Abortion Politics in Transnational Perspective

Abortion Politics in Transnational Perspective is a scholarly panel featuring the work of Dr. Aideen O’Shaughnessy (University of Lincoln, United Kingdom) and of Dr. Nayla Luz Vacarezza (University of Buenos Aires and CONICET, Argentina), moderated by Dr. Barbara Sutton (University at Albany).  

The two featured authors will present their scholarship on abortion politics and what's at stake when abortion is largely illegal or severely restricted. They will also showcase strategies for social change. The cases of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Ireland will be addressed in the presentations and put in conversation with contemporary abortion politics in the United States, at a time in which abortion rights are being rolled back and abortion access made more difficult in various parts of the country. Both Dr. O’Shaughnessy and Dr. Vacarezza have produced important works on abortion politics that illuminate activist and advocacy strategies for abortion legalization and access in restrictive contexts.   

Aideen O'Shaughnessy is sociologist interested in the study of embodiment, emotions, reproduction and feminist protest movements. She earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, UK. She convened, along with R. Sánchez Rivera, the Reproductive Justice Network. She is currently a Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln, UK. Her core research focuses on the question of the embodiment of reproductive politics. 

Combining theoretical approaches from feminist phenomenology, affect theory and new social movement studies, she articulates new ways of understanding the embodied experience of living under and mobilizing against systems of reproductive coercion. She is particularly interested in examining the materiality and temporality of laws and policies which criminalize abortion access. Her work relies predominantly on qualitative methodologies, specifically feminist narrative interviewing. Her book, Embodying Irish Abortion Reform, is slated for publication by Bristol University Press.  

Nayla Luz Vacarezza is an Associate Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Argentina. She is affiliated with the Institute of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and teaches courses on Feminist Theories and Gender Studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She holds a Sociology degree and a doctoral degree in Social Sciences from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Additionally, Dr. Vacarezza was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University. As a feminist scholar and activist, Dr. Vacarezza has been involved with the abortion rights movements in Argentina and in Latin America's Southern Cone. 

With a transnational perspective, her scholarly work focuses on the visual, affective, and cultural aspects of this activism. She is co-author (with July Chaneton) of the book La intemperie y lo intempestivo. Experiencia del aborto voluntario en el relato de mujeres y varones (Buenos Aires, Marea, 2011). She is also the co-editor with Cecilia Macón and Mariela Solana of Affect, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Her latest co-edited book with Barbara Sutton is Abortion and Democracy: Contentious Body Politics in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (Routledge, 2021).  

Cosponsors: Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Institute for Research on Women (IROW), University Auxiliary Services