Especially with the election of far right president Javier Milei in November 2023, who has repeatedly expressed his intent to overturn law 27.610, reiterated by his government only last month, feminist activists play a more crucial role than ever as guardians of the law. Paying attention to the underpinnings of contemporary activist strategies and practices thus continues to be important for understanding how abortion access is secured in the long run.
Drawing on the findings of my ongoing PhD research on abortion access and feminist practices of (health)care in post-legalisation Argentina, in this piece, I take a historically grounded approach by raising the following questions: firstly, how are personal, collective, and intergenerational memories of abortion felt as embodied experiences? Secondly, how do these in turn reflect on contemporary activist practices?
To this end, I trace how memory comes to be embodied — taking embodied memory to be memories imprinted upon, experienced with, and felt within the body. I suggest that this crucially informs today’s feminist practices which foreground the construction of affective links and structures of care free from the histories of violence that have shaped this memory.
This reflection draws on interviews and participant observation with feminist activists I carried out between October 2022 and June 2023 in the metropolitan area of Greater Buenos Aires, as well as the provinces of Salta, San Luis, and Neuquén. Across the activists I spoke to in these four locations, most spoke about their activism as an explicitly embodied experience; a recurring theme emerged of how they perceived the memories of personal, collective, as well as intergenerational experiences of violence within their body and how this in turn shaped the way they use this body in their activism.
Examples of personal experiences of violence include hostile encounters within the public health sector, ostracisation and rejection from family, friends, and acquaintances, as well as negative responses to prior activism. One participant recounts requesting a tubal ligation at the age of 25, after having had three children, but being denied the intervention on the grounds of being too young. This resulted in her having to undergo an unsafe abortion procedure. She highlights that the obstruction of sexual and (non-)reproductive healthcare and autonomy is a common phenomenon among women.
Encounters like this one constitute acts of violence with physicians either denying tubal ligation on the basis of the woman being ‘too young’ or telling her she must take more time to consider their decision, both calling into question their capacity to exercise their bodily autonomy. They are also expressions of structural and institutional violence, further illustrated by the fact that despite having been legal for almost two decades, this participant cites the lack of appointments available as a significant obstacle to access. This experience of obstetric violence within a patriarchal healthcare system directly informed this participant's perspective on her activism, namely that it must aim for community-based and integral healthcare that escape the violent structures of current biomedical and patriarchal models of care.
Beyond personal histories of encounters with various forms of violence, activists also conceptualise intergenerational legacies as shaping the embodied experience of their activist practice. Memories of traumatic events such as Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976-83) and the forcible disappearance of at least 30,400 people during that time period continue to shape contemporary activism. This is reflected in the adoption of the kerchief (pañuelo) as a symbol of the movement for legal abortion, a green twist on the white headscarf of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, an association of mothers of the disappeared who mobilised for their return and against the dictatorship.
In an interview, one participant pointed out that the memories of the disappeared are maintained in activists’ memories and that their “forms of doing everyday activism is marked by those who have come before”. Beyond the adoption of activist strategies and slogans, this legacy also resonates in the body insofar as that this participant traces the connection between the repression experienced by “a whole marked generation” and the fear of repression and prosecution felt in the body when engaging in feminist activism today. In turn, this shapes the strategies activists pursue including the importance placed on presence in numbers in public spaces, both as a way of making a political statement and as a way of self-protection.
The last crucial facet of embodied memory is constituted by intergenerational memories of violence. One participant, describing herself as coming from a “Catholic, colonised family,” interwove Argentina’s political history with her own Indigenous and Criollo heritage to highlight the continuity of sexual violence as a force that continues to shape the context in which feminist activists mobilise.
Referring specifically to the genocidal violence perpetrated against Indigenous communities during the Conquest of the Desert campaign, she linked the normalisation of the sexual violence of her (great-)grandmothers’ generation with an ongoing “culture of violence”, in which women continue to be “territories of conquest”.Today, this dehumanisation of racialised women in particular lives on in its most extreme form in the context of femicidal violence. She highlights that the questioning of dominant narratives which attribute such violence to “familial problems” (among others) has only in recent years become more widespread beyond feminist circles.
Further, these histories of colonial and patriarchal violence have informed the hegemonic construction of womanhood through reproductive capacity from the early 20th century into the 21st, with motherhood as a site for building and maintaining national identity. These histories continue to manifest themselves in the bodies of activists as they find themselves reduced to their reproductive capacity and denied (reproductive) autonomy “on the sole basis of having a uterus,” as one participant phrased it.
The above outlined personal, collective, as well as intergenerational memories of colonial histories, socio-political experiences of repression, and individual experiences of discrimination and violence interweave to form a set of memories that is collective and deeply embodied at once. They have crucially shaped how the activists I spoke to conceptualised their work and the practices of care they choose to engage in. In particular, it has led them to construct structures of care as key instruments for interrupting histories of violence and building reproductive justice.
As one participant highlighted, it is “only our bodies in the streets, […] our eyes that are watching you” that guarantee the implementation of the . With the body as a key site for understanding histories of violence, its use in activism not only in the streets and everyday practices of collective resistance, but also as a way of making sense of the world today, it is crucial for shaping resilient presents and futures of reproductive justice.
About the author
Lea Happ is a PhD candidate at King’s College London, based at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Her doctoral research explores pharmaceutical abortion, feminist activist thought and practices, and constructions of political subjectivities in post-legalisation Argentina. She holds an MSc in Gender, Development, and Globalisation from the London School of Economics and a BA in Politics and International Relations from the University of Cambridge. You can contact Lea at lea.happ@kcl.ac.uk or on Twitter.