Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the entanglements of feminist artivism, political protest, and reproductive justice by exploring the 2022 exhibition “Who Will Write the History of Tears. Artists on Women’s Rights” at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Paper long abstract:

Tabooed, stigmatized, or prohibited: The debate over abortion has raged for decades. Even today, in an era of rising populism, anti-genderism, and religious fundamentalism, the fight for reproductive justice is being waged around the world, and the contested approach to abortion serves as a seismograph for the transformations underway in contemporary societies. In 2022, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw hosted Who Will Write the History of Tears, an exhibition that articulates new and transformative relationships between feminist artivism, reproductive inequalities, and repressive laws. The architecture of the exhibition and the works presented underlined the arduous process of women’s pursuit of their rights, especially from Argentina, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United States, countries that have become the site of mass protests and heated public debate. The all-female artists refer to real stories, emotions such as rage, and include in their protest art a wide range of visual and poetic references, images and symbols that convey the complexity of the experience of pregnancy and abortion. Drawing on theoretical approaches to the politics of aesthetics, movement framing, and affects as practice, the paper explores the relationship between artivism, political protest, justice, and the political within the framework of a transnational feminist pro-choice movement. The paper situates the artistic interventions within the (trans)forming feminist legal discourse on justice and protest by analyzing the women’s works as (1) articulations of new subjectivities within the prevailing legal orders and their authors as potential idea generators of new dissensual orders, (2) tools of affective practice-based protest artivism, and (3) expressions of gendered solidarity for reproductive justice and their implications for feminist mobilizations in times of uncertainty, global crises, and reproductive injustice.