From the Virgen del Panecillo to the Virgen del Legrado: (Trans)national Feminist Struggles for Reproductive Rights in the Andes

Abstract:This article explores how (trans)national feminist artists and activists in Ecuador, Peru, and the United States strategically (re)appropriate Catholic cultural artifacts to denounce religious, patriarchal, and heterosexist colonial laws, mandates, and symbols around reproduction and bodily autonomy. Throughout I employ a (trans)national feminist analysis of the fight for women's reproductive rights in both Ecuador and Peru in the early twenty-first century and analyze two instances in which the Virgen del Panecillo—a famous monument of the Virgen de Quito that was constructed in Quito, Ecuador, in 1976—has been utilized to highlight state and church control over women's bodies and reproductive rights. The first is a public action staged atop the monument in 2008 during which two feminist organizations used the strategic location of the Virgen del Panecillo as part of a larger campaign to legalize abortion in Ecuador. I pair my analysis with a photograph by Peruvian artist Cecilia Podestá titled Virgen del Legrado, released on September 28, 2009. My examination of the photograph highlights the (trans)national circulation of the Virgin—in many ways, reminiscent of how the Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico and the United States has circulated and been reimagined by Chicana feminist organizers, artists, and scholars to extend women's rights. I demonstrate how the artistic uses of the Virgen del Panecillo underscore histories shaped by colonialism and uncover the intimate relationship between empire and the constructions of race, class, sex, gender, and sexuality.