Key publications
Duffy D, Freeman C, Rodriguez S (In Press). Beyond the State: Abortion care activism in Peru.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and SocietyAbstract:
Beyond the State: Abortion care activism in Peru
For abortion seekers, Peru is an uncaring state where legal and policy interventions have resulted in violence, persecution, and neglect. This state of abortion uncare is set within historic and ongoing denials of reproductive autonomy, coercive reproductive care, and the marginalisation of abortion. Abortion is not supported, even where legally permissible. Here we explore abortion care activism within the Peruvian context, foregrounding a key mobilisation that has emerged against a state of un-care - acompañante carework. Through interviews with people involved in abortion access and activism in Peru, we argue that acompañantes have constructed an infrastructure of abortion care in Peru through the bringing together of actors, technologies, and strategies. This infrastructure is shaped by a feminist ethic of care that differs from minority world care assumptions regarding high quality abortion care in three key ways: (i) care is provided beyond the state; (ii) care is holistic; and (iii) care is collective. We argue that US feminist debates relating to the emerging hyperrestrictive state of abortion un-care as well as broader research on feminist care can learn from acompañante activism strategically and conceptually.
Abstract.
Freeman C, Calkin S, Moore F (In Press). The Geography of Abortion: Discourse, Spatiality and Mobility.
Progress in Human GeographyAbstract:
The Geography of Abortion: Discourse, Spatiality and Mobility
Abortion has historically been ignored in geography. While bodies and pregnancy have been increasingly studied since the 1990s, a reticence around abortion has persisted until very recently. This article critically reviews how geographers and other scholars are now considering abortion and uses three conceptual lenses of discourse, spatiality, and mobility to argue that abortion should be a mainstream topic of critical concern for geographers. Through these themes we show that geographical attention to abortion makes questions of space, power, and citizenship visible in new ways and, furthermore, in ways that are only recently possible.
Abstract.
Freeman C (In Press). The desert, the border, and the city: Staging a spectacle on the Chile-Peru border. Political Geography
Freeman C (2020). Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities.
Mobilities,
15(6), 896-910.
Abstract:
Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. Scholarship on abortion travel has examined the places women travel between and why such journeys are necessary. However, there has been scant attention paid to the journeys themselves and how these journeys are undertaken. This paper uses William Walters’ notion of ‘viapolitics’ to better attend to how people travel by focussing on the role of vehicles in abortion politics. This takes three parts: an exploration of the emotional and embodied journeys that women have to take to access abortions; the role of the vehicle as a site of political activism around abortion rights; and the transportation of abortion medication. Viapolitics has to date only been used within migration politics but as this paper shows, it has utility beyond this field to interrogate abortion travels and highlight the role of vehicles in abortion access as well as to explore how abortion transport can be emancipatory for women. This paper furthers viapolitics by arguing that we need to consider the journeys of ‘things’ and not just people. In the case of abortion access, it is the transportation of abortion medication rather than the travel of women that is the most socially just solution to discriminatory laws and extra-legal barriers.
Abstract.
Calkin S, Freeman C (2018). Trails and technology: social and cultural geographies of abortion access. Social & Cultural Geography, 20(9), 1325-1332.
Freeman C (2017). The crime of choice: abortion border crossings from Chile to Peru.
Gender, Place and Culture,
24(6), 851-868.
Abstract:
The crime of choice: abortion border crossings from Chile to Peru
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. Since 1989 abortion in Chile has been illegal in every single circumstance. This means that tens of thousands of women every year undergo clandestine abortions at great risk to their health. Class directly influences Chilean women’s relationships to abortion; wealthier women can pay for the confidentiality of a safe doctor whereas poorer women cannot. There is just one region where women regardless of class can easily travel to another country in search of abortions, Arica in northern Chile. This article considers the previously unstudied phenomenon whereby women cross the border quickly and cheaply from northern Chile to the Peruvian city of Tacna where numerous clinics offer the procedure. This article utilises Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to trace how women are forced to cross a border to avoid government legislation and finds that even by leaving the territory of the state, women do not fully leave state control. Despite the lack of official statistics, interviews with healthworkers and a young woman who made the crossing show that abortion border crossings do occur and this article reflects on the legal, safety, and biopolitical ramifications of these journeys for Chilean women.
Abstract.
Publications by year
In Press
Duffy D, Freeman C, Rodriguez S (In Press). Beyond the State: Abortion care activism in Peru.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and SocietyAbstract:
Beyond the State: Abortion care activism in Peru
For abortion seekers, Peru is an uncaring state where legal and policy interventions have resulted in violence, persecution, and neglect. This state of abortion uncare is set within historic and ongoing denials of reproductive autonomy, coercive reproductive care, and the marginalisation of abortion. Abortion is not supported, even where legally permissible. Here we explore abortion care activism within the Peruvian context, foregrounding a key mobilisation that has emerged against a state of un-care - acompañante carework. Through interviews with people involved in abortion access and activism in Peru, we argue that acompañantes have constructed an infrastructure of abortion care in Peru through the bringing together of actors, technologies, and strategies. This infrastructure is shaped by a feminist ethic of care that differs from minority world care assumptions regarding high quality abortion care in three key ways: (i) care is provided beyond the state; (ii) care is holistic; and (iii) care is collective. We argue that US feminist debates relating to the emerging hyperrestrictive state of abortion un-care as well as broader research on feminist care can learn from acompañante activism strategically and conceptually.
Abstract.
Freeman C (In Press). Feeling Better: Representing abortion in ‘feminist’ television. Culture, Health & Sexuality
Freeman C (In Press). Multiple methods beyond triangulation: collage as a methodological framework in geography. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography
Freeman C, Nandagiri R (In Press). No bad abortions: Graphic abortion narratives as feminist discourse.
MAI: FEMINISM & VISUAL CULTUREAbstract:
No bad abortions: Graphic abortion narratives as feminist discourse
‘Graphic medicine’ refers to the bringing together of biomedical discourses and comics in order to problematize power asymmetries within healthcare and medicine (Czerwiec et al. 2015; Green and Myers 2010). Within this, there has been increased attention on the topic of reproduction in order to challenge the medicalisation of reproduction and centre the experiences of people as they have sex, navigate contraceptions, become pregnant, give birth, and/or have abortions, among other issues. Abortion as an embodied subject in these texts has become a key symbol of feminist discourse. Whether created for political feminist reasons, as educational tools, or as emotional catharsis, abortion graphic narratives play an important and increasingly prominent role in shaping how we think about abortion. Narratives that portray abortion as a positive decision have been important for combating abortion sigma, challenging assumptions about abortion, humanising abortion seekers, and rejecting the idea that there is a simple binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ abortions. Here, we reflect on our own experiences as academics who have co-created graphic abortion narratives with activist groups. Cordelia worked with Fondo MARIA to co-create Será Deaseada, a graphic novel following three Mexican women as they seek abortions and Rishita worked with Asia Safe Abortion Partnership to co-create Nirnay, a series of six comics tracing women’s differing abortion trajectories in India. Through a reflective conversation we examine the power of the visual, our different processes of creating graphic narratives, and the challenges that come with it and conclude by setting out our framework for conceptualising our work as academics producing graphic narratives.
Abstract.
Freeman C, Calkin S, Moore F (In Press). The Geography of Abortion: Discourse, Spatiality and Mobility.
Progress in Human GeographyAbstract:
The Geography of Abortion: Discourse, Spatiality and Mobility
Abortion has historically been ignored in geography. While bodies and pregnancy have been increasingly studied since the 1990s, a reticence around abortion has persisted until very recently. This article critically reviews how geographers and other scholars are now considering abortion and uses three conceptual lenses of discourse, spatiality, and mobility to argue that abortion should be a mainstream topic of critical concern for geographers. Through these themes we show that geographical attention to abortion makes questions of space, power, and citizenship visible in new ways and, furthermore, in ways that are only recently possible.
Abstract.
Freeman C (In Press). The desert, the border, and the city: Staging a spectacle on the Chile-Peru border. Political Geography
2023
Freeman C (2023). The Abortion Pill and Other Myths: Medication Abortion on Screen. In Boudreau B, Maloy K (Eds.)
Rewriting the Abortion Narrative: the Power of Popular Culture, Lexington Books.
Abstract:
The Abortion Pill and Other Myths: Medication Abortion on Screen
Abstract.
2022
Freeman C (2022). Book review: Littlejohn, Krystale E. (2021) Just get on the pill: the uneven burden of reproductive politics. University of California Press: Oakland, CA. Gender, Place and Culture
Freeman C (2022). McPherson, Alan (2019) Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice. The University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill), 392 pp. £36.50 hbk. Bulletin of Latin American Research
Freeman C, Engle O (2022). ‘All this way, all this money, for a five-minute procedure’: Barriers, mobilities, and representation on the US abortion road trip.
MobilitiesAbstract:
‘All this way, all this money, for a five-minute procedure’: Barriers, mobilities, and representation on the US abortion road trip
The abortion road trip is a narrative device that has emerged in the last decade whereby the central plot of the story is the journey taken in search of an abortion. In this paper we analyze two young adult novels (Unpregnant and Girls on the Verge) and two films (Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Grandma) that follow adolescent girls traveling for abortions in the contemporary United States. Through the analysis of these four narratives, we argue that representations of the abortion road trip are novel for their focus on the barriers and politics of abortion access in the United States. While the representations do prioritize certain barriers over others, they mark an important shift in abortion discourse in popular culture. Instead of the ‘drama’ of the plot being the decision to have an abortion, it is increasingly other socio-politico-legal issues such as the lack of abortion clinics, the distance required to travel, legal rights for adolescents, the cost of the procedure, and the opinions of family and friends that take center stage. The focus on these structural, political barriers can help to educate audiences about the realities of abortion access in the US and move abortion discourse beyond the individual.
Abstract.
2021
Freeman C (2021). Challenging Reproductive Control and Gendered Violence in the Américas: Intersectionality, Power, and Struggles for Rights Leandra Hinojosa Hernández and Sarah De Los Santos Upton. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018 (ISBN 978-1-498-54257-9). Hypatia, 36(4).
Hope J, Freeman C, Maclean K, Pande R, Sou G (2021). Shifts to Global Development: is this a reframing of power, agency, and progress?. Area, 54(2), 154-158.
2020
Freeman C (2020). Abortion Across (Some) Borders?. Women's Reproductive Health, 7(2), 147-149.
Freeman C (2020). Borders. In Domosh M, Withers C, Heffernan M (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography, SAGE.
Freeman C (2020). Peruvian Lives Across Borders: Power, Exclusion, and Home. Feminist Encounters: a Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 4(1).
Freeman C (2020). Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities.
Mobilities,
15(6), 896-910.
Abstract:
Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. Scholarship on abortion travel has examined the places women travel between and why such journeys are necessary. However, there has been scant attention paid to the journeys themselves and how these journeys are undertaken. This paper uses William Walters’ notion of ‘viapolitics’ to better attend to how people travel by focussing on the role of vehicles in abortion politics. This takes three parts: an exploration of the emotional and embodied journeys that women have to take to access abortions; the role of the vehicle as a site of political activism around abortion rights; and the transportation of abortion medication. Viapolitics has to date only been used within migration politics but as this paper shows, it has utility beyond this field to interrogate abortion travels and highlight the role of vehicles in abortion access as well as to explore how abortion transport can be emancipatory for women. This paper furthers viapolitics by arguing that we need to consider the journeys of ‘things’ and not just people. In the case of abortion access, it is the transportation of abortion medication rather than the travel of women that is the most socially just solution to discriminatory laws and extra-legal barriers.
Abstract.
2019
Freeman C, Calkin S (2019). Feminism/Feminist Geography. In Kobayashi A (Ed)
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Elsevier.
Abstract:
Feminism/Feminist Geography
Abstract.
Freeman C (2019). Filming female desire: queering the gaze of pop music videos.
Cultural StudiesAbstract:
Filming female desire: queering the gaze of pop music videos
© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. This paper examines the queer gaze within pop music videos. It contends that the contemporary US musician Hayley Kiyoko can be seen as a queer music video auteur who has transformed what the ‘gaze’ can mean in mainstream pop music through directing her own videos. The paper asserts that through her performance within and, arguably even more significantly, via her direction of videos, Kiyoko has produced a new and complex portrayal of how female sexual desire is represented even when, on the surface, it may not necessarily appear to disrupt normativity. Reaction videos made by Kiyoko’s fans have also queered the gaze whereby the ‘watcher’ becomes the ‘watched’. The paper concludes that online spaces and digital technologies are radically reshaping understandings of queer sexuality in music videos.
Abstract.
Freeman C (2019). Historical Everyday Geopolitics on the Chile-Peru Border. BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH
2018
Calkin S, Freeman C (2018). Trails and technology: social and cultural geographies of abortion access. Social & Cultural Geography, 20(9), 1325-1332.
2017
Rodríguez A, Freeman C (2017). El estudiante y la frontera: una aproximación a los imaginarios geográficos en el Norte de Chile.
Espacios,
6(11), 110-110.
Abstract:
El estudiante y la frontera: una aproximación a los imaginarios geográficos en el Norte de Chile
<p><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>Se realiza una aproximación al imaginario geográfico trifronterizo en el extremo norte de Chile, desde la perspectiva de niños y jóvenes, comprendiendo la frontera como una construcción tanto social como experiencial. El trabajo aborda el imaginario geográfico a partir de la aplicación de mapas mentales en instituciones educacionales públicas de la región de Arica y Parinacota, utilizándose una metodología semi-cualitativa. Los resultados demuestran que existe una frontera dinámica, que sin embargo recae en una paradoja, dado que en la mayoría de los mapas mentales analizados nos enfrentamos a una frontera-barrera, pero que en el discurso de los informantes se deja ver lo contrario, una frontera-porosa o multi-transterritorial.</p><p><strong>Palabras claves:</strong> frontera, territorio, cognición, mapas mentales, región de Arica y Parinacota</p>
Abstract.
Freeman C (2017). Latino Heartland: of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest - by Vega, Sujey. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 36, 381-383.
Freeman C (2017). Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk. Journal of Latin American Geography, 16(1), 210-211.
Freeman C (2017). The crime of choice: abortion border crossings from Chile to Peru.
Gender, Place and Culture,
24(6), 851-868.
Abstract:
The crime of choice: abortion border crossings from Chile to Peru
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. Since 1989 abortion in Chile has been illegal in every single circumstance. This means that tens of thousands of women every year undergo clandestine abortions at great risk to their health. Class directly influences Chilean women’s relationships to abortion; wealthier women can pay for the confidentiality of a safe doctor whereas poorer women cannot. There is just one region where women regardless of class can easily travel to another country in search of abortions, Arica in northern Chile. This article considers the previously unstudied phenomenon whereby women cross the border quickly and cheaply from northern Chile to the Peruvian city of Tacna where numerous clinics offer the procedure. This article utilises Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to trace how women are forced to cross a border to avoid government legislation and finds that even by leaving the territory of the state, women do not fully leave state control. Despite the lack of official statistics, interviews with healthworkers and a young woman who made the crossing show that abortion border crossings do occur and this article reflects on the legal, safety, and biopolitical ramifications of these journeys for Chilean women.
Abstract.
2015
Freeman C (2015). Violence on the Chile-Peru border: Arica 1925-2015.
Abstract:
Violence on the Chile-Peru border: Arica 1925-2015
This thesis examines the paradox of the Chile-Peru border, and specifically the Chilean border city of Arica, between 1925 and 2015. Through an eclectic mixed method ‘collage’, primarily relying on archival research and extended interviews, the richness of the lived experience of the border comes to the fore. Arica has been a space of violence since it was appropriated from Peru by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) and I am interested in how this violence has lingered and manifested itself in various ways since Arica officially became Chilean territory in the 1920s. This violence often stems from a performance of Chilean machismo at the border. Arica is a space of contradiction. A space of extreme nationalism but also of rejection of the Chilean state, of being central to the Chilean nation but also of being peripheral and abandoned. Over five ‘border moments’ over ninety years Arica oscillates between centrality and marginality dependent on threats to Chilean sovereignty at the border. Through a chronological and multi-disciplinary arc the history of violence in Arica can be better understood. The thesis begins in 1925 when the United States became involved in the dispute over the Chile-Peru border that hadn’t been settled since the War of the Pacific. Violence permeated the region and made an attempted plebiscite impossible and although the border was demarcated through other means in 1929, Arica soon became ignored by the Chilean state. A state of abandonment remained until the 1950s when economic initiatives enacted at the regional level succeeded in raising the prospects and spirits of Arica, purging the area of violence …
Abstract.
2013
Freeman C (2013). IDENTITY AND THE MILITARIZED BORDER: MI MEJOR ENEMIGO (CHILE, 2005). Espaço e Cultura, 0(33).
