University of Washington Press Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context (Feminist Technosciences)

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 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. 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. Review Bhatia, a feminist reproductive justice activist and scholar (SUNY Albany), does not shy away from the difficult issues facing those determined to provide a full range of reproductive options to women of all ethnicities and economic levels. Her account is nuanced, engrossing, and accessible to students and professionals alike. . . . Highly recommended.--Choice Review A fantastic contribution to feminist technoscience, the transnational travels of biomedicalization, and reproductive politics. Bhatia examines sex selective ART as a global form and traveling assemblage that reveals the complex entanglements of gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, ability, and other axes of difference. A book that will be a must-read for anyone interested in stratified reproduction and the biopolitics of science, technology, and medicine. Author: Laura Mamo, author of Queering Reproduction From the Author Rajani Bhatia is assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. About the Author Rajani Bhatia is assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University at Albany, SUNY.