Harvesting Life: Agrarian Crisis, Urban Precarity and Working Class Women in Karnataka

• In Event: Good Days are Coming? Gendered Precarity in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

In the south Indian city of Bangalore construction workers receive $100 for selling their ova even though others receive $500. Who are these women who receive subpar remuneration for their eggs? These women are recent migrants from northern Karnataka, where crop failures because of GM seeds, mono-cropping, and state retrenchment has made rural life unsustainable. Unable to make living wages in Bangalore, they offer their bodies to be harvested of eggs. Though not representative of working class Indian women who vend their ova, these construction workers tell one story of how Third World women get caught up in bio-markets.

Presenter

• Sharmila Rudrappa, University of Texas at Austin