September 8, 2023

Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

This thesis seeks to contribute to the field of human rights by proposing and developing the concept of corporal fascism. Corporal fascism occurs when social actors through legal, religious, educational, medical, or financial means, and/or force coerce, impose, physically control and/or appropriate another party's embodied body against their will and/or interest threatening their life and livelihood. In corporal fascism, the body is at the center of the oppression, it is the body that is the target of violence. It is not any body; it is the subaltern, the sub-human, the non-conforming body. Corporal fascism has been on the rise in the last decades as the social, economic, and political scenarios have deepened the already abyssal inequalities excluding even more people. This becomes evident, for instance, in the struggle to legalize abortion. As feminist movements made strides in the fight for reproductive autonomy, they were met with ferocious counteroffensives led by various social actors seeking to subjugate women and feminized bodies. The cases of Argentina and Brazil are emblematic. In both countries, the feminist movements' struggle to legalize abortion reached new strengths and protagonism in the last decade at the same time that were met with violent economic, racist, heteropatriarcal and religious counteroffensives. Using these two cases as springboard, and based on the frameworks provided by feminist epistemologies and epistemologies of the South as well as on the evidence gathered during fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2022, this thesis focuses and advances the concept of corporal fascism over women's bodies and argues that: (1) through corporal fascism over women's bodies it is possible to link the criminalization of abortion to other forms of violence and use it as a tool to oppose the counteroffensives led by various social actors; (2) the feminist movements through their feminist potencia have not only visibilized the practice of abortion but also mobilized law to oppose corporal fascism over women's bodies; and, (3) the answer to the question - "Can law, as used by feminist movements seeking to legalize abortion in Argentina and Brazil, be emancipatory?" - is a highly qualified yes, as these movements' capacity to mobilize their feminist potencia internationally and to engage in an exercise of ecology of knowledges constitutes an emancipatory use of the law and a push towards a post-abyssal thinking. Hence, by proposing and developing the concept of corporal fascism over women's bodies this thesis sought to further the feminist struggle and provide a tool that synthesizes the intersection of different forms of violence against embodied bodies helping to build counter-powers and emancipatory alternatives.

Keywords: Epistemologies of the South; abortion; corporal fascism; emancipatory use of law; feminist potencia