Author Meets Critics: On Infertile Ground and Gender Before Birth

Abstract

Furthering recent feminist discussions on the place of population in reproductive politics, this panel brings together authors and critics as discussants on two books that engage the historical legacies and contemporary permutations of population control. Exposing multiple, interacting, and implicit populationisms, this pair of books revive classic feminist critiques of population control. Rajani Bhatia argues that population control, which has always encompassed both quantitative and qualitative imperatives, continues to undergird new forms of selective reproductive practices. In Gender before Birth, Bhatia explores sex selection in a transnational context, taking on the double standard of how similar practices in the West and non-West are divergently named and framed. Bhatia argues that population control persists in familiar ways but also transmutes into new forms that no longer pathologize fertility. Rather, individuated subjects manage reproductive risks within markets not merely for the sake of controlling whether and when to have children but to transform individual and family identities and the experience of life itself. In On Infertile Ground, Jade Sasser explores how a network of scientists, political activists, and policymakers in international development work to (re)frame populationist narratives as socially just and woman-centered, particularly in the context of global environmental problems. The network focuses on addressing both climate change and contraceptive access through the concepts of women’s empowerment and environmental responsibility. Sasser argues that this dual framing undergirds the idea of women as sexual stewards, a model that represents neoliberal, instrumentalist assumptions about women’s embodied agency, environmental change, and social justice.

Chair

• Jade Sasser, University of California, Riverside

Discussants

• Chikako Takeshita, University of California, Riverside

• Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Carole McCann, UMBC

Session Organizer

• Rajani Bhatia, University at Albany, SUNY