CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Kantor, Paula |
|---|---|
| Title | Contesting the Natio(n): The 2018 Abortion Debates in Argentina |
| Summary | In 2018, despite strong social mobilizations, the Argentinian Congress failed to pass a Bill making abortion legalized and more accessible. This thesis wonders about the challenges of having legal abortion and looks for answers in feminist theories of the nation-state and decolonial perspectives. Through feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, this study specifically examines the speeches given by the lawmakers in the 2018 abortion parliamentary debates to unravel the extent in which gendered notions of nation and the state went under resignification, sustaining and contesting hegemonic discourses. I argue here that both positions, supporting and rejecting the Bill, have reinforced and challenged hegemonic gendered depictions of the nation with variations in the extent and content of this resignification. The anti-Bill position has (re)produced heteronormative hegemonic visions of the nation-state while also has disputed Argentinian national authenticity as a reflection of the west. Conversely, the position supporting the Bill, has contested hegemonic heteronormative visions of gender relations and national imaginaries but has left unproblematized traditional colonial Argentinian logics of power. By examining legal abortion with these lenses, this thesis improves the understanding of the mutual affection between matters of sexuality, (non) reproduction, nation, and the state. It also problematizes longstanding expectations that conservatives groups would only reproduce hegemonic national imaginaries, and proves that they have also challenged these imaginaries. Moreover, this study examines feminist demands of legal abortion towards patriarchal and colonial institutions such as the law and the state, showing that, in this process, a new type of feminist? /progressive nationalism have been emerging in Argentina. National configurations have been relevant for both positions, and, as revealed here, they will continue to be significant in the following decades. |
| Supervisor | Elissa Helms; Ana Gallego Cuiñas |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/kantor_paula.pdf |
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