Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the overlapping boundaries between visual culture and political activism when abortion becomes aesthetically (de)coded. It is an attempt to understand the cultural meanings, affective strategies and political impact of abortion imageries in the current European context.

Paper long abstract:

Political struggles over conception, contraception, and pregnancy termination are longstanding in Europe. Since the rise of right-wing parties and populist movements in Europe in the last two decades, their agenda dominates the public debates by centring around the Catholic Church, the protection of “traditional values” and “restoration of the natural order”, pushing a populist cocktail of anti-feminist, anti-progressive, and anti-abortion rhetoric and symbolism. “Pro-lifers” in many European countries have long applied the principle that a picture of a dead fetus is worth a thousand words and chaste silhouettes of the fetal form or voyeuristic-necrophilic photographs of its remains litter the background of any (anti)abortion debate. These developments serve as the backdrop for the exploration of the power of abortion imageries, in particular of fetal images, in the politics of reproduction in Croatia, Germany and Poland. The paper examines the effects of abortion imaging on the larger cultural climate of reproductive politics but also on the affective experience and consciousness about abortion in public debates. Based on the methodological triangulation of participant observation and discourse analysis, the contribution addresses imageries, symbols, and aesthetic codes of “pro-life” and pro-choice activism and analyses visual media by drawing on approaches to the mechanisms of visualisation and emotiveness as cultural practices. Finally, the study considers some implications of abortion images for (anti)feminist practice and aims at a critical discussion of (anti)feminist imageries and its political power(lessness) to create transformative social change in a time of rising populism, cultural backlash, anti-genderism and religious fundamentalism in Europe.