Historicising the agency of India’s reproductive subjects

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on female foeticide in India frames India’s reproductive subjects as incapable of exercising mastery over their bodies. This framing often questions Indian women’s exercise of reproductive agency within Indian patriarchy and views women as preferring sons. Such framing is problematic as it pays very little attention to India’s population control measures, which are steeped in India’s colonial history, and sets women up for tutelage, instead. In response, this essay using Foucault historicises influential theoretical approaches to population control based on three texts, originating in different historical and geographical locations, written by Thomas Malthus, Margaret Sanger and Amartya Sen. This analysis demonstrates how colonial contexts and history framed research in the past and continues doing so in the present. This study addresses the epistemological conditions of knowing female foeticide. Drawing on Butler’s notion of framing this essay argues that Indian women’s autonomy is framed both as passive − a masculinist position − and as ‘other’ − an Orientalist position. This essay also argues that this causal location of women then deflects attention from state policies which may be exacerbating such a practice and is not helping the Indian reproductive subject.