This dissertation analyzes archival materials to examine the relationship between reproductive governance in India and the political and scientific dynamics of the Cold War. In 1952, India became the first country to institute anti-natalist population control as a national policy goal, concentrating its efforts on female sterilization and the building of medical family planning clinics. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the state launched a series of mass communications campaigns on family planning and contraception targeted at men. While prior scholarship glosses over these campaigns as mere accompaniments to its medical efforts, the dissertation argues that they represented a radical transformation of reproductive control in response to Cold War-era social science. Furthermore, it shows how this shift in approach transformed a largely medicalized program focused on the bodies of women into a simultaneously ideological endeavor to influence the reproductive decisions of men. The dissertation makes three primary contributions to sociological scholarship on reproductive governance. First, in contrast to explanations of reproductive governance that center on national factors, the dissertation demonstrates the influence of global political and scientific dynamics on reproductive control. Relatedly, while prior scholarship understands the postwar institutionalization of population control as largely a response to concerns over economic growth measured in quantitative terms, the dissertation argues that it was also driven by social scientists’ anxieties over the viability of capitalist democracy. Finally, prior scholarship on reproductive control centers on the medicalized and biomedicalized management of women’s bodies, which leaves little room for understanding the erstwhile control of men’s reproduction in India. Expanding this literature, I show how, in the Indian case, social scientists’ framing of reproductive control in psychosocial and behavioralist terms allowed men to be imagined as germane targets of fertility regulation.

Last modified

• 10/21/2019

Creator

• Savina Balasubramanian

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4bav-1j14

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• Science and technology
• Reproductive governance
• Gender
• Family planning
• Population control
• India

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright