Making Feminist Selves

This article interrogates the role of misoprostol, an abortifacient pharmaceutical, in recent Argentine abortion activism through the lens of biopolitics. For more than three decades, misoprostol has enabled activists to accompany and facilitate self-managed abortions safely in settings where access is restricted. In Argentina, where abortion was legalized in 2021, misoprostol has been harnessed by feminist activists not only as a pharmaceutical technology, but also, as I argue here, a biopolitical one fostering a distinctly feminist “biopolitics from below” (Biehl 2016). Building on an analysis of informative and narrative materials publicized by activist groups, I trace the affective mechanisms by which feminist activists contest hegemonic subjectivities. I focus on feminist knowledge productions about misoprostol and the affective paradigms made possible through them to suggest that its pharmaceutical properties have enabled activist practices that link the commanding of scientific knowledge to the production of political knowledges. Through these practices, feminist activists have turned misoprostol into a technology for shaping counter-hegemonic subjectivities as embodied, affective, and relational.