(Re)sketching the theorizing around “missing women”: imageries of the future, resistance, and materializing aspects of gender
By: Mona Lilja, Mikael Baaz and Filip Strandberg
Recent sex ratio data indicates that the number of “missing” (society defined) women and girls has reached approximately 200 million worldwide. The situation has evolved, mostly due to a combination of infanticide and feticide. Infanticide denotes the killing of babies at birth – primarily those with female genitals – and is practiced in India, China, and some other countries. This practice is, however, increasingly substituted by the practice of feticide; that is, sex-selective abortions, which are performed on a large scale globally.
As Zhen Guo, Monica Das Gupta and Shuzhuo Li (2016, 135) suggest, the specific sex-selection, which emerges from the preference to have sons rather than daughters could be understood as one of the “most striking manifestations of gender inequality” that currently exists. Still, how researchers and activists address the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals differs. Civil society activists we conducted interviews with in India promoted more radical strategies and often addressed the “missing women” in terms of an ongoing “gendercide”. Rita Banerji (author and the founder of the “50 Million Missing Campaign: Fighting Female Gendercide in India”) refers to the missing women as: “gendercide and femicide too, as all those terms apply to India. Though my main argument continues to be that this is more a genocide as per the UN Act.” (Banerji, personal conversation). Another of our respondents stated:
They know it is wrong to kill a baby girl. They know it, but they don’t reflect about it. We can start the thinking; this is what we must do. Those who do it aren’t bad or evil, they do it because they don’t put the questions together with the answers. To see, am I really doing this to my girl child? And to answer, this is not what I want to do. I think that we must raise awareness. This is the key. Maybe [the concept of] gendercide can do that. […] It is a social task, it is communication (Interview with founder of Indian NGO, 2 October 2020).
Feminist scholars in India and around the world, on the other hand, are concerned about the concept of gendercide, which, some argue, rely on an unproblematised notion of “perpetrators”. They also suggest that to restrict the access to sex-selective abortion would not only be operationally difficult but also curb women’s sexual and reproductive rights. In addition, many of them argue that the concept of gendercide should be avoided, since it has been co-opted by the anti-abortion movement.
Thus, the “missing women” and how to name and address them is a difficult issue that is still very much in need of our attention. A planned conference in Sweden in June 2020 – which was to include a gathering of, among others, Indian and Swedish activists, authors, lawyers and researchers alike to co-produce important knowledge on the phenomenon of the “missing women” – had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This was, needless to say, a great disappointment. However, while waiting for the conference to take place in 2022, we have reviewed previous literature on sex-selective practices and carried out interviews with Indian scholars, activists and lawyers via Zoom; this is an endeavor set out to understand how we, as scholars of law and global politics, could name and theorize the missing (born and unborn) bodies.
In our latest paper in IFJP (Re)sketching the theorizing around “missing women”: imageries of the future, resistance, and materializing aspects of gender we suggest two important aspects of the Indian situation. Firstly, we suggest that in order to understand different sex-selective practices, productive and materializing aspects of gender norms must be further interrogated. Secondly, we propose that previous research has failed to include a time aspect within its formulations of the “missing women”. With the exception of some interesting theorizing on time within queer studies, various time aspects have been curiously “hidden” in gender studies in general and gendercide studies in particular. However, if we do not acknowledge the imagined and often emotional encounters with the future – mainly on the part of parents or other family members who perform the sex-selective elimination of girls and female fetuses – we diminish our range of potential ways to redress the situation and understanding the motives the practice.
We further suggest that when rethinking the phenomenon of the “missing women”, pathways to change must also be reformulated. In the final part of our paper, we propose possible directions for a resistance against sex-selective practices. First of all, we propose that the “un-sticking” of representations from bodies must be seen as a critical path for resistance. Bodies with male and female genitals are nodes, which attract specific imaginaries. In the case of gendercide, the representation of “high dowry” sticks to babies with “female genitals”. The un-sticking of different figures, bodies and representations thereby prevails as an imaginable aim of resistance. Secondly, as queer scholars suggest, another resistance strategy could be to attempt to remove the future from the “now”. In addition, emotions, such as fear are interwoven with the imaginaries of having daughters. Emotion partakes in our understanding of the real, motivates belongings and suggests directions and actions. To resist sex-selective practices, the anxiety and other emotions, which fuel the elimination of certain bodies, must be addressed and provided with new directions.
Overall, by taking stock of existing research on resistance, time and gender, we suggest that resistance against sex-selective practices must be formulated in response to important aspects of the elimination of gendered bodies; temporal, emotional and materializing gendered discourses must be addressed in order to understand how sex-selective practices can be ruptured. In light of this, we suggest that future studies must be furthered, which provide novel insights into the ways in which we can make different time lapses, manage emotions and “un-stick” bodies from representations.
While the above provides some insights into the ongoing the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals, the paper does not claim to provide the final picture – it only aims to suggest a few patterns, thereby opening up the opportunity for further research and discussion on sex-selective practices. Thus, we are now looking forward to the above-mentioned conference at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in order to co-produce important knowledge around the reasons for, and possibilities to change, sex-selective practices. Please feel welcome to register and attend!
Read the full article here: (Re)sketching the theorizing around “missing women”: imageries of the future, resistance, and materializing aspects of gender
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Mona Lilja, professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Lilja’s area of interest is the linkages between resistance and social change as well as the particularities—the character and emergence—of various forms of resistance. Some of the Lilja’s papers have appeared in Signs, Feminist Review, Nora and Journal of Political Power.
Mikael Baaz is a full Professor in International Law as well as an Associate Professor in Political Science and an Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict studies. He works at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Baaz’ core research interest is various aspects of the international society, in particular international law and international criminal law as well as resistance and social change. He has, together with Professors Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen, written the book, Researching Resistance and Social Change: A Critical Approach to Theory and Practice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).
Filip Strandberg Hassellind is a doctoral candidate in international law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His primary research interest is genocide and international criminal law. His current research looks at the nexus between genocide, the concept of gendercide and resistance.