TFAP@CAA Day of Panels 2024
Friday, February 16, 2024, 2:30pm – 4pm
Chicago Hilton | 8th Floor – Lake Erie
Conference Registration required for this event!

The Choice Tactics session is The Feminist Art Project CAA Affiliated Society Session
CHOICE TACTICS: Art, Abortion, and Bodily Autonomy Today

Chairs: Miriam Kienle (University of Kentucky) and Connie Tell (The Feminist Art Project)

How do contemporary feminist artists, art historians, critics, and curators address current legal restrictions to abortion access? How do they draw from or push against historical precedents for art about reproductive choice and bodily autonomy? Although acknowledging the tremendous historical harm done, much present-day art about abortion draws on old visual tropes of clothes hangers and irrevocably marred bodies that has little resonance to the risks posed by the criminalization of abortion today. This imagery not only ignores how ending pregnancy is far safer than it was 50 years ago due to widely accessible medications for menstrual management after abortion became legal, but it also inadvertently echoes anti-choice propaganda that emphasizes self-harm as integral to abortion. Therefore, one must ask: How do feminist artists today visualize bodily autonomy, self-managed menstruation, and abortion in ways that refuse inaccurate, outdated, and punishing representations in favor of ones that are accurate, informative, and supportive (perhaps even playful, joyous, frustrated, outraged, or irreverent)? How might they forge intergenerational solidarities by re-activating historical modes of resistance that avoid nostalgia? How do they educate both menstruating and non-menstruating publics to transform political discourse on abortion? How can they help empower abortion seekers to have their physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, and/or legal needs met? This panel seeks presentations that investigate the visual and material tactics of feminist art that tackles abortion, particularly those that attend to the complex gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, geographic, historical, medical, legal, and/or economic implications of abortion today.
Panelists:

Beau Green (Artist + Full Spectrum Careworker)
breadbox: promoting access to high quality abortion care throughpeer-to-peer education and art

Basia Sliwinska (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
My body (but not) my choice: feminist arts activism towards bodily autonomy

Erin L. McCutcheon (University of Rhode Island)
Performing the Politics of Voluntary Motherhood in Mexico City

Louisa Lee (Buckinghamshire New University)
‘What you want to do is make people look’: Visibility, or lack of visibility, for reproductive rights

More info here: https://thefeministartproject.org/college-art-association/

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Tags: Basia Śliwińska, Beau Green, Chicago, Chicago Hilton, CHOICE TACTICS: Art Abortion and Bodily Autonomy Today, Erin L. McCutcheon, Loop, Louisa Lee, The Feminist Art Project