Visual politics of abortion activism: symbols, affects and transnational circulation

This paper examines the visual and affective politics of feminist abortion activism in Colombia, Poland, and Argentina, drawing on interviews, fieldwork in all three countries, and visual documentation conducted between 2022 and 2025 as part of the Abortion Figurations project. Building on feminist theories of identification (Brubaker & Cooper 2000; Alcoff 2006; Fuentes 2014) and scholarship on abortion mobilizations (Sutton & Vacarezza 2021; Daby & Moseley 2023), the analysis explores how symbols such as the green scarf and the red lightning bolt function as material, emotional, and performative practices through which movements articulate belonging, dissent, and political subjectivities under restrictive legal regimes. In Colombia, the green scarf resonates with Latin American feminist genealogies and post-conflict imaginaries of peace and democratic renewal (González Vélez & Jaramillo 2021), shaping the communicative and strategic repertoires of the Causa Justa movement. In Poland, visual repertoires emerging from the 2016 Black Protests and the 2020 Women’s Strike, including the red lightning bolt, mobilize anger, irony, and disobedience against the nationalist-Catholic order (Graff 2020; Bucholc & Gospodarczyk 2024). Fieldwork in Argentina traces the foundational role of the pañuelo verde and its affective force in the construction of a transnational feminist language (Vacarezza 2021). Across these contexts, the paper shows how feminist symbols circulate transnationally, are re-signified locally, and reveal both the possibilities and tensions of identification within contemporary abortion struggles amid growing anti-gender backlash.