinct from and in opposition to the established sphere of politics, one that may even have led to a reconfiguration of the wider polis given the impact of the protests.An immediate consequence was that the Immigration Detention Advisory Group (IDAG) 22 brokered a deal that led, amongst other things, to the resumption of the processing of asylum claims by Afghan detainees (O'Neill, 2008: 94). 23Supported by the media coverage they received, their protests succeeded in making their plight 'perceptible' to others and impelled the political order (primarily the state), which had refused to 'see' them as human in social and political terms, to address their concerns, making public what the Australian state wanted to hide.The bivalent nature of vulnerability, I am suggesting, served as a condition of possibility for this.

Conclusion
The examples cited in this paper certainly do not exhaust the multiple forms of vulnerability that exist today, or the wide range of groups experiencing them.Even though Woomera is now closed, refugees across the world continue to be subject to severe vulnerabilization that often engenders further occasions of hunger striking and lip-sewing, as well as other forms of self-harming corporeal protest not addressed here, like selfimmolation (Tamer, 2021; for a discussion of the ambiguities of self-immolation see Page, 2018).None of what I have said in this paper should underestimate the cost or risks of resistance for those engaged in them, particularly for those in detention.Nor am I denying the very real and severe deprivations they suffer, including the often extreme mental and physical struggles they undergo.It is also expressly not my aim to fetishize vulnerability as an idea or to present it as an unproblematically progressive category.As others have noted (see Cole, 2016;Oliviero, 2018), the language of vulnerability has been used to bolster reactionary political agendas just as much as to support anti-racist or anti-sexist struggles.But to see lip-sewing and hunger strikes only as self-destructive, or as expressions of bare life, as they have so often been characterized, or to focus solely on their liminal siting is to minimize the political dimensions of those actions.In the principal example explored in this paper, the camp at Woomera, exclusion from the public sphere, conventionally understood, became a locus of politics.Its materiality, including its physical infrastructure, was used against the regime ordering the lives therein.Vulnerability's ambivalence was exploited -both literally and relationally -in acts of resistance that rendered the internees more vulnerable to harm and punishment but also empowered them collectively to challenge the factors, processes and terms occasioning their vulnerabilization.
Vulnerabilization might be an inelegant term to employ but I use it because it captures the sociality of vulnerability: the fact that it is produced through determinate actions, policies and structures that render particular bodies vulnerable in precise ways in specific, determinate situations, whether through denying them rights, legal protections, and/or access to health care or sanitary conditions, or through the production of other forms of economic, social or sexual precarity not covered here -vulnerabilities that are made possible because of the body's dependency on what is external to it.It is these socially generated vulnerabilities that drive people to resist; that galvanize them to put their already vulnerable bodies on the line to protest the specific modes of vulnerabilization to which they are subjected.
Reframing vulnerability as an ambivalent proposition is important because it challenges the exclusive coupling of vulnerability with passivity and the inability to act, where to be vulnerable is to be powerless and where it is the (moral or political) responsibility of others to restore the possibility of agency to 'the vulnerable'.Emphasizing the relational dimensions of vulnerability indicates that it is not a property of individual bodies or an attribute of specific persons.The account of vulnerability considered in this paper suggests that it is a way of being, arising from human dependency, that makes possible subjects' navigation of their environments, their interactions with others, their endeavours to persist, and, though it cannot guarantee it, that also enables their capacity (collectively) to contest particular conditions of vulnerabilization.Not just the source of violence inflicted on one person by another, or of anguish and pain, though at times it is exactly both of those things, vulnerability is also a potential source of solidarity and collective action that, in certain circumstances, subtends and makes possible the politicization of spaces, including the spaces of vulnerabilization.