Gender Before Birth: Sex Selection In A Transnational Context (feminist Technosciences)
by Rajani Bhatia hD /
2018 / English / PDF
8.3 MB Download
In the mid-1990s, the international community pronounced prenatal
sex selection via abortion an "act of violence against women" and
"unethical." At the same time, new developments in reproductive
technology in the United States led to a method of sex selection
before conception; its US inventor marketed the practice as "family
balancing" and defended it with the rhetoric of freedom of choice.
In
In the mid-1990s, the international community pronounced prenatal
sex selection via abortion an "act of violence against women" and
"unethical." At the same time, new developments in reproductive
technology in the United States led to a method of sex selection
before conception; its US inventor marketed the practice as "family
balancing" and defended it with the rhetoric of freedom of choice.
InGender before Birth
Gender before Birth, Rajani Bhatia takes on the double
standard of how similar practices in the West and non-West are
divergently named and framed.
, Rajani Bhatia takes on the double
standard of how similar practices in the West and non-West are
divergently named and framed.
Bhatia's extensive fieldwork includes interviews with clinicians,
scientists, biomedical service providers, and feminist activists,
and her resulting analysis extends both feminist theory on
reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. She
argues that we are at the beginning of a changing transnational
terrain that presents new challenges to theorized inequality in
reproduction, demonstrating how the technosciences often get
embroiled in colonial gender and racial politics.
Bhatia's extensive fieldwork includes interviews with clinicians,
scientists, biomedical service providers, and feminist activists,
and her resulting analysis extends both feminist theory on
reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. She
argues that we are at the beginning of a changing transnational
terrain that presents new challenges to theorized inequality in
reproduction, demonstrating how the technosciences often get
embroiled in colonial gender and racial politics.
