This thesis considers the ways in which women's bodies are at once objects of state population planning and subjects of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) discourse. By examining the everyday geographies of 29 women in Daultabad Village, India, it is possible to see the ways in which bodies become tools to negotiate sexual and reproductive desires, reshaping power relations related to SRH. The strategies employed by women in light of multiple and conflicting state and village discourses on SRH make visible the spaces of hope created by and with bodies. Women both reproduce and subvert village patriarchy, state planning and nationalism and in doing so foreground their bodies and the village in which they live as spaces of political action. This project draws upon interview-based research conducted by the author in India in 2005 as well as scholarly work on bodies, states, nationalism and sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing.
This volume presents the critical perspectives of feminists, critical race theorists, and queer and postcolonial theorists who question the adoption of European norms in the postcolonial world and whether such norms are enabling for disenfranchised communities or if they simply reinforce relations of domination and exploitation. It examines how postcolonial interventions alter the study of politics and society both in the postcolony and in Euro-America, as well as of the power relations between them. Challenging conventional understandings of international politics, this volume pushes the boundaries of the social sciences by engaging with alternative critical approaches and innovatively and provocatively addressing previously disregarded aspects of international politics. The fourteen contributions in this volume focus on the silencing and exclusion of vulnerable groups from claims of freedom, equality and rights, while highlighting postcolonial-queer-feminist struggles for transnational justice, radical democracy and decolonization, drawing on in-depth empirically-informed analyses of processes and struggles in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. They address political and social topics including global governance and development politics; neo-colonialism, international aid and empire; resistance, decolonization and the Arab Spring; civil society and social movement struggles; international law, democratization and subalternity; body politics and green imperialism. By drawing on other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, this book both enriches and expands the discipline of political science and international relations. Primary readership for this volume will be academics and students concerned with globalization studies, postcolonial theory, gender studies, and international relations, as well as political activists and policy-makers concerned with social and transnational justice, human rights, democracy, gender justice and women’s rights.
This book discusses the issues of inequality and marginalization in India. The first section of the book contextualizes sociological traditions for the scrutiny of subaltern discourse on discrimination. The chapters in the section explore self-identity, ‘margins’ in sociological traditions, subalternity and exclusion, citizenship issues of de-notified tribes, the role of religion for scheduled tribe Dalits and Ambedkar’s ideas on tribes. The second section deals with the political economy of higher education, health and employment. The efforts of BR Ambedkar and the consequences of those efforts, his critique of education policies during British time and its alteration for independent India have been meticulously dealt with. The third section illustrates an application of theoretical understanding through narratives of labour bondage in Varanasi, sanitation workers in Mumbai and rickshaw pullers in Delhi. The last section establishes that unequal access to resources is a consequence of discrimination and marginalization induced by social identities. The book argues for equitable access to resources and opportunities to ensure health equity. The audience for this publication includes academics, researchers, health professionals, policymakers engaged with discrimination, exclusion, marginalization and inequity in health.
This book explores and analyses women’s participation in local urban governance in West Bengal, India. It is developed from empirical research with in-depth understanding of ground situations of freedom, functioning and obstacles of women councilors in India. The central idea of this book revolves around two central research questions: 1. How are women’s positions and spaces changing due to their political participation in the urban local governance? and 2. What are the major hurdles they face in their day to day lives barring their emancipation? The main strength of the book lies in the in-depth grounded research in four small cities (Darjiling, Balurghat, Raniganj and Hugli-Chinsurah) using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. This volume can be considered as a reference book for Gender Studies, Women’s Studies, Urban Governance, Women and Policy Research, Gender Development Studies.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the discourse on health in India, examining governance, policies, programmes, and the involvement of the state and civil society in ensuring health for all and especially for people living with HIV/AIDS. The book critically examines government measures to improve healthcare services in India, specifically for disadvantaged groups like the poor and women who face several obstacles in accessing healthcare. It explores various aspects of healthcare accessibility, gender equity measures and strategies implemented by the state and highlights the significant contributions of civil society organizations and activists in shaping healthcare provisions, as well as their influence on the discourse surrounding health and HIV/AIDS. With a special study based on the author’s research on HIV-positive women in Karnataka (a high-prevalence state) and West Bengal (a low-prevalence state), and an examination of government policies, financial allocations, and relevant reports, this book fills a crucial gap in academic literature by offering a comprehensive analysis of health and governance in relation to HIV-positive women, in India. The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in public health, policy studies, community health, gender studies, sociology of health and illness, and Indian government and politics. It will also be useful for policymakers in the development of more effective and inclusive healthcare policies.
Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.
Set in the context of the processes and practices of human reproduction and reproductive health in Northern India, this book examines the institutional exercise of power by the state, caste and kin groups. Drawing on ethnographic research over the past eighteen years among poor Hindu and Muslim communities in Rajasthan and among development and health actors in the state, this book contributes to developing analytic perspectives on reproductive practice, agency and the body-self as particular and novel sites of a vital power and politic. Rajasthan has been among the poorest states in the country with high levels of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity. The author closely examines how social and economic inequalities are produced and sustained in discursive and on the ground contexts of family-making, how authoritative knowledge and power in the domain of childbirth is exercised across a landscape of development institutions, how maternal health becomes a category of citizenship, how health-seeking is socially and emotionally determined and political in nature, how the health sector operates as a biopolitical system, and how diverse moral claims over the fertile, infertile and reproductive body-self are asserted, contested and often realised. A compelling analysis, this book offers both new empirical data and new theoretical insights. It draws together the practices, experiences and discourse on fertility and reproduction (childbirth, infertility, loss) in Northern India into an overarching analytical framework on power and gender politics. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of medical anthropology, medical sociology, public health, gender studies, human rights and sociolegal studies, and South Asian studies.
Recent years have seen many changes in human reproduction resulting from state and medical interventions in childbearing processes. Based on empirical work in a variety of societies and countries, this volume considers the relationship between reproductive processes (of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period) on the one hand and attitudes, medical technologies and state health policies in diverse cultural contexts on the other. Maya Unnithan-Kumar is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research in the early 1990s focused on kinship and gender relations in northwest India and appeared as Identity, Gender and Poverty (Berghahn Books 1997).
