De/Politicization as resistance

ABSTRACT

Resistance is often depicted in terms of antagonism, in which its core is the politicization of different issues or identities. This paper, however, seeks to add to previous research by displaying how depoliticization could also be understood as a form of resistance. Depoliticization has previously been addressed in the Social Sciences as a power tactic. But, by bringing insight from, as well as illuminating, the ‘missing women’ situation in India, we suggest that depoliticization could also be considered a tactical form of dissent.

KEYWORDS:

• Depoliticization
• resistance
• absences
• missing women
• India

1. Introduction

Resistance are often depicted in scholarly texts as mainly adversarial and antagonistic practices (See e.g. Hollander and Einwohner 2004, Courpasson et al. 2012, Lilja 2021). At the core of many accounts of resistance is the politicization of different issues or identities. These – often composite and fruitful – understandings of resistance could, however, be added to by other perceptions in order to broaden our understanding of dissent, widely defined. In this paper we would like to suggest that stories, which connect resistance to depoliticization, can contribute to increase our awareness of the limits of the existing social science scholarship and, by extension, widen the view of political performances within emancipatory actions.

In what follows, we elaborate on the concept of depoliticization as resistance, by contrasting it to the concept of politicization and by bringing insight from, as well as illuminating, the ‘missing women’ situation in India. As a tactic, depoliticization has been critically interrogated by scholars of radical democracy, who have accused different movements of applying ‘depoliticizing’ communication strategies in order to overcome societal politicization and encourage social consensus, which leads to the inhibiting of public engagement (Swyngedouw 2007, 2010, Schmidt 2020, Zulianello and Ceccobelli 2020). These scholars argue that the way in which some movements primarily bring up scientific, technical, and managerial issues, holds back a critical discussion of society, and stifles different imaginary utopias. This is an interesting point, still, we would like to suggest that this disentangling of depolitical processes is somewhat unsatisfying and too limited. When analyzing different debates regarding the Indian ‘missing women’, it appears that the concept of ‘depoliticization’ should be connected to the concept of ‘resistance’ in order for it all to make sense.

There is a slight discrepancy in regard to how many women that are currently estimated to be missing worldwide. According to Bongaarts and Guilmoto (2015), the number of missing females has risen by 38 million (43%) since 1990 to 126 million in 2010, and they project the number to increase further and reach 150 million by 2035 (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). According to European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM), however, the number of women that are demographically ‘missing’ from the world’s population has currently increased to almost 200 million women and girls (FEMM 2013). China and India have by far the largest number of missing girls, and in 2010 India counted 43 million and the number has been increasing significantly since then (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). In response to the ‘missing’ women, the United Nations (UN) experts have recently called for urgent action to end the ‘pandemic of femicide and violence against women’.¹ Society activists and feminist scholars in India have, however, expressed different views on how we should resist the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. Among other things, the politicization of the ‘missing women’ has created a depoliticizing resistance; thus, both politicizing and depoliticizing tactics will be dis-cussed in the analysis, however, with a particular focus on the latter practice.

Displaying depoliticization as resistance, this paper address three questions: (i) How does depoliticizing resistance against the discourses and practices of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals in India unfold in relation to practices of politization; (ii) What are the key features of this politicizing and depoliticizing resistance; and (iii) Why does this resistance make sense in the Indian context? Departing from these questions, the ongoing resistance against the practices and discourses of the ‘missing women’ in India, broadens our understanding of resistance. This, in turn, enables us to start envisaging new directions in the paradigm of the Social Sciences that display the friction and struggle between ‘new’ and often different forms of resistance.

In terms of material and method, the paper, draws upon civil society websites, research articles, review policy papers, newspaper articles and alike, which present different standpoints regarding the lack of expected-to-exist bodies.² By this, the paper also, at least indirectly, adds to the method literature that revolves around the ‘negative’; that is, ‘the gaps, voids, and hollows of knowledge production’ around the missing fetuses and bodies with female genitals (Navaro 2020, p. 161). This means that we will approach the missing women as an absence, which in different ways informs the ‘now’ and our political processes. The concepts of absence(ness), have been central to the power debates since the 1960s (e.g. Bachrach and Baratz, 1962, Crenson 1971), but has, more or less, been absent in the resistance literature. In what follows, the concept of absence will be employed to illuminate depoliticization as resistance.

2. What can we know about the ‘missing women’ in India?

In a widely cited paper, Amartya Sen (1990) shed light upon the ‘missing women’ – females who would be alive in the absence of sex discrimination (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). Due to the technological developments of the 1980s and 1990s, Sen did not mention prenatal sex selection. However, over the recent decades prenatal sex diagnosis and access to sex-selective abortion have become increasingly available, which has resulted in the rise of skewed sex ratios in Asian countries since Sen’s article (See further Hudson and den Boer 2004, Attané and Guilmoto 2007, Guilmoto 2012, Bongaarts 2013, Eklund and Purewal 2017). Today, the high number of ‘missing women’ is due to, as pointed out by Bongaarts and Guilmoto (2015), a combination of ‘two distinct phenomena – prenatal and postnatal gender discrimination – that are responsible for the loss of females’ (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015).

Prenatal sex selection grew rapidly after 1990 and is found in countries such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, China, India, and Vietnam; that is, countries with a strong son preference, and ready access to prenatal diagnosis (Guilmoto 2009). In regard to the prenatal discrimination, Bongaarts and Guilmoto (2015) conclude that the global annual number of missing female births rose from near zero in the late 1970s to more than one million per year in the period after 1990. After that it increased extensively, reaching 1.6 million per year from 2005 to 2010. India and China accounted for 90% of this total.

When it comes to postnatal discrimination, it has been estimated that the total number of excess female deaths ranged between 1.7 and 2 million deaths per year during the period of 1970 to 2010. From the late-2000s and onwards, the number seems to have gradually declined. As stated by Bongaarts and Guilmoto (2015), this downturn is probably related to the rise of prenatal sex selection during the 1980s (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015).

Thus, parents are increasingly relying on sex-selective abortion to avoid getting daughters. However, we do not know to what precise degree sex-selective abortion has been replaced or complements postnatal excess mortality, as reliable data is unavailable (Hausfater and Hrdy 2008a). The current scholarship on the ‘missing women’ situation describes the situation in terms of ‘lack of trustworthy sources’ and states that data ‘indicates’ patterns from which we can ‘assume’ the accuracy of the composition between prenatal sex selection and postnatal excess mortality (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). For example, Bongaarts and Guilmoto argue that the UN’s SRB (sex ratio at birth) estimates are ‘reflecting a lack of trustworthy sources of the exact level of birth masculinity’ and they ‘assume … that sex-selective abortion was not practiced until 1980’ (Grech et al. 2003, Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). They also state that ‘(e)xcess mortality among females is often difficult to estimate for want of reliable age- and sex-specific mortality rates in many developing countries’ (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). Concluding that some statistical variables are uncertain, they still argue that the global number of missing females has risen continuously from 61 million in 1970 to 126 million in 2010 and is expected to rise further in the coming decades (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). This, as stated above, means that in India, there has been an increase in ‘missing bodies’ from the 43 million counted in 2010 (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015). In 2018, a finance ministry report concluded that 63 million women were ‘missing’ from India’s population primarily due to sex-selective abortions or that more care was given to boys (B.B.C. News, 29 January 2018).³

3. Absences and the ‘missing women’

this paper is inspired by a hypothetical comparative counterfactual reasoning as well as by what is known as a ‘negative methodology’ (Navaro 2020, p. 161) and, by extension, probe specific ways in which absences could be understood in political discourses. However, before discussing how these missing and absent fetuses and bodies with female genitals are currently addressed in political undertakings, we will make a detour around the notion of absences. The way in which we engage with and conceptualize absences is part of how we are ‘doing’ politics.

Absences should not only be embraced as a dichotomy between the present and the absent – the relationship between what is here and what is not here is more complex than that (Bille et al. 2010). For example, hyper-visible representations of cultural heritage often prevail as cultural heritage is destroyed or missing. Some examples of this are the disseminated images of destroyed cultural landmarks in Syria since war began in 2011, or the numerous articles that describe how relentless looting strikes stripped the cultural value of the art of the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia. As these events and undertakings come into spotlight the missing and absent becomes visible and present.

Existential and post-structural philosophy have also embraced the complex relationship between the present and the absent (Bille et al. 2010). Michel Foucault, among others, understood what is here as defined by what is excluded (not here), and the missing, then, becomes present by its absence. In addition, as is pinpointed by Foucault: ‘the epistemic agency that subjects have within a discursive practice is such that their knowledge and ignorance are co-constituted: their epistemic lucidity and their epistemic blindness go hand in hand, mutually supporting each other. As another epistemologist of ignorance’ (Medina 2011). Similarly, Bleiker (1998, p. 489) has suggested that ‘every process of revealing is at the same time a process of concealing’.

Absence is also to be seen as a key dimension in Jean-Paul Sartre’s exploration of negation (2020 [1943]), in which he expands on a planned meeting with ‘Pierre’, who is expected to come to a café but fails to show up. Sartre argues that the inventory – the tables, chairs, mirrors, and people – of the café disappear as he directs his attention towards Pierre’s absence: ‘In fact Pierre is absent from the whole café; his absence fixes the café in its evanescence’ (p. 34). In this case, the absent things make present things disappear. Focusing on what is not there, ‘hides’ everything that is invisible from that vantage point (Bille et al. 2010, Lilja 2021). Thus, the knowing and non-knowing and the visible and non-visible couplets, together contribute to what we know?

The expectations of what should be there but are materially absent, influence people’s experience of the material world. Or as stated by Bille et al. (2010, p. 4), there is an ‘ambiguous interrelation between what is there and what is not’ and ‘absences are cultural, physical and social phenomena that powerfully influence people’s conceptualizations of themselves and the world they engage with’ (See also Sum and Jessop 2013). For example, the ‘missing women’ add to, as well as inform, the binary categories men-women, living-dead and they thereby impact on how ‘the real’ is comprehended and understood.

Moreover, some bodies, buildings and practices are invisible – or become absent – in relation to asymmetrical power relations and/or politicized issues (Mowatt et al. 2013). In the case of the ongoing elimination of a specific sort of fetus or body, the absence of the fetus/body sheds light on norms that become hypervisible. In addition, Bille et al. (2010) point out that these kinds of absences often become a source of desire, objects of longing and thereby driving forces and the motivation for action (Fuery 1995, Bille et al. 2010). It is how these motivations, longings and actions take shape, and why, that are elaborated below from a resistance perspective.

Absences then inform what we tend to and long for as well as our political processes. In this, as we now know, there is a relationship or an overlap between the present and the absent, and we need to research the specific ways that absences are framed and have a bearing on social processes. In the Indian debate, the missing fetuses and bodies with female genitals indicate perpetrators as well as links to other discourses such as the anti-abortion movement. As these associations are made, the resistance becomes influenced by discourses that already exist (e.g. about abortion, genocide, etc.). This is noticeable in the two main resistance strategies that we have distinguished through analyzing the current debate on the ‘missing’ women, namely: politicization and depoliticization, respectively.

In what follows, we will address how knowledge emerges and revolves around the missing women in India, although, in different ways. While some civil society actors try to politicize the issue, others rather want to depoliticize the question. While politicization is politics through emphasizing the absence of the fetuses/bodies, the depoliticizing can be seen as a resistance tactic that is applied in order to protect Indian women.

4. De/Politicization as resistance tactics

As stated above, resistance has often been read as antagonistic practices that emerge from the politicization of different issues or identities. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to politicize (e.g. an absence) implicates, among other things, making an issue political,⁴ which in turn, we suggest, involves making this issue visible, socially, and politically important, and emotionally engaging. The other side of the coin is depoliticization, which has been drawn on to illuminate interventions that are presented as apolitical (Jung et al. 2023). In International Relations and Development Studies, the concept has been deployed to e.g. reveal how the machinery of ‘international’ and ‘local’ actors are often dressed in an apolitical appearance. Among others, James Ferguson (1990) notes the operations of, what he labels, the ‘anti-politics machine’, which works to reformulate political issues, such as poverty, into technical ones that need to be addressed in technical terms. Depoliticization, according to such an understanding, involves the invocation of narrative or preference shaping. Discursive claims are made to establish certain truths, which correspond to certain political positions (e.g. Flinders and Buller 2006). In this regard, Mary Douglas (2000) emphasizes how a dominant rationality can be (silently) constructed while, simultaneously, other options or possibilities are systematically deleted from public discourse. A tactic here is to present normative judgements as a neutral rationality. In line with this, different narratives, such as the apolitical images of victimhood that are often presented by humanitarian actors, can be understood to ‘preserve social order’ (Carpi 2020, p. 145, Pallister-Wilkins 2022, Facon 2022, Jung 2022, Jung et al. 2023).

Depoliticizing processes, techniques and instruments have real implications in that they shape how problems are formulated and solved and to whom financial support is forwarded. It is a particular way to ‘produce “problems” with meanings that affect what gets done or not done, and how people live their lives’ (Bacchi 2009, Bletsas and Beasley 2012, p. 22). Depoliticizing tactics could thus be understood as political tactics, which distinguish themselves from other strategies, in which actors, for example, actively and visibly politicize certain issues for their own, or others, benefit.

Depolitical communication has also, as stated above, been critically interrogated by the scholarship of radical democracy, who have accused the climate movement of advancing different ‘depoliticizing’ communication strategies in order to overcome societal politi-cization and encourage social consensus, and thereby inhibiting public engagement (See e.g. Swyngedouw 2007, 2010, 2013, Swyngedouw and Ernstson 2018, Schmidt 2020, Zulianello and Ceccobelli 2020). If civil society embraces climate change as a primarily scientific, technical, and managerial issue, it has been argued, it holds back a critical discussion of society and stifles different imaginary utopias. Thereby, Greta Thunberg’s rhetoric, Erik Swyngedouw (2007, 2010) argues, paves the way for a technocratic development that threatens democracy (See also Schmidt 2020, Zulianello and Ceccobelli 2020, p. 630). According to the aforementioned Swyngedouw as well as Amanda Machin (2013), environmental and climate policies are particularly clear cases of post-political control, where conflicts are smoothed over and consensus is sought through constant reference to science and by launching concepts such as ‘sustainable development’, which no one can really oppose. According to them, ‘the political’ is always conflict-filled, antagonistic, and all signs of consensus are an expression of a ‘hegemonic articulation’, which ‘always has an “outside” that prevents its full realization’ (Mouffe 2005, p. 33). In line with Chantal Mouffe (2005, p. 9), they regard the political as a space for ‘power, conflict and antagonism’ and post-politics or even post-democracy as strategies for (neo-liberal) domination. Acknowledging the link between depoliticization and power outlined above, we would like to emphasize also other connections.

By bringing insight from the ‘missing women’ in India, we in this paper analyzes strategies of politicization and depoliticization as resistance, which is sometime contaminated with power. As is displayed below, different subject positions and hierarchies have played a vital role for how these resistance strategies have emerged. We frame politicization and depoliticization as resistance tactics (Knox 2010 . See also, p. 193, See also Schwöbel-Patel 2021, p. 246). As a ‘tactic’, the resistance can arguably repaint the political landscape in a specific setting, albeit temporarily; but as a sole movement, it might risk collapsing into the status quo (Schwöbel-Patel 2021, p. 247).

5. De/Politicizing strategies in India against the ‘missing women’ situation

In what follows we will turn more concrete and, in order, discuss politicizing and depoliticizing strategies in India against the ‘missing women’ situation.

5.1. Politicizing strategies

Politicization, as we now know, means making an issue political, which involves several dimensions, such as showing and mobilizing an emotional commitment in favor of a particular issue. In regard to the ‘missing women’, this is clearly reflected in our data – everywhere (in different ops and websites), we come across the call that something must be done: the government must act, we must donate, et cetera. Moreover, a number of distinctive strategies of politicization surfaced in the data material. Among other things, several of the civil society websites suggested a pervasive use of the concept(s) of gendercide, foeticide or infanticide in order to encourage people to enact agency. One Indian organization states on their website:

Female foeticide is one extreme manifestation of violence against women – a social problem that is now spreading unchecked across the country. Female foetuses are selectively aborted after pre-natal sex determination, thus denying girls a ‘Right to Life’ which is the first right given to all children by the UN Rights of the child 1989. In India where female infanticide has existed for centuries, now female foeticide is on an upswing.⁵

Likewise, the founder of a Haryana-based non-governmental organization (NGO) cherishes the usage of the concept of gendercide as a tool of resistance:

Because the thing is, people have the answers. They have the questions too. But we need to put them together. 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 word] ‘gendercide’ can do that. […] It is a social task, it is communication.⁶

The two quotations indicate that there might be some political advantages with using concepts such as ‘feticide’, ‘infanticide’ or ‘gendercide’. For example, the concept of gendercide, when deployed, ‘creates an obvious semantic corollary to the much-abused term “‘genocide’’ (Carpenter 2002, p. 80). Using the word could be seen as a call for political undertakings to prevent the elimination of gendered bodies and fetuses. The linguistic associations that are created between the concepts indicate that the widespread sex-selective elimination of girls, women and female fetuses could/should be handled with more general strategies for opposing mass-killings.

While the concept of ‘gendercide’ is not a legal concept, it still emerges as a legally informed tactic. Moreover, the concept is to be seen as a hybrid social construction where different signs assemble in unexpected ways (e.g. gender and -cide) and thereby shake the existing knowledge and open up for other ways of thinking. This, according to Mary Anne Warren (1985, p. 22), is because: ‘(t)he term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice’. Thus, by letting gendercide rephrase the concept of genocide, and merging both ‘gender’ and ‘−cide’ into one, the language usage aims to bring the ‘missing women’ into a political issue.

Thus, by letting gendercide rephrase the concept of genocide, the language usage aims to bring the ‘missing women’ into a political issue. The politicization involves drawing attention to the missing bodies/ fetuses – bringing them into the spotlight. The absences of the missing become present and affect us here and now. To understand this tactic of politicization, we can return to Sartre’s exploration of negation (2005[1943]) – other issues are given a backseat as the civil society directs its attention towards the absence of the bodies/fetuses.

Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group – among other things, it involves killing members of the group or imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. The term was coined by Raphaël Lemkin (See e.g. Lemkin 1944, 1947), who combined geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. This social construction received institutional legal validation on 9 December 1948, when the UN approved a written international agreement known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that, among other things, contained an obligation to prevent genocides.⁷ This probably explains why the concept of genocide is often used to illuminate the ‘missing’ bodies and the issue of son preference: ‘The missing women and the son preference in India is a genocide, happening now’.⁸

To associate the ‘missing women situation’ with genocide, frame the eliminations of these bodies/fetuses in a very specific way, which urges us to act. It is a highly politicizing practice that also suggests the existence of perpetrators and victims. For example, on the website of Rita Banerji’s campaign, 50 Million Missing, the missing women issue is addressed together with words, such as murders, infanticides and feticides and the movement aims to:

… lobby for Governmental and international action to stop this genocide: We want to have the government of India commit to a time-line within which India’s female genocide will be contained, and all associated practices like dowry, dowry murders, infanticides and feticides eradicated. [Please support our petition for this demand].⁹

The websites describes an absence and a longing for something that is expected to be there: the word ‘missing’ brings our thoughts to a loss and points towards an unnaturalness and a change of normality. The word ‘murders’ suggest someone committing a murder. In this narrative, there is intent (cf. Mittal et al. 2013, on the gendered discrimination see also Krishna et al. 2019, Nanda 2018).This rhetoric creates an equivalence between the missing women under the particular category of genocide and equate the case with other cases – Germany and Rwanda – that have already been acknowledged as crimes against humanity. It is about a type of repetition, where the situation of India is constructed as a ‘repeat’ of other previous cases. Nazi Germany, Rwanda and the Indian gendercide do reiterate the same phenomenon, according to this narrative. The repetition is done by claiming that there is a similarity between different cases. It is a politicization by association, a repetitive echoing, and a claim for similarities., which is made possible through the association with other crimes that have been fought politically and militarily.

The politization through repetition, also take other routes. This can be illustrated by one Indian organization, Snehalaya, which, on its website, suggest that: ‘Violence against women includes foeticide, infanticide, medical neglect, child marriages, bride burning, sexual abuse, forced marriage, rape, prostitution and sexual harassment at home and the workplaces and their abusers include in laws as well as partners’.¹⁰ The quotation lists different acts that, according to the webpage, fall under the same category of ‘violence’ and have the same origin. Bride burning, rape and infanticide are merged into one category, which calls for a certain understanding of the phenomenon of the ‘missing’ women. By creating an equivalence between the terms, they socially construct a normatively negative meaning to the term as a rhetorical political tactic (Lilja and Lilja 2018).

The usage of words, such as gendercide and genocide, also suggests an emotional narrative of lives that are attributed low value. This can be illustrated by the webpage of the Bhai Ghanayya Ji Charitable Trust, which was established in 1993 and presents itself as an organization that looks after ‘unwanted, unclaimed, or orphan children whom society shuns’. On its website it suggests:

The baby girls are found by roadsides, dumped by running water, or even left during the night in the baby cradle outside the home … restore them their due place in society is a very hard task that required a mass, social effort. Prakash Kaur is mother to 60 abandoned girls. She’s given them a life to look forward to; when their own parents wished them death.¹¹

The usage of words, such as ‘their own parents wished them death’, ‘abandoned’, and ‘dumped’, creates emotional effects and also an empathy for the ‘nearly missing’ inhabitants of our Earth. Our meeting with these precarious, but ‘saved’, bodies, through this emotional call‚ molds us as spectators and political subjects in the present. It is an emotional tactic that may have a range of effects on political and social relations (Pain 2009). The texts also, as do many other similar texts on the websites of organizations, encourage us to act or donate.

5.2. Depoliticizing strategies

In the above section, we suggested that the websites politicize the missing women; the ‘problem representation’ addresses the missing women in terms of genocide and gendercide, often with an emotional touch. However, the narratives around the ‘missing women situation’ are infused with plurality and complexly, and multiple claims on truth. A competing narrative in regard to the ‘missing women’ does not connect these fetuses and bodies with female genitals to genocides, but rather the opposite. The concept of gendercide has been criticized by scholars such as Navtej Purewal and Lisa Eklund (2018), who suggest that it has been co-opted by the anti-abortion movement as well as populist and conservative political forces. According to Purewal and Eklund (2018, p. 730) sex-selective abortion should not be regarded as an act of gendercide, while this implies that it is ‘an act of killing’. Indeed, many ‘missing’ girls are missing not because they were eliminated after birth but rather because they were never born. Sex-selection practices include, among others, sex-selective abortion, or sex selection of an embryo prior to implantation, which cannot be equated with infanticide.

Nivedita Menon (2012) sketches a complicated relationship between selective abortions of female fetuses and abortion. She reconstructs how the women’s movement in India has struggled with the dilemma since the late 1980s.¹² While most feminists support the unconditional rights of women to safe and legal abortions, many Indian feminists have successfully campaigned for legislation restricting sex testing during pregnancy. Still, since the Preconception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (PCPND, Prohibition of Sex Selection) came into effect in 1994, the sex ratio at birth has continued to fall, showing that sex-selective abortion continues to be unchecked and the instances of selective abortion of female fetuses are rising.¹³

Menon states that government initiatives to address what has come to be called the ‘skewed sex ratio’ have increasingly taken forms that threaten to restrict access to abortion itself (Menon 2012). In 2011, Indian feminists protested loudly against the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, who suggested that ‘female feticide’ should be treated as murder. A letter to the Speaker of the Assembly, signed by hundred signatories stated that abortion should not be referred to as ‘feticide’, which has anti-abortion implications:

This is because feminists generally support the unconditional rights of women to safe and legal abortions. We see this as necessary because pregnancy and child-rearing are for all practical purposes, the sole responsibility of women. We should therefore, have the right to choose when and under what circumstances we will bring a child into the world, for we should be able to control what happens to our bodies and to our lives. The right to safe and legal abortion is an essential right of self-determination. (Menon 2012)

The letter further suggested that a murder charge will increase illegal abortions and also make access to safe abortions difficult for women. This will burden an already vulnerable group, who already have limited reproductive rights. Menon acknowledges that ‘Sex selection in favor of the boy child is a symptom of devaluation of female lives’ (Menon 2012, cf., Menon 1995) but suggests that instead of focusing on the crime of ‘feticide’, we must point our attention to the socioeconomic hierarchies and factors that evoke the skewed child sex ratio. In addition, the PCPNDT Act should be enforced, by the monitoring of sex-selective procedures. Overall, the argumentation suggests that ‘[t]he monitoring of sex-determination tests is one thing, but it is quite another to monitor abortions themselves’. At the same time, Menon concludes, that many women in India ‘choose’ sex-selective abortion under the pressure of their husbands’ families (Menon 2012).

The way in which Menon and others, actively draw the attention away from the ‘missing women’ to ‘socioeconomic hierarchies’, could be understood as a way to depoliticize the discourses around the missing women. In addition, addressing the ‘absent’ women in terms of ‘enforcing the PCPNDT Act’ and ‘monitoring of sex-selective procedures’ could be understood as turning a political issue into a primarily technical and managerial issue, which tones down the emotional engagement with the issue and stifles popular engagement. This depoliticizing happens in dialogue with, or as a response to, the politicization of the issue by other parts of the civil society but also by the “state feminism”.

Menon states that ‘female feticide’ was a term repeatedly used by the Indian feminists until it was adopted by anti-abortion Christian right-wing factions in the US and elsewhere. Menon, and other Indian feminists along with her, also suggest that the selective abortion should be labelled abortions, and political undertakings should instead be directed by a consistent feminist politics against ‘marriage itself and more importantly, question the necessary framing of motherhood within discourses of hetero-patriarchal legitimacy’ (Menon 2012, see also Kaur and Kapoor 2021). In this narrative, the absent fetuses and bodies with female genitals are downplayed in order to illuminate situations of different asymmetrical power relations. The absent fetuses and bodies with female genitals (now and in the future) take a backseat for living and present women. This ‘depoliticization’ of the sex-imbalance, could be seen as a tactical response to strong relations of power. In addition (Purewal and Eklund 2018), suggest that ‘the Asian examples of India and China, in particular, have been used in order to transpose an argument against abortion as a ‘choice’, particularly in contexts where diasporic communities from those countries are branded as ‘deviant aborters’’.

The feminist argumentation summarized above could then be seen as resistance through a depoliticizing of the Indian skewed sex-balance. Words that connect the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals to a crime are avoided and the spotlight is directed elsewhere. The letter to the Speaker of the Assembly pleas for a particular narrative that corresponds to a certain political position. Apolitical images of perpetrators are presented, which, in one sense, tend to preserve the current order. It is a form of resistance, or political tactic, in which the actors try to depoliticize certain issues in order to protect what is considered an already vulnerable group: Indian women. The tactic can be seen as ‘constructive resistance’, which is not only against something but also suggests how the problem should be formulated and solved otherwise (See further e.g. Baaz et al. 2017). This resistance politics should be seen as imbricated in the feminist conversations in India. It is also a tactic that is claimed to be coming from a particular subject position and gains power from that position: Indian feminists talking for Indian women.

Considering the above, the tension between knowing and not knowing, and what becomes hidden in the process of knowledge-making becomes interesting. Menon and others, while keeping the concept of feticide visible, still suggest that the gendercide/feticide discussion should be silenced. In their narrative, they draw attention away from some perspectives, which they aim to conceal from the specific vantage point that they promote.

6. Concluding reflections

To politicize, means to make something or someone political. Politicizing an issue could be seen as a type of constructive resistance, which produces (alternative) knowledge that is emphasized as important and sometimes framed in emotional modes. In the case of the missing fetuses and bodies with female genitals in India, one civil society strand uses the rhetorical tactic of politicizing the absence, through associating it with the notion of genocides. The politicization takes place through repetitions and by affectively resonant stories, which aim to evoke political subjects and encourage people to ‘do something’ (for a discussion on resonance see Rosa 2019).

However, that which is hidden, not known, and non-visible in the knowledge production is also important. When analyzing the narratives of Indian feminists and scholars, the depoliticization of the ‘missing’ women appears as a form of resistance through ‘concealing’ and suppressing certain discourses. Depoliticizing, in the above analysis, implies that issues are actively hidden as a form of feminist dissent. This hiddenness also sculpts what we come to know. Practices of hiding then prevail as part of a depoliticizing resistance. Overall, knowing and not knowing, and the visible and the absent are important dimensions of resistance.

Depoliticization has previously been explored as a site of power (Swyngedouw 2007, 2010, Schmidt 2020, Zulianello and Ceccobelli 2020. Cf. Bachrach and Baratz 1962). Both the aid sector and climate-change activism have been accused of being relational spaces, in which there has been a circulation, and consumption of apolitical, scientific, and technical narratives. These circulate through a process of collective production and hold back a critical discussion of society and other possible imaginary utopias. We suggest, however, that depoliticizing different issues should not only be seen as a societal construction of power but also as a divergent political path of resistance that interacts and clashes with other more politicized forms of resistance and the ones in power.

Overall, the responses against the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals have gone hand-in-hand with different imageries and norms. Opening up this discussion not only helps us rethink change processes but also the friction between different change strategies. Departing from this, we argue that analyzing the ongoing resistance against the practices and discourses of the ‘missing women’ in India, broadens our understanding of resistance. This, in turn, enables us to start envisaging new directions in the paradigm of the social sciences. We must add nuances to the theoretical repertoires that are currently prevalent in academia by contributing to new ways of speaking and writing about resistance, in general, and about the missing fetuses and bodies with female genitals, in particular. By this, we do not seek to block previous understandings, but rather to give the readers a new lens for viewing other aspects of the aforementioned phenomenon.

One of the argumentations by Menon, quoted above, is that Indian women’s decisions to abort are almost always shaped by factors like lack of social facilities for childcare that place a disproportionate economic burden on women, stigma of illegitimacy, or because they cannot afford another child. However, sex-selective abortions are more common among high-caste families and better-educated mothers in well-off families than among the poor (Chakraborty and Kim 2010, Bhalotra and Cochrane 2010, Jayachandran 2017, Pörtner 2022). Therefore, boys are more likely than girls to be born into families with a high-socioeconomic status, which might strengthen local gender hierarchies. Thus, the feminist understandings displayed above, are becoming frictional as new research and ‘facts’ are introduced. From this, new stories will probably evolve. Or as stated by Patel and Khajuria (2016): Indian ‘(f)eminism today is the constant questioning of the world we perceive and the boundaries we encounter. The more we understand, the more we are able to build a narrative for change’.

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Notes on contributors

Mona Lilja

Mona Lilja currently serves as a Professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the Head of Department at the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University. 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 Lilja’s articles have appeared in Signs, Global Public Health, Review of International Studies and International Feminist journal of Politics.

Mikael Baaz

Mikael Baaz is a Professor of International Law as well as an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science. He currently serve as Head of the Law Department, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg. His main research interests are law and politics in the international society as well as different expressions of resistance.

Filip Strandberg Hassellind

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.

Notes

1. https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1078362, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-7-2013–0400_EN.html/.

2. The data was collected and analyzed in India in 2022.

3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42864827

4. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/politicize/.

5. https://base.sbmahimalaya.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&layout=item&id=67&Itemid=285/.

6. Interview with NGO founder, 2 October 2020 quoted in Strandberg Hassellind (2023).

7. https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/learn-about-genocide-and-other-mass-atrocities/what-is-genocide.

8. Interview with Sabu Mathew George, 20 November 2021 quoted in Strandberg, Hassellind (2023).

9. https://genderbytes.wordpress.com/about/.

10. https://www.snehalaya.org/snehadhar-pune/.

11. http://uniquehomejalandhar.org/about-foundation/.

12. She discusses the troubling question of women, who themselves decide to have sex-selective abortions, while leaving out both cases of infanticide and cases where women have been forced to have abortions after sex determination.

13. For more on the The National Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PNDT) Act of 1994, implemented in 1996, see (Nandi and Deolalikar 2013).