Disciplining the Sex Ratio:Exploring the Governmentality of Female Feticide in India

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

'Gendercide,' Abortion Policy, and the Disciplining of Prenatal Sex-selection in Neoliberal Europe

This article examines the contours of how sex-selective abortion (SSA) and ‘gendercide’ have been problematically combined within contemporary debates on abortion in Europe. Analysing the development of policies on the topic, we identify three ‘turns’ which have become integral to the biopolitics of SSA in Europe: the biomedical turn, the ‘gendercide’ turn, and the Asian demographic turn. Recent attempts to discipline SSA in the UK and Sweden are examined as a means of showing how the neoliberal state in Europe is becoming increasingly open to manoeuvres to undermine the right to abortion, even where firm laws exist

Between Returns and Respectability: Parental Attitudes towards Girls' Education in Rural Pakistan

This article focuses upon perceptions of girls’ education in the family context within which decisions around children’s education and opportunities are made. The article presents a framework showing how parental attitudes to girls’ education are shaped by an objective logic framed by the notion of returns, relating to potential benefits of daughters’ education, and respectability, relating to girls’ modesty and threats that education may present to normative expectations for girls. Drawing upon data collected in 2011 in rural areas of the districts of Faisalabad (Jaranwala town) and Chiniot (Tehsil Chiniot) in the province of Punjab, the study highlights how assumptions around the liberating effects of education implicit in global education programmes fail to take into account cultural values around gender norms that are central to informing parental attitudes towards their daughters’ prospects for education

Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception

This collection contributes to debates, which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. However, rather than focusing on the terms of the debate, it foregrounds the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, paying particular attention to the ‘state of exception’ and similar frameworks. In doing so, contributors to this collection trouble the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, it provides an approach, which allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analyses of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation

Beyond the Spectacle of Malala: A Critique of the Bandwagon of Girls? Education

The plight of third world girls has yet again emerged as an imperative to promote education as a liberating tool in the symbol of Malala Yousafzai. The symbol of Malala does not exist in a vacuum and reveals how important it is to look beyond the spectacle. The broader global geo-politics of the ‘war on terror’ and the privatisation of education at all levels are implicit in how the symbol of Malala is circulating since her shooting in 2012 in Pakistan

To be friends

This CD features Bhai Ghulam Muhammad Chand, an accomplished and widely appreciated exponent of the rababi tradition. Born in 1927 in Raja Sansi (near Amritsar), Bhai Chand accompanied his father and uncle who performed at Harmandir Sahib as well as other historical gurdwaras across Punjab such as Nankana Sahib, Panja Sahib and Chheharta Sahib through the 1930s and 1940s

Five myths about the partition of British India – and what really happened

This August marks 75 years since the partition of the Indian subcontinent. British withdrawal from the region prompted the creation of two new states, India and Pakistan. The process of transferring power grossly simplified diverse societies to make it seem like dividing social groups and drawing new borders was logical and even possible. This decision unleashed one of the biggest human migrations of the 20th century when more than ten million people fled across borders seeking safe refuge. Anniversaries can be a critical moment to pause and reflect on the passage of time, and reexamine history. Partition is widely seen as the outcome of seemingly irreconcilable differences and inherent religious tension in south Asia. Three-quarters of a century later it’s time to reassess some of the established historical accounts. Myths have been established around this history based on false assumptions. Here we examine five of them

South Asian women elders and everyday lives of ‘care in the community’ in Britain: the neoliberal turn in social care and the myth of the family

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 judgements 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

Population Control and Sex Selective Abortion in China and India: A Feminist Critique of Criminalization

This chapter outlines some of the key concerns with criminalising sex-selective abortion (SSA) in China and India, highlighting that it offers no identifiable options for sustainable, women-centred, progressive change. Instead, the criminalisation of SSA sits firmly within other forms of carceral feminism. Framing SSA as ?female foeticide,? ?femicide,? or ?gendercide? is problematic, as such terms advance arguments for limiting women?s access to safe abortion through the indication and synonymisation of abortion with the notion of killing. Such a conflation of abortion and killing runs many risks in compromising the long struggles of feminist movements globally to defend access to safe abortion. While representing different ideological regimes, in both contexts, criminalising SSA has contributed to and bolstered the assertion of state power but without the feminist structural analysis of what generates son preference and daughter aversion