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This article examines the cultural activism of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Network of Abortion Companions. Although cultural strategies are crucial for free and safe abortion activism, studies have focused mostly on its legal and health aspects. We therefore analyzed a series of cultural productions in which activism seeks to transform the ways in which abortion is represented and felt. Our findings indicate that these productions associate abortion with dignity, autonomy, and the ability to say “no” to forced motherhood. Although reports show that abortion in illegal contexts can cause fear, pain, and anguish, they also associate it with relief, solidarity between women and self-love. Finally, we analyze the emergence of intersectional politics that connect the illegality and insecurity of abortion with regimes of colonial, racist and capitalist exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the connection between women's own experiences and women and feminist movements in Latin America and the Caribbean as a place where women can transact their requests moving from the individual to the collective, from the personal to the political. In our perspective, the women and feminist movements are a mirror where, from one side, we constitute ourselves as collective subjects of a political action and, on the other side, we place on the public space affairs which are usually considered not to deserve public debate. The demands that women and feminists place in the public space affects the notion of citizenship, representation, equality, shakes the notions of public space itself and in a singular way the one of brotherhood/sisterhood. We can identify an obstacle on the view of the subjectivity that often produces the illusion that on the fundamental subjects (for feminist movement): sexuality, Iove, violence, we were before the eternal repetition of the same: outside of society and historical conditions of existence. The difficulty lays on the tension between the personal and the political, between the slowness in the subjective transformations and the social conditions of existence, the class struggle, the ways of racist subordination and the patriarchal domination on women. We identify an obstacle on the view of the subjectivity that often produces the illusion that on the fundamental subjects: sexuality, love, violence, we stand in front of the eternal repetition of the same, outside of society and historical conditions of existence. Some key concepts borrowed from the field of psychoanalysis, namely the idea of ambivalence, and the appeal to the lacanian notion of mirror, provide a useful tool in better understanding the particular link between individual and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]