Protect. Track. Emancipate: The Role of Political Masculinities in India’s Fight Against Sex Selection - Rahm, Laura (Working Paper, 2017)
One of the side effects of India’s rapid socio-economic transition has been a growing demographic masculinization with millions of ‘missing’ women. Modern technologies have enabled couples to determine and select the fetal sex in their aspirations for small families with at least one son. Since the 1990s political efforts to control sex selection have met with little success. This paper assesses policy effectiveness and the role of political masculinities in India’s fight against sex selection. This qualitative analysis draws from policy files and 47 in-depth semi-structured expert interviews conducted in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana in 2014-2015. Interview participants included national policy makers, state and district implementers as well as representatives from non-governmental and international organizations. Interviews were thematically analyzed based on Braun and Clarke (2006). The paper finds that state action against sex selection frequently follows the logic of ‘protecting’, ‘tracking’ and ‘emancipating’ females – analogue to roles of a family patriarch towards his kin. While these gendered roles are dynamic and evolve due to international and local pressures, they are expressions of a patriarchal system, which reproduces gender biases, and thus undermines policy efforts against sex selection.
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