Imaginary Dystopias, Sex Selection, and the State
Son selection in India is a material and spectral field clamped between the familial domain and the unresolved contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. State actions and inaction vis a vis son selection are producing a range of subject positions – such as the
backward citizen, the blind traditional subject, the disempowered man – and are implicated in (trans)national demographic obsessions and dystopian imaginaries.
Kumkum Sangari worked as a UGC Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and is the William F. Vilas Research Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has published extensively on British, American and Indian literature, critical theory, religious conversion, medieval oral devotional traditions, nationalist figures such as Gandhi and Annie Besant, Bombay cinema and partition, televisual memory, contemporary feminist art practice as well as contemporary gender issues such as personal law, domestic labour, the beauty industry, sex selection, dowry, domestic violence, widow immolation and communal violence. She is the author of Politics of the Possible: Essays on gender, history, narratives, colonial English; the editor of Trace Retrace: Paintings, Nilima Sheikh; and the co-editor of Women and Culture, Recasting Women: Essays in colonial history, and From Myths to Markets: Essays on gender.