Past With Present (and Future). Affective Agency in Latin American Abortion Rights Activism

After a decades-long effort and a feminist movement that grew in size and scope after #NiUnaMenos, Argentina legalised abortion on 30 December 2020. Under the hashtags #QueSeaLey [#MakeItLaw] and, later, #SeráLey [#ItWillBeLaw], the massive and multi-generational campaign launched in 2018 coalesced into a milestone in Latin American politics. This article examines how online and off-line activism constituted a massive and intersectional collective in which contact with the past proved essential to mobilisation. This occurred in three ways: through the intergenerational connections that this activism established, in the challenge it posed to a progressive narrative of the movement, and in its way of linking current feminist activism with the struggles and resistance movements against the State Terrorism of the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976–1983). The second part of the article is devoted to scrutinizing the case of Chilean abortion rights activism also in terms of the link it established with the past. This analysis undertakes an exploration of a key concept, affective agency, as well as its role in the construction of historical inevitability.