Labor and Restitution in Emma Campbell’s Abortion-Seeking Art Work by Emma Crowley. Journal article reviewing work of Emma Campbell.

Description

Labor and Restitution in Emma Campbell’s Abortion-Seeking Art Work
Emma Crowley
06.30.23
This essay considers An Appropriate Hobby as a work of socially engaged art that renders visible the labor of activists and organisers in the movement to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland (NI). An Appropriate Hobby presents jubilant visualisations of activist labor that re-narrativize the function of photography in struggles for reproductive justice. In foregrounding portraits of activists, including artist-activists, central to the struggle for decriminalisation, Campbell draws attention to labor practices that have been economically devalued and broadly ignored politically.

Featured in:
Special Issue, Post 45: Abortion Now, Abortion Forever
This cluster is being published on the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and removed the constitutional right to abortion. Since this decision, extreme limitations to abortion access have taken effect across the U.S.: statewide bans, criminalization and surveillance of those seeking abortion and all those who assist them, the widespread closing of reproductive health clinics, forced travel to seek reproductive health care, denial of health care to pregnant persons facing life-threatening conditions, and forced birth. These effects fall disproportionately on already marginalized populations — immigrant, Indigenous, Black, disabled, working-class persons — whose reproductive rights and healthcare access have historically been threatened and precarious. We are witnessing a violent new spasm of state-sponsored patriarchal control over pregnant persons and all those capable of becoming pregnant.

Post45 is a diamond open-access, peer-reviewed online journal publishing high quality, field-shaping work on any aspect of American literature and culture since the mid-twentieth century. We publish individual articles and themed special issues on an irregular schedule to avoid publication backlogs.

ISSN: 2168-8206

Annie McClanahan and Arthur Wang, Co-Editors
Nia Judelson, Managing Editor
Aaron Obedkoff, Assistant Editor

Period	6 Feb 2023
Degree of Recognition	International