China and India, two countries with skewed sex ratios in favor of males, have introduced a wide range of policies over the past few decades to prevent couples from deselecting daughters, including criminalizing sex-selective abortion (SSA) through legal jurisdiction. This article aims to analyse how such policies are situated within the bio-politics of population control and how some of the outcomes reflect each government's inadequacy in addressing the social dynamics around abortion decision-making and the social, physical, and psychological effects on women's wellbeing in the face of criminalization of SSA. The analysis finds that overall, the criminalization of sex selection has not been successful in these two countries. Further, the broader economic, social, and cultural dynamics which produce bias against females must be a part of the strategy to combat sex selection, rather than a narrow criminalization of abortion which endangers women's access to safe reproductive health services and their social, physical, and psychological wellbeing.
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This article explores sex selective abortion (SSA) as a form of structural violence within the broader notion of women's 'protection' in contemporary India. While SSA tends to be framed more generally within ethical and choice-based frameworks around abortion access and reproductive 'rights' and specifically in India around preference for sons as a discriminatory, cultural, technological misogyny, this article argues that sex selective abortion in India needs to be understood as an outcome of broader systemic economic, political and social processes. The deepening of neoliberal values, economic processes, and state policies has impacted significantly on social relations which shape SSA as a manifestation of structural violence. State-driven policies in India reflect a neoliberal governmentality through state patriarchy which are implicit within the neoliberal developmental, governmental and capitalist paradigm of contemporary India. This article argues that SSA is structurally produced and therefore cannot be remedied through awareness-raising strategies such as 'beti bachao' or financial inclusion as a means to 'protect' or 'save the girl child'. Indeed, it is neoliberal economic forces which actively, though seemingly inadvertently, promote anti-women, sex selective abortion as a reproductive strategy which is then disciplined through neoliberal governmentality. This highlights SSA as a form of gendered and structural, rather than discriminatory, violence.
Developing a gendered understanding of the neoliberal state has been, not surprisingly, a preoccupation for much recent feminist praxis in the Global North and particularly in the Global South. Sustained activism and scholarship has addressed a wide variety of questions including the increased reproductive and productive labour demanded of women; the gendered effects of the privatisation of and dispossession from land, natural resources and public services; and the variegated and often apparently contradictory impacts of multiple incorporations into global
The 'girl child' has attracted a considerable amount of attention in India as an object of policy addressing gender discrimination. This article examines the field of campaigns seeking to address female foeticide and positions the public discourse on the 'girl child' and sex selective abortion in India within a broad cultural backdrop of son preference. The article argues that anti-female foeticide campaigns exist within a disciplinary domain of female foeticide which both generates a discourse of saving the 'girl child' and also shows attempts to utilise both incentives and punitive measures in carving out a female foeticide carceral space.
This article focuses upon the myth of the South Asian family as a self-fulfilling unit in which a construction of 'looking after their own' in the diaspora is perpetuated which intrinsically assumes how care and caring are organised at home. The Care in the Community agenda in Britain, which comes out of the contemporary neoliberal paradigm of austerity in which social welfare services have been dramatically cut and reformulated, utilises this imagined myth of the South Asian family in its judgments of the needs of South Asian women elders. Based on fieldwork at a South Asian women's centre in Britain, the article highlights how women's senses of self and selflessness relate to and reflect the neoliberal decline of welfare in which 'looking after their own' presents an ideal for policies which are rescinding delivery of services and entitlements. We highlight how South Asian women elders are absorbing the burdens of this social care paradigm shift while also bearing the strains of generational shifts around the culture of the family and expectations of women's roles as they move through the life course as carers and as those being cared for.
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