Four Heads, One 'Pussy': The Struggle for Bodily Autonomy and Reproductive Rights in the Work of the Feminist Artist Collective ZOiNA

In 1999, Ana Medeira, Carla Cruz, Catarina Carneiro de Sousa, and Isabel Carvalho founded ZOiNA, one of the first feminist artist collectives in Portugal. Through their fanzine Rata, the group tackled women's bodily autonomy connected to reproductive rights such as abortion, sexual education, reproductive healthcare, and women's access to menstrual hygiene. Using visual guerrilla, ZOiNA appropriated theoretical texts and images from visual arts and mainstream culture, along with their own drawings and collages, transforming feminist academic perspectives into activist slogans. Ultimately, ZOiNA played an important role in deconstructing stereotypes around women's sexuality and reproductive rights, confronting the conservative and Catholic norms prevalent in Porto's society. This chapter explores how ZOiNA dialogues with transnational feminist discourses, develops local visual expressions of feminist activism, and contributes to new forms of commonality, subjectivation, and agency via collective feminist art that challenges heteropatriarchal ideologies.