1 AFFECTS, MOURNING AND JUSTICE IN VISUAL PRODUCTIONS ABOUT WOMEN´S INCARCERATION AND DEATHS FOR ABORTION IN LATIN AMERICA Nayla Luz Vacarezza 1 Abstract: Affects play a fundamental role in the political struggles for the right to abortion in Latin America. The analysis of visual productions in favor of legal abortion reveals the great efforts made to generate social empathy towards women and to destigmatize abortion. In recent years, original visual works that associate abortion with affects such as joy, relief, and pride have gained centrality. However—in a region where abortion continues to be largely clandestine, insecure and even prosecuted—organizations are constantly creating images that refer to injustices associated with incarceration and deaths due to abortion. Creating images about these forms of extreme social violence is a delicate task. Far from all forms of victimization, the visual productions analyzed here represent, in many different ways, the women´s incarceration and deaths for abortion as a call to political action. Pain, affliction and grief are powerful affects that activate political forms of memory, action and imagination in pursuit of reproductive justice. Keywords: Affects. Abortion. Visual Production. What is the role of affect in visual productions for the right to abortion in Latin America? In recent years—together with the popularization of medical abortion methods and the extension of abortion support networks—new visual discourses emerged linking abortion with affects socially considered as "positive". This visual experimentation around "joyful" emotions in relation to abortion are challenging deep-rooted "structures of feeling" (Williams, 2009) that connect abortion to disgust, secrecy, pain, fear and guilt. However, and fortunately, it would not be appropriate to say that affects such as sadness or sorrow disappear and are replaced by joy, determination, relief and mutual care. The stories of pain and suffering associated with clandestine and unsafe abortion still appear in the images. The abortion- rights movements cannot simply forget the pain since women continue to die from unsafe abortions and the state continues to imprison women for having abortions. Leaving aside these forms of injustice, violence and suffering would imply denying past and present injustices still suffered by women. In a region where "more than 97% of women in childbearing age [...] live in countries where abortion is restricted or completely banned by law" and where seven countries have legislation that 1 Assistant Researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) - Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.<nayla.luz@gmail.com>.