Transnational Visual Activism for Women’s Reproductive Rights: My Body, My Choice.
Kimberly Lamm received a competitive research leave from Trinity College to pursue her research project “Words and Clothes: Literary Self-Fashioning and the Gendered Legacies of Enslavement.” She also recently published “Andrea Bowers, the Army of Three, and the Writing of Reproductive Justice” in the collection Transnational Visual Activism for Women’s Reproductive Rights: My Body, My Choice. In this article, Lamm explores how the contemporary U.S.-based artist Andrea Bowers engages with the history of the Army of Three, a small political organization devoted to giving women access to safe abortions a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. In videos and installations, Bowers makes the letters people wrote to the Army of Three in need of reproductive healthcare her subject and material, and by situating these artworks in the tradition of feminist art’s engagement with language, Lamm shows how Bowers places women at the center of abortion stories, thereby challenging the silent and transparent woman of anti-abortion discourse. For Lamm, Bowers’ artwork offers a model for reading written testimonies from women seeking reproductive justice around the world as calls to people across borders and through historical time to collaborate on the global project of writing woman beyond biological determinism.