“Pañuelazo”: Visual Strategies of the Legal Abortion Campaign in Argentina

• In Event: Machete al Machote! An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Struggle for Reproductive Justice

Abstract

Argentina voted for the first time to legalize abortion on June 14th 2018. The ‘Ley de interrupción voluntaria del embarazo’ was partially approved by Diputados in a historic vote, but later got rejected in the upper chambers of the Senate on August 8th. Despite this disappointing setback to a campaign that already dates over a decade, the feminist movement that emerged around the vote during these months was unprecedented, and marks a before and after in the way gender is concieved in Argentina. Feminist art collectives were an intrinsic part of the campaign, who resorted to various visual strategies and vocabularies to generate an identity for the movement, intervene in the public sphere and build solidarities with other human rights movements and organisations. Saliently, throughout the debate, supporters of the campaign highlighted continuities with the experience of the dictatorship, some of which were articulated around the hypocrisy of the Argentine church, experiences of clandestinity, and the struggle of women against the State. Similarly to Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a green handkerchief has become the symbol of the campaign and their public demonstrations are referred to as ‘pañuelazos.’ This paper seeks to explore these visual interventions that arose around the campaign to explore the continuities and innovations in discourses and strategies, enquiring in particular how abortion was presented vi à vis human rights.

Author

• Erika P Teichert, University of Cambridge