Sons and M(others): Framing the Maternal Body and the Politics of Repoduction in a South Indian Context

Abstract

Reproductive practices provide a space to examine the nature of political incursions into the female body. In India, femininity is epitomized in discursive definitions of motherhood and the maternal body. Only the mother who can bear sons is socially validated in many communities. This essay explores how gendered subjectivities are constructed within the framework of reproductive ideology. The narratives reveal responses to oppression and the disciplining of the maternal body. Ethnographic details reveal how subaltern identities are constructed in the everyday struggles of living between resistance and submission to hegemonic control.