Four Pieces on Repeal: Notes on Art, Aesthetics and the Struggle Against Ireland’s Abortion Law

Abstract

<jats:p> The Repeal campaign articulated new and transformative relationships between law, reproduction and the political in Ireland. During the campaign, ordinary people took ownership of and participated in mutual teaching and critique of law on a wide scale. Art, along these lines, was often used to document and archive the injustices worked by the 8<jats:sup>th</jats:sup> Amendment. However, art also became a means of imagining law otherwise. In this piece, I use Jacques Rancière’s work on the relationship between aesthetics and politics to analyse artistic contributions to feminist legal discourses associated with Repeal. </jats:p>

Abortion in Ireland: Introduction to the Themed Issue

“…However, the 2018 abortion referendum was notable for the presence and involvement of 'repeat players' whose aim seems to be to stall all attempts to dismantle the ephemera and structures of oppressive Ireland; these are familiar actors from previous referendums, who had persistently campaigned against progressive gender and sexual rights, and continue to do so after the repeal of the 8 th . These repeat players may have been defeated, but their efforts in the referendum and since had longer term impacts on the scope, liberalism and woman-centredness of the new law (de Londras and Enright, 2020). Their efforts to oppose abortion also continue to impact on the daily lived experiences of people who need to access abortion, as Ariane Vaughan's (2020) poem in this issue evokes.…”

“…Máiréad Enright (2020, this issue) and Ruth Fletcher (2020, this issue) reflect on artistic interventions in the Irish abortion debate to show the productive power of feminist art and its contribution to feminist legal theory. Fletcher argues that the performances and artistic actions by Speaking of IMELDA articulate a feminist legal knowledge, using humour and spectacle to witness and testify to the enforced silences of the 8 th Amendment.…”

“…They refused to embody the expected role of disempowered victim, dutiful mother or deserving woman who seeks an abortion only because of medical necessity. Furthermore, they refused the 'legal discourse which insists on state mastery and control over pregnancy and birth' (Enright, 2020) and asked us to imagine the possibilities for reproductive justice, even if we cannot articulate today what that future might look like.…”

Cheeky Witnessing

“…As they improvise with a legal consciousness of women who have sought out 'England' as a destination for abortion, and of the women who helped them (O'Malley, 2019, p. 25), they draw on the pleasurable, playful and plural practice of naming and renaming (Smyth, 1989). Their naming practice not only performs a migrant and diasporic feminist collectivity in the here and now, but it also joins with past iterations of feminist subjectivity as it intervenes into public space and 're-arranges the sensible' (Calkin, 2019, p. 348; see also Gunaratnam, 2013, p. 16;Enright, , 2020. Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A.…”

“…called for legal reform by drawing on the rhetorical, affective register of law’s theatricality (Goodrich, 2011; Peters, 2014; Harrington, 2017). They encouraged audiences to see the ridiculousness of a law that denied pregnant people the value of their own gestational labour, contributing to what Máiréad Enright (2020) calls ‘art’s law’. As they explain in their own documentation (Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A., 2015, 2019), they improvised in the sense of adapting their partially scripted actions on the ‘spur of the moment’ during their performance.…”