Desire and Natural Law in Argentina's Gender Rights Struggles

Rebecca Wey, University of Arizona

When Argentina legalized abortion in 2020, media outlets heralded “the law of desire,” citing an idea that featured prominently in the abortion rights campaign and other recent political struggles. In this paper I examine the work that the deployment of “desire” achieves in progressive Argentine politics. Its meaning relies on a commonsense notion based in psychoanalysis, widely disseminated in Argentina, that says desire is more an inescapable aspect of who one is than what one wants. I argue that the “law of desire” recapitulates a form of natural law that is paradigmatic to Argentina’s human rights tradition. I make the case that natural law, figured in this context through the lens of psychoanalytic desire, articulates a gender politics that is surprisingly anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist.

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 Presented in Session 181. Histories of Gender Equality Action: Frameworks, Legibility, and Power