Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter explores what I term the ‘embodied consequences’ of the referendum victory. It draws on the work of Black, decolonial, and queer feminist scholars to explicate the physical toll of reproductive justice work and describes how Irish abortion activists experienced catharsis but also widespread burnout in the aftermath of the 2018 campaign. Illustrating how the embodied burdens of protesting were unequally distributed among and between activist groups, it describes how their involvement in the referendum campaign changed how many activists felt about their bodies. The referendum victory is constituted then as a final act of ‘coming out’ whereby activists redefine their bodies in their own terms as sources of pride, power, and even pleasure.
This chapter describes the contributions of the book to scholarship on reproductive justice. It describes the movement to repeal the constitutional abortion ban as a struggle to alleviate an ongoing and violent condition of gendered, racialized, embodied vulnerability and labour which has historically been imposed on women and gestating people. It considers how, with access to abortion being rolled back in a number of countries worldwide, increased analytical attention is needed to understand how women, pregnant people, and abortion-seekers perform ‘abortion work’ and negotiate abortion restrictions in their everyday lives.
Offering a unique perspective, this book explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban.
Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion.
It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.
This chapter applies an intersectional perspective to analyse the transition from the grassroots pro-choice campaign to the official referendum campaign in 2018. It argues that the official referendum campaign adopted a ‘respectability politics’ approach which required of activists a specific linguistic, emotional, and sartorial presentation. By enacting a non-confrontational or ‘respectable’ approach, I argue that the affective bonds of ‘race’, class, and specifically of White femininity played an important role in the official referendum campaign.
Chapter 1 outlines the history of abortion politics as it is intertwined with Catholic, religious norms, and with the process of nation-building in Ireland. It situates the development of the Irish abortion rights movement from the mid-1980s onwards, in a transnational and global perspective. This chapter outlines the aim of the book: to explicate how the insertion and subsequent repeal of the constitutional abortion ban moulded the embodied subjectivities of women and gestating people in Ireland. In addition, this chapter introduces the key conceptual frameworks of this book and describes the research design based on qualitative feminist interviews.
This chapter explores how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people in Ireland have been historically moulded via the state’s anti-abortion laws and regulations. Exemplifying the spatial orientation of postcolonial reproductive politics, activists describe being always already oriented, both mentally and physically, towards England – the traditional destination of Irish abortion travellers. This chapter coins the term ‘abortion work’ to describe the additional reproductive labour imposed on women and people who may become pregnant as they are forced to make ‘contingency plans’ and anticipate the possibility of having to access a clandestine abortion.
This chapter discusses the importance of ‘coming out’ for abortion, emphasizing how the double movement of activists publicly disclosing their abortion experiences at the same time as campaigners took to the street en masse, constituted integral elements of a politics of revelation which worked to counter the stigma and shame traditionally attached to the bodies of women and abortion-seekers in Ireland. In addition, it explores the practice of dress and specifically the wearing of the black-and-white Repeal jumper as a form of what I term ‘gestural dress’ whereby activists use their bodies to convey political meaning, enact solidarity, and create additional spaces for embodied, collective action.
This chapter explores two important events in the development of the Repeal the 8th campaign: the publication of the ‘Abortion Tears Her Life Apart’ billboard campaign and the death of Ms Savita Halappanavar who was denied a life-saving abortion in 2012. It theorizes that ‘pro-life’ protest objects, such as the billboard campaign, work to catalyse counteractivity as abortion activists feel compelled to resist their symbolic, moral, and physical domination of the social landscape and desire to challenge the specific model of reproductive embodiment depicted in these images. In addition, this chapter interrogates the ‘negative’ emotions of anger, indignation, and shame which circulated among the abortion activist community in the aftermath of Ms Halappanavar’s death, served as an important ‘affective fuel’ in the consolidation of the movement.
In this chapter the spatialities and temporalities of feminist activism are investigated, in light of diminished space for activism in increasingly authoritarian Russia. The reader is introduced to various locales of feminism in order to concretize the spatial realities of feminism, such as the constant lack of privacy and spaces of their own, and the spillover nature of the movement. Three key spatial metaphors for feminism – underground, street and shelter – and their wider implications are uncovered. With the help of these, the author illustrates how the activists negotiate spatial axes such as visible/invisible, public/private, closed/open and safe/unsafe. Two spatio-temporal dimensions of feminist politics are identified: that of expanding feminist space and discourses in society in the long run, and, more urgently, producing collective shelter and privacy for those who lack these. The concept of the politics of sheltering coined in the chapter refers particularly to the second dimension.
In this chapter the reader is provided with the necessary background to and history of civic activism and feminist politics in Russia. The author first introduces five key historical phases of Russian civic activism relevant to studying feminist activism in contemporary Russia. This is followed by discussion of the history of feminist and gender politics in Russia, which addresses the first feminists (ravnopraviki), the Soviet reorganization of gender relations, Stalin’s declaration that the ‘woman question’ had been solved, the Soviet underground feminist group Maria, and the women’s movement that emerged during perestroika and flourished following the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Finally, the author walks the reader through more recent political developments in Russia in the 2000s that have contributed to the rise of the contemporary feminist movement.
