Performing the Politics of Voluntary Motherhood in Mexico City

The right to free and legal abortions has been a core demand of the women’s movement in Mexico since abortion was officially made a crime in 1931. During the 1970s, activists located new avenues for the legalization of abortion by reframing it around the concept of voluntary motherhood, a platform that was tied to women’s newly defined rights as citizens. After nearly a century of resistance, abortion was finally legalized nationwide in 2021. This paper considers the role public performance, both artistic and activist, has played in visualizing voluntary motherhood in Mexico City from the 1970s through to today. It pays particular attention to intergenerational alliances forged through the visual and pedagogical practices of Mónica Mayer (b. 1954) and the feminist art collective, Polvo de Gallina Negra (PGN), she co-founded with Maris Bustamante (b. 1949) in 1983. Both PGN and Mayer’s practices centered on opening existing representations and meanings of motherhood up to collective transformations rooted in the demands of the local women’s movement. I argue here their public performances established the pregnant body as an enduring artistic and feminist object of communication, giving visible form to proposals for voluntary motherhood that have expanded to include the concerns of a new generation. By tracing the ways younger creatives and activists working in the twenty-first century have been impacted by the practices of these older feminist agents, and vice versa, I seek to establish the ongoing presence of mutual flows of influence across and beyond the so-called waves of feminist histories.