Dissenting fiction re-righting law: practice-led research into biopolitics, women’s rights and reproductive justice in Ecuador

Abstract

This text is an introduction to my doctoral creative research that addresses issues of women’s rights and reproductive justice in Ecuador and Latin America, through the practice of the screenplay writing. The basic research questions that allow me to articulate this reflection are: is it possible to set on legal grounds a fictional story about women’s reproductive rights, in order to propose a political argumentation about women’s fundamental rights and reproductive justice issues in Ecuador and Latin America? If it is, could that fiction in anyway question and contest the legislation in force in order to re-right the rights law disregarded?
Through a feature-length screenplay and accompanying dissertation, artistic practice-led research interrogates several international human rights instruments, Constitutional law, Criminal Law and public policy in Ecuador, with regards to
women’s reproductive rights. The screenplay is the outcome of a particular sort of juridical hermeneutics; where the heuristic force Paul Ricœur recognizes in fiction allows the screenplay writer to re-present various juridical fictions regarding reproductive rights, shaped according to the Ecuadorian law, in the form of four female characters.
The research proposes a biopolitical trajectory in order to interrogate life as possibility, potentiality, and a female body as Bare Life. Dissenting fictions re-righting law renders visible how Ecuadorian law and its biopolitical enforcement strategies disenfranchise women. It ultimately introduces dissensus, as suggested by Jacques Rancière, as a tactic to re-right those rights law disregarded.