In the winter of 2018, millions of women filled the streets of Argentine cities to demand the legalization of abortion. For the first time, a bill constructed by activists over the course of almost four decades was to be heard in the chambers of the National Congress. The Senate rejected the law after it was passed in the Chamber of Deputies, but, nevertheless, the demonstrations that ensued marked a milestone in Latin American politics: adolescents, middle-aged women and long-time militants occupied the streets and virtual arenas in an unprecendented form -unprecedented, both in terms of scale and in terms of the strategies put in play. In addition, the latter involved highly disruptive contact with the living past of the local movement. Today, with abortion soon to be legal in Argentina, one cannot help but recall those days in 2018 as foundational, both in strictly political terms and in the way they configured what I present here in terms of affective agency.
I am interested in examining the critical role of online activism at that juncture in the campaign to legalize abortion in Argentina, and particularly how this activism, organized using the hashtag #QueSeaLey[#MakeItLaw], managed to constitute what was, in more than one sense, a massive and transversal collective in which a centrally affective--but at the same time strategic-path of connection with the past became pivotal. This connection with the past occurred in three ways: through the construction of an intergenerational bond, through the challenge resulting from the progressive narrative of the moment, and by the way in which it linked current feminist activism with the struggle against, and resistance to, State Terrorism during the last military dictatorship. This, moreover, transpired under a logic in which these three forms are interconnected in their outline of a specific Here we face a kind of link between the current protest and the recent 'traumatic', 'lived,' or 'immediate' Latin American past in light of an association with the most recent catastrophe that can help to conceptualize it as both a motor and characteristic of fourth wave feminism. As we will see, #QueSeaLey exhibited a demand for a radical alteration of the relationship with recent history, imbued with an affective temporality. What is more, this affective temporality imposes the constitution of a new mode of intervening politically through a relationship with what has only recently been from the past, particularly with protagonists of recent Argentine history who still participate in current demonstrations. This is to say, we do not face here a merely phantasmal presence of the past; given this, as I will attempt to show, in this particular case, the recent or lived/history of State Terrorism becomes connected with the living history of the local feminist movement, and in a particular interaction with on and offline strategies that specifically make up the fourth wave.
