Grief, Joy, and Laughter: Reimagining Abortion Through Creative Activism in Latin America
LSE Global Health Initiative is pleased to host Dr Nayla Luz Vacarezza – an Associate Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and a Visiting Bye-Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge – for a seminar on the transformation of abortion politics in Latin America through creative activism.
Latin American feminist movements have transformed abortion politics through creative activism— from the iconic green kerchiefs that sparked the Green Tide to the embodied care of accompaniment networks and the disruptive humor of viral memes. Moving beyond legal analysis, Dr Vacarezza's work traces how visuals, symbols, and embodied practices articulate radical political frameworks rooted in struggles against dictatorships: abortion as inseparable from democracy, human rights, and social justice—not merely individual choice or privacy. Central to this transformation is the movement's capacity to reimagine abortion's affective landscape. After decades of mobilizing pain and grief over deaths from unsafe abortion, activists cultivated alternative emotional repertoires—turning shame into pride, fear into hope, isolation into solidarity. By the early 2000s, feminist networks for self-managed abortion and accompaniment brought new affective repertoires associated with care, relief, and even joy. Also, during Argentina's 2018 parliamentary debates, laughter erupted as political force: memes dismantled the cultural authority of anti-abortion imagery, proving abortion no longer needed to be only tragic or serious.
The work that will be presented traces a political and creative language rooted in Latin American activism that speaks to global movements for reproductive justice and autonomy—offering vital strategies for building resistance, mobilizing hope, and sustaining transformative imagination in times of backlash.
This event will be chaired by Professor Ernestina Coast (LSE International Development). Dr Rishita Nandagiri (LSE Visiting Fellow, International Development) will be the discussant.
Speaker:
Nayla Luz Vacarezza is an Associate Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and a Visiting Bye-Fellow at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. She holds a Sociology degree and a doctoral degree in Social Sciences from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has held visiting appointments at the University at Albany (SUNY), Columbia University, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Most recently, she co-led a Visiting Research Group at Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research.
Dr. Vacarezza's research takes a transnational approach to the cultural, visual, and affective dimensions of feminist movements and abortion rights struggles in Latin America. Through this work, she forges hybrid spaces of collaboration between feminist scholarship, activism, and artistic practices.
Her publications include Abortion and Democracy: Contentious Body Politics in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Routledge, 2021) and Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), both co-edited volumes. Her monograph, Las pasiones alegres del feminismo: O cómo agitar la imaginación política contemporánea [The Joyful Passions of Feminism: How to Shake Up Contemporary Political Imagination], was published by Siglo Veintiuno Editores in 2025. She is currently co-editing the De Gruyter Handbook of Abortion Politics in Global Perspective with Barbara Sutton (forthcoming 2026).
Chair: Professor Ernestina Coast is Professor of Health and International Development in the Department of International Development at LSE. Her research is multidisciplinary and positioned at an intersection of social science approaches including health, gender and development.
Discussant: Dr Rishita Nandagiri is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Global Health and Social Medicine, King's College London. She is a Visiting Fellow, Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science. A feminist researcher focusing on gender, abortion and reproduction in the Global South, her interdisciplinary work is underpinned by feminist and reproductive justice approaches, interrogating how power and politics manifest and are wielded at individual, interpersonal, community and macro levels.
Featured image provided by Dr Nayla Luz Vacarezza: 'Ephemeral materials from feminist abortion struggles in Latin America,' Mariana Riquelme Pérez (photographer)
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