Mother India? Crossing Borders, Controlling Births

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What have been the consequences for the cross-border traffic of feminism, birth control, and maternal surrogacy between India and the United States? How can these histories, and contemporary practices, deepen current struggles around feminism, imperialism, capitalism and reproductive justice? Please join us for a conversation featuring Asha Nadkarni, author of Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India and Sharmila Rudrappa, author of Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India.

In Eugenic Feminism, Asha Nadkarni reveals connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s, demonstrating that both call for feminist citizenship centered on the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She contends that whenever feminists lay claim to citizenship based on women’s biological ability to “reproduce the nation” they are participating in a eugenic project—sanctioning reproduction by some and prohibiting it by others. Employing a range of sources from the U.S. and India, Nadkarni shows how the exclusionary impulse of eugenics is embedded within the terms of nationalist feminism.

Drawing from rich interviews with surrogate mothers and egg donors in Bangalore, as well as twenty straight and gay couples in the U.S. and Australia, Sharmila Rudrappa’s Discounted Life focuses on the processes of social and market exchange in transnational surrogacy. In her detailed and moving study, Rudrappa delineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries, how Bangalore’s surrogate mothers make sense of their participation in reproductive assembly lines, and the remarkable ways in which they negotiate positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socio-economic conditions.

This conversation will be moderated by Sujani K. Reddy, author of Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States.

Author Bio

Presented By:

Asha Nadkarni is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her B.A. in Gender and Women's Studies from Connecticut College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Brown University.

Prof. Nadkarni’s research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminist theory, U.S. empire studies, and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on the literatures and cultures of the South Asian diaspora. Her book, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation.

Prof. Nadkarni is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context.


Presented By:

Sharmila Rudrappa is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Asian American Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Prof. Rudrappa teaches on, and researches issues related to gender, race, and labor in the U.S. and India. She is author of Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India (New York University Press, 2015). She is also the author of Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2004).

Dr. Rudrappa's current research projects are on how markets develop in human materials, specifically from women's bodies, whether it is reproductive services such as pregnancy, breast milk, or human hair.