070327 VO Specialisation 1: Questions and Issues of Contemporary History (2011S)

Reproduction, State Interventions and Women's Bodies: Global Designs and Local Life-worlds

Course Description: In many strands of academic scholarship, in political debates and the media there is a broad consensus that the world is facing a "population problem". But the problem has been defined very differently for different parts of the world. If European colonial powers were worried by the low fertility rates in their colonies in Asia, Africa and the Pacific, after decolonisation they began funding programmes to control population growth in the very same countries. But the doomsday scenarios sketched by advocates of the "overpopulation" thesis for societies of the global South also have a long history in European thought going back to Malthus' "Essay on Population", which has over the centuries continued to influence demographers, policy-makers and popular opinion alike. High fertility in the South is linked causally to poverty, environmental crises and security threat besides more recently to the low status of women. In contrast most European countries today are gripped by a fear of falling fertility rates, which unless reversed, or compensated by an equally unwanted immigration, would negatively affect economic growth. Thus the world seems to be simultaneously "overpopulated" and "underpopulated". In political and popular discourse in Israel as in India, there is a fear of large Muslim families. Whereas the Chinese state, for example, sought to ensure a one-child family through draconian measures like forced abortions, the Rumanian state prohibited abortion and contraception and German health insurance companies funded up to three trials of assisted conception or IVF. Anti-natalistic policies and programmes in some regions of the world were and are paralleled by pro-natalistic policies in others. While the former involve the use of many kinds of technologies of surveillance and contraception, the latter is more a matter of social policy. But both kinds of policies primarily target and affect the lives and bodies of women. The "population problem" is thus evidently not an objective demographic question of sheer numbers but a normative and political issue of how many people, of which kind should live where and how.

The lectures we will use post-colonial and feminist perspectives to examine the ways in which"population" has been constructed as a problem historically and today. They will attempt to link the little to the large by looking at how global designs by Northern governments, US American private foundations and by the elites in the South have sought to "modernise" and shape the reproductive desires and bodies of women in poor communities in the North and South. It will explore the colonial origins of the debates on population size, the Cold War background of global designs of "population control" in the South, the role of demographic expertise and surveys in these programmes, the debates on abortion and sterilisation as well as the more recent shifts in international population policy to issues of women's empowerment and reproductive rights, its latest avatar. Attention will also be paid to infertility as a major reproductive health problem faced women all over the world, which has led to the globalization of in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy, and other new assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). The seminar will enable students to read and critically discuss ethnographies on Rumania, Palestine, India, China, Egypt, Africa and the Pacific, which seek to situate and understand women's desire for children within the constraints of family and kinship structures, on the one hand, and interventions by nation-states and international actors, on the other. It will examine the specific and uneven impact of the globalization of reproductive technologies on women's bodies, subjectivities, and social relations.

I. Politics of Demography

30.5 Demography and Feminist Perspectives

1.6 Malthus vs. Condorcet: Fertility, Gender and Culture

3.6 Race, Imperialist Designs and (Post) Colonial Legacies (with excerpts from the film „La Operacion“)

6.6 Population, Development, Environment

II. Technology, Body Politics and the Body Politic

8.6 Reproduction, Women’s Bodies and Technology

15.6 From Family Planning to Reproductive Rights

17.6 Infertility and Global Diffusion of Assisted Reproductive Technologies

III. State Interventions and Planned Populations

20.6 Governance of Populations and Socialist Modernisation: China and Rumania

22.6 Population Control, Gender and Religion: India and Palestine

24.6. Examination

27.6 Film „Something like a war“ (Deepa Dhanraj) followed by discussion