(Re)sketching the theorizing around “missing women”: imageries of the future, resistance, and materializing aspects of gender

ABSTRACT

Recent sex ratio data indicate that the number of “missing” women and girls has reached approximately 200 million. This is a significant increase since 1990, when roughly 100 million women and girls had “disappeared.” What are the contemporary discussions concerning the widespread practice of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals? Moreover, how should we, as scholars of law and global politics, name and theorize these “missing” bodies? Despite decades of rigorous scholarship on the connections between sex, gender, and “missing” bodies, there appears to be no agreed understanding of the current and ongoing elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. In this article, we go beyond some well-argued and thought-provoking elaboration and critique of the concept of gendercide to further inquire: what claims should be secured to establish a solid theoretical base for further research on the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals? By building on – in empirical terms – the case of India, our suggested answer to this question rests on two main arguments. First, to capture the motivations and practices of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals, the productive and materializing aspects of gender should be further interrogated. Second, we argue that previous research has failed to include a temporal dimension to the debate around the “missing” women. We should embrace the imagined emotional encounters with the future, mainly on the part of parents or other family members who perform the sex-selective practices. By integrating these two arguments, we conclude that rethinking the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals also means rethinking the resistance to its practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendercide
• gender
• India
• resistance
• time

Introduction

Recent sex ratio data indicate that the number of “missing” women and girls has reached approximately 200 million. This is a substantial increase since 1990, when approximately 100 million were considered to have “disappeared” (European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality 2013). What are the contemporary discussions concerning the widespread practice of eliminating fetuses and bodies with female genitals? Moreover, how should we, as scholars, name and theorize these practices?

The concept of “gendercide” has been deemed irrelevant, even misleading, in explaining the elimination of bodies noted above (Carpenter 2002). The critics question the socio-biological explanations framed to advance the concept of gendercide. Is the “cause” of the lethal violence located in matter, culture, or a complex combination of the two? It has been argued that this question should be resolved to establish a useful “name” for the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. For instance, Carpenter (2002) makes a strong case for distinguishing between the notions of sex and gender and argues that “sex-selective massacre” is a more useful concept than gendercide for investigating gender-based eliminations (see also Jones 2003). Both Carpenter (2002) and Jones (2003) criticize the application of the notion of “gender” in gendercide research that equated gender solely with women and girls. Carpenter (2002) also argues that researchers of gendercide fail to acknowledge that gender performances do not necessarily correspond to a specific sex. In their failure to address masculinity and femininity as highly contextual variables, she continues, scholars of gendercide overlook the fact that gender cannot be coded dichotomously, as in “gender-selective massacre” (Carpenter 2002, 161).

The critique elaborated above is important. In preparing this article, we interviewed 11 scholars and Indian civil society representatives working on the issue of missing women. As a result of the then ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the interviews were conducted via Zoom, Messenger, and similar applications. Several of the civil society representatives argued that there are some advantages in using the concept of gendercide. The argument is that “gendercide,” when deployed, “creates an obvious semantic corollary to the much-abused term ‘genocide’” (Carpenter 2002, 80). The linguistic associations between the two concepts indicate that the widespread elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals could or should be addressed by more general strategies for opposing mass killings. The semantic similarities imply that gendercide should be seen as a pressing social, security, and political issue.

One question is, then, whether or not the concept of gendercide should be used. However, more importantly, we should consider what claims ought to be secured to establish a solid theoretical base for further research on the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. In this article, we build on the Indian gendercide case, which involves some 50 million missing women (see for example Banerji 2009; Eklund and Purewal 2017; Guo, Das Gupta, and Shuzhuo 2016; Kaur and Kapoor 2021; Larsen 2009; Sen 1992, 2003),¹ highlighting and integrating two aspects of the extinction of gendered bodies – aspects that are also discussed throughout the text.

First, we interrogate the productive and materializing aspects of gender, which are the very foundation for the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. The concept of gender has been produced through various assumptions concerning social constructions and materialities, which have not been spelled out (see for example Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2018). Today, there is a general confusion around the concept of gender, which can be exemplified by Zalewski (2010), who suggests that she does not even know what gender is or does. Similarly, Carpenter suggests that the “theoretical knowledge of how gender operates is still underdeveloped” (Carpenter 2002, 77). In this article, however, we suggest that gender discourses produce subjectivities, gendered practices, and lethal violence. They are shaped by their entanglements with different materialities while also having material effects.

Second, we argue that previous research has failed to include a temporal dimension within the theorization of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. If we do not learn from the theorizing of time, we risk overlooking various possible ways of combating the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. If we do not embrace the imagined emotional encounters with the future on the part of those who perform sex-selective practices, we diminish the range of potential approaches available to challenge the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals and to understand its underlying motives.

Finally, by drawing on our elaborations of gender and time, we highlight some possible avenues of resistance against the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. We conclude that rethinking gendercide also means rethinking the resistance against it. Four possible strategies of resistance are proposed in the last section of the article.

The article proceeds as follows. After a brief discussion of the existing research, we pause to “revisit” the concept of gender. We agree with many of the arguments put forward by contemporary feminist theorists concerning the entanglements of sex and gender. Nevertheless, through engaging with the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals, we claim that particular aspects of gender become more important than others. Subsequently, we move to (re)sketching the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals in relation to time, as well as the productive and materializing nature of gender (Lilja 2021; Lilja and Martinsson 2018). In the final section, we investigate the particular ways in which resistance makes sense while interrogating the connections between gender, time, and the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals.

Previous research on gendercide

The method applied in this section is quite straightforward, as it simply builds on our extensive reading of the policies and academic literature on the concept of gendercide. Below, we recap some of the key debates and arguments within the field. This serves as the foundation for our own arguments concerning the stakes of this debate, and the line of inquiry that we suggest is necessary to ensure that crucial aspects of the ongoing elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals are not ignored.

According to scholars, women are “missing” primarily due to a combination of infanticide and feticide. Infanticide denotes the killing of babies at birth – primarily those with female genitals – and is practiced in India, China, and some other countries (Mittal et al. 2013; Sekher and Hatti 2010). Sex-selective abortion or feticide is performed on a large scale globally. Critical scholarship demonstrates, however, that the practices of eliminating female fetuses and babies are not static. For example, according to Goodkind (1996), female infanticide (see for example Hanley and Yamamura 1977; Hausfater and Hrdy 2008a; Lee, Feng, and Campbell 1994; Scrimshaw 1978) is increasingly substituted by the practice of sex-selective abortion. Nevertheless, we do not know to what degree this substitution has occurred, as reliable data is unavailable (Hausfater and Hrdy 2008b).

Warren (1985) was one of the first scholars to approach the phenomenon of gender-based lethal violence theoretically. She coined the term “gendercide” in her 1985 book Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Her elaborations on the deliberate extermination of women inquired into sati (so-called widow burning) and the witch hunts in early modern Europe, among other atrocities committed against women. Subsequent work on gendercide has developed Warren’s framing of gender-based lethal violence to encompass the gender-selective targeting of males. For example, Jones (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2014) deploys the term “gendercide” in line with Warren’s original usage and explores gender-based lethal violence in Rwanda. Jones (2003, 142) states that “‘[g]endercide’ similarly refers to the deaths of ‘embodied’ males and females – or rather, violently disembodied ones.”

Carpenter (2002) challenges the gendercide framework by arguing that the “gender” prefix is unduly stretched in this approach. Building on the existing gendercide literature, she argues that we should embrace age variables and destabilize heterosexual assumptions (see also Jones 2003). Carpenter further suggests that it would be disastrous for studies of gender and genocide to become preoccupied with the theme of gendercide, or “sex-selective massacre.” In addition, she considers the focus of the gendercide literature to be excessively narrow for the inclusive study of gender as a variable in comparative genocide studies. This may indeed be the case, but it should not prevent scholars from different disciplines from elaborating on, or critically discussing, the concept of gendercide. As stated above, during interviews with civil society actors in India, several respondents argued in favor of using the concept. From the perspective of legal studies or gender studies, the gendercide concept could be addressed as an issue of legal pluralism or as a means of raising awareness of atrocities. Moreover, it is difficult to see how gender studies would ever be narrowed down to a focus on gendercide, considering the numerous multi-layered and composite stories that feminist international relations (IR) and gender studies currently produce. In addition, if used, the concept of gendercide should be seen as only one concept out of several for scrutinizing gender in genocide studies.

There are, as Carpenter (2002) suggests, numerous ways in which gendered discourses interact with lethal violence and mass murders – not least in the context of war. While men of Srebrenica or Kosovo were killed for being men, Russian prisoners of war (POWs), although they happened to be men, were singled out for massacre because they were POWs. Nevertheless, gender mattered in this context: mostly men were conscripted, and thus mostly men were POWs. Underlying gendered discourses determined the placement of men and women into different spheres to begin with. Furthermore, even when killing is equally distributed across the sexes, it may carry different meanings and different methods may be used; rape before death or sexual mutilations are highly gendered practices (Carpenter 2002, 90; Stein 2002). In this article, we do not touch on all of the situations in which gender matters in the case of mass murder. Rather, we limit our argument to the “missing” women and girls in India who have been victims of infanticide or feticide, even if our findings also have some bearing on the killing of men in wartime. This article, however, does not set out to give an in-depth analysis of the Indian situation, but rather to use the case in order to illustrate the importance of a temporal dimension and the materializing aspect of gender discourses, as well as to provide some avenues for resistance.

Carpenter also makes a strong case for distinguishing between sex and gender. This is further elaborated by Jones (2003), who acknowledges that many scholars prefer to demarcate sex and gender more rigidly than he does in his own research. Considering how deeply entangled biological sex is with our social constructions of gender, we should ask if it is possible to firmly delineate the boundaries between the two. As objects emerge as we interpret them from discourses and previous experiences, we believe that it is hard to strictly separate what we understand as the biological from our social constructions. Matter (in this case, fetuses and bodies with female genitals) interact with the bodies and minds of the researchers and are then created and recreated in an assemblage of “natureculture” through various encounters and interrelations (Fuentes 2010; Haraway 2003).

As stated above, Carpenter (2002) claims that what Jones calls “gendercide” would be better referred to as “sex-selective massacre.” By contrast, Jones (2003, 141) argues that there “are solid grounds for using ‘gender’ as shorthand to designate a continuum of biologically-given and culturally-constructed traits and attributes.” We concur with such arguments and claim that, because lethal violence is perpetrated due to a complex combination of matter and culture, the concept of gendercide might be as good as that of “sex-selective massacre” to address the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals.

The concept of gendercide has lately also been criticized by scholars such as Purewal and Eklund (2018), who have alleged that it has been co-opted by the anti-abortion movement and populist and conservative political forces.² Purewal and Eklund (2018, 730) also question whether sex-selective abortion should be regarded as an act of gendercide and “hence 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 that cannot be equated with infanticide.

However, it is a common misunderstanding that the crime of genocide requires homicide to be actualized. Embodied killing is, in itself, not a dispositive criterion for the crime of genocide. Genocide, instead, is an “inchoate offense” against “protected groups” that according to the Genocide Convention, include national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups. This means that a proof of result is not required for the crime to have been committed, only that it has the potential to spur genocidal violence (see the discussion in Nersessian 2010, 12). In causing criminal action, it is the intent and not the effectiveness of an action that is of importance (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2019).

The classification of genocide as an inchoate crime also makes it possible to use the Genocide Convention preventively rather than reactively (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2019). In addition, the abortion of particular fetuses in a gendercidal manner can be recognized as “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” as set out in Article II(d) of the Genocide Convention. When we discuss gendercide here, we use a definition that differs from the Convention’s definition of genocide in terms of the groups protected and in relation to whom the crime applies in its archetypical sense. This makes it possible to include infanticide and feticide under the label of gendercide, as these practices emerge from the same intent (to eliminate, in this case, women as socially defined) and with the same result (women and girls are “missing”).

To summarize, the current debate over the use of the term “gendercide” highlights, among other things, the importance of disentangling the sex–gender nexus, yet it also pinpoints the difficulties of defining gender roles in relation to sex in a fast-changing and multi-layered world. We problematize both of these assumptions by arguing that they render invisible the most important gendered aspects of the contemporary elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. Below, we begin by elaborating on the concept of gender, thereafter suggesting which aspects of the concept become relevant when revisiting the phenomenon of “missing” women in general and in India in particular.

The issue of gendercide is of particular concern in India; with its huge population, India (together with China) accounts for the overwhelming majority of “missing” girls. The scale of the problem makes the issue of sex selection in India an important case to examine. As pointed out by Tandon and Sharma (2006), “[s]ex selective abortions and increase in the number of female infanticide cases have become a significant social phenomenon in several parts of India. It transcends all castes, class and communities and even the North–South dichotomy” (see by way of comparison European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality 2013; Purewal and Eklund 2018). While the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals takes myriad forms throughout India, it should be pointed out that the situation is not static; the methods of eliminating fetuses and bodies with female genitals have changed over time, and the incidents also differ widely across the country and by class and religion.³

Recapping some notions on gender

To further explore the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals, we begin with a brief exploration of the concept of gender. As feminist researchers have argued, “gender refers, variously, to social beliefs and institutions, which direct our awareness to sex differentiation and regulate human interaction on that basis” (Carpenter 2002, 80). Certain bodies are assigned specific meanings and expectations. In this regard, Ahmed (2004) discusses the ways in which some representations “stick to” to other representations and to bodies. In other words, the bodies who “could be terrorists” are the ones who might “look Muslim,” the body who “looks feminine” is the one who could be the “babysitter” or “nurse,” and so on. Some bodies, then, become nodes that attract specific understandings. This is, of course, context dependent and changeable. Moreover, we are “corraled” into the subject positions that we are assumed to perform. As feminists have shown, there are various disciplinary processes at play that urge us to perform the “right” positions.

Gender roles are important for the embodying of subject positions, the production of subjectivities, and the organization of society. It is nevertheless important to point out that few, if any, self- and society-defined women and men (entirely) correspond to these images of “men” and “women.” In a globalized world order, subject positions are marked by complexity, which manifests as displacement, multiplicity, and hybridity. There are no “women” or “men” as such; rather, subjects appear in “great diversity,” with subjectivities that include “hyphenated identities that range along particular axes of definition, such as used-to-be-working-class-now-professional, or divorced-mother-now-lesbian” (Ferguson 1993, 161). Furthermore, discourses of gender, race, and ethnicity intersect to shape different opportunities and challenges. Trans or in-between positions also unsettle the men–women binary and open up new or unexpected ways of being. In the work of Žižek (2000, 132), in-between bodies emerge as extra-discursive material, which is related to the discourse but is still excluded from it:

The moment we translate class antagonism into the opposition of classes qua positive, existing social groups (bourgeoisie versus working class), there is always, for structural reasons, a surplus, a third element which does not “fit” this opposition (lumpenproletariat, etc.). And of course, it is the same with sexual difference qua real: this, precisely, means that there is always, for structural reasons, a surplus of “perverse” excesses over “masculine” and “feminine” as two opposed symbolic identities.

Overall, a material and symbolic surplus is produced, one that exceeds female and male figurations. This implies that contemporary gender discourses are not only populated with “men” and “women” but also with ambivalent bodies and in-between identities.

While this is true, many of us still tend to reproduce the figurations of “men” and “women.” When embodying feminine or masculine figurations, we are produced by gendered discourse and also become representations that maintain and uphold the positions and boundaries between “men” and “women.” In other words, society-defined women and men, as discursive materialities, partake in the ongoing processes of both creating and dividing communities of belonging (see by way of comparison Barad 2008; Butler 2004; Lilja and Martinsson 2018). However, what is also at stake is how norms materialize and shape matter. Butler (1993, 9–10) writes: “Thus, the question is no longer, how is gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex? (a question that leaves the ‘matter’ of sex untheorized), but rather, through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialized?” Thus, norms not only revolve around but are also inseparable from the process of materialization. Bodies materialize as we act according to different norms (Lilja and Martinsson 2018). We suggest that the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals should be considered an extreme example of these materializations, as bodies are eliminated due to different gendered norms and expectations.

Below, this discussion on the productive aspects of norms and gendered discourses is further elaborated by bringing in a temporal dimension. We suggest that gendered discourses are not only established over time but also carry temporal and contextual imageries with material effects.

(Re)visiting the notion of time and the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals

Above, we have surveyed the literature on genocide while also exploring some strands of scholarship on gender. In this section, we suggest that even though the current scholarship on gendercide primarily debates how sex and gender correspond with each other, how they could be disentangled, and whether genital differences “match” with the expected gender, these concerns are of less importance when exploring potential ways of theorizing the gendercide in India. We suggest that it is not how gender is performed by certain bodies that matters, rather which temporal imageries stick to which bodies. It is not what parents expect from their children now that matters, but rather what emotional imageries of the future are attached to bodies with certain genitals. Relatedly, in the case of males and wartime crimes, gendercide involves the deaths of “embodied” males and females (Jones 2003, 142). Nevertheless, it is the fear of what “masculine bodies” could do in the future that makes them targets of lethal violence. Here, it is important to note that gendered imageries regularly intersect with notions of race or ethnicity when shaping expectations of the future. As Carpenter rightly points out, “it is not men as such but men of particular groups who are targeted in the sex-selective massacres to which the ‘gendercide’ literature refers” (Carpenter 2002, 86, emphasis in original).

With few exceptions (see for example Weston 2002), time is not widely acknowledged as a concept in gender studies, feminist IR, feminist international political sociology, and feminist international law. Gender’s temporal dimensions tend to be neglected or downplayed, even if gendered discourses are dependent upon repetition over time. Departing from this, this article intends to show temporal patterns that have previously remained hidden. Bleiker (2000, 276) points out that when opening up a certain perspective, one simultaneously tends to “hide” everything that is invisible from that vantage point: “every process of revealing is at the same time a process of concealing” (see by way of comparison Historiska nd). Attempting to find that which is concealed, belittled, or rubbed out is a difficult endeavor. Eriksson Baaz and Stern (2018, 4) write that it is “clearly a tricky endeavour methodologically, as it relies on not simply looking for what is seemingly there, but also for what is not there, and interrogating those absences (or partial absences).” For us, it has been important to provide an overview of the diverse body of literature on gendercide to show how time is clearly “missing” in the accounts of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals.

Notable research on time exists in other related fields that have been bypassed in the various outlines of gender-based lethal violence (see for example Adam 2004; Foucault 1991; Martin 2016; Rosa 2014; Thompson 1967). For instance, contemporary post-colonial research has shown how power, violence, and time are closely entangled (see by way of comparison Rao 2014). The research of Fanon, among others, displays the temporal logic that was characteristic of the colonial situation: the claims for equality by the colonized were answered with a request for patience and a promise that the equality demanded would be realized in the future. In this way, the power relations between the colonizer and the colonized always involved a time contradiction. The colonized – by the virtue of an ideology promising equality – had the future playing against them (Azar 2002, 2009).

In addition, some interesting theorization on time has recently been presented in queer scholarship. In this field, an increasingly abundant literature explores the idea of queer temporalities, showing how queer time might rupture heteronormative time patterns. Among the varied research angles of queer scholarship, Stockton (2009) has expanded the notion of “growing sideways,” while Freccero (2006) proposes a model of “fantasmatic historiography.” Similarly, Halberstam describes queer time as the “dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence–early adulthood–marriage–reproduction–child rearing–retirement–death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility” (Dinshaw et al. 2007, 182; see also Halberstam 2005). In this sense, queer time denotes a critique of the dominant heteronormative social scripts. Queer temporalities can be viewed as non-synchronized time sequences that rupture the predetermined or regular intervals that signify a heteronormative reality.

We propose that the preference for sons could be connected to a (Indian) heteronormative time pattern, which suggests that children with female genitals will in the future leave their parents to take care of their parents-in-law, require the payment of a dowry, and change their name to that of another family (European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality 2013). By connecting these imageries to the bodies – the materiality – of the fetuses, parents choose to eliminate them. Emotional encounters with the future produce the elimination of bodies in the present. Thus, the act of eliminating fetuses and bodies with female genitals seemingly depends on different temporal scripts. Parents expect certain patterns as they “time-travel” according to a heteronormative time order, which implies that the temporal dimension of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals has previously been underacknowledged. The norms that make parents reposition themselves and move back and forth between the “now” and the future then materialize in the elimination of bodies. The very material effect of these gendered norms is a fabricated and disproportionate sex balance.

The above implies that, in the case of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals in India, it is not so important to sort out how “[p]erforming one’s gender is different than performing one’s sex,” or how “[g]ender performances do not necessarily correspond to sex” (Carpenter 2002, 82). In regard to the sex-selective practices, what is interesting is how future scenarios or imageries are attached – or stuck – to specific bodies and how these scenarios motivate the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. The scenarios are reductive and essentializing, and built on binary understandings of men and women.

As indicated above, practices that change the future, such as gender-based lethal violence, regularly involve emotions such as discomfort, stress, or fear. Fear is an emotion that we experience when faced with something that potentially threatens our wellbeing. It involves the future, which is understood as indefinite, threatening, and impending. Therefore, as stated by Ahmed (2004, 65), fear includes a temporal dimension; it arises in response to something that can hurt one in the future. That is, fear relates to “something that threatens us, is not yet within striking distance, but it is coming close” (Heidegger 1962, 180). In India, where approximately 50 million women are missing, parents experience fear for their future wellbeing, both in terms of high dowry costs – which would strip the family of resources – and their aging and needing to be cared for.⁴

There is a causal pattern in the temporal move between “now” and “then.” Gärdenfors (2006, 60–64) argues that we generally possess a strong urge to comprehend different societal mechanisms and, in particular, to search for causal explanations to make sense of the complexities of the real world (Gärdenfors 1990, 2006; Ricoeur 1988, 41). The desire to control causal patterns can be triggered by emotions, such as anxiety, which arise in response to something that threatens us in the future. As in the case of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals in India, the fear of future difficulties makes parents act in the present to bring about change and create a different scenario from the one that is feared – that is, to change the causal pattern. Thus, causality can in some senses be understood as the driver of the elimination of female bodies.

Expectations of the causal relationship between female babies and hardship are strengthened by the accounts of contemporary Indian women who have been married off and, along with the dowry paid by their parents, left their familial home for that of their husband’s family. To not follow the expected heteronormative time pattern of adolescence–early adulthood–marriage–reproduction–child rearing–retirement–death is most likely connected to various “disciplinary punishments.” The fact that it cannot be proven that women are necessarily going to marry, demand dowry, and leave their parents probably both strengthens and weakens the gendered norms. What cannot be proven must be constantly reinforced by anxious restatements (Bhabha 1984; Childs and Williams 1997, 124–129). The fact that the imageries that are stuck to female fetuses or babies’ bodies cannot be verified creates an ambivalent situation that may be exploited for resistance. Although the stereotypes need no proof of existence, the fact that they cannot be proven simultaneously poses a dilemma.

In sum, adding a temporal dimension to previous theorizations of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals challenges some of the underlying assumptions of previous research. Among these is the assumption that “[b]ecause masculinity and femininity (both roles and attributes) are continuous, highly contextual variables, gender cannot be coded dichotomously, as in ‘gender-selective massacre’” (Carpenter 2002, 82). Gender roles do not need to be studied dichotomously to conclude that gendered discourses matter with regard to the eliminations of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. What is interesting is that gendered imageries are attached to bodies and thereby result in the elimination of these bodies. Gendered (and sometimes intersectional) imageries should be acknowledged because they are essentially the motivation for eliminating some bodies before others. How these imageries are constructed should, however, be investigated in each and every case.

Resistance to the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals

In the previous sections, we have (re)visited certain notions of gendercide and gender in relation to time to critically discuss how these concepts should be formulated in the meaning-making processes around sex-selective practices. In this section, we turn to the much-debated issue of dissent. We do so by outlining some possible ways in which resistance could challenge the construction, patterns, practices, and motivations of eliminating fetuses and bodies with female genitals (for discussions on resistance, see for example Bayat 1997; Hollander and Einwohner 2004; Johansson, Lilja, and Martinsson 2018; Koefoed 2017; Lilja 2018; Lilja and Vinthagen 2014; Scott 1990; Sørensen 2016; Wiksell 2020).

Resistance is a practice; when not being promoted by other acts of resistance (copy-cat resistance), it emerges as a response to power (or violence) (Baaz, Lilja, and Vinthagen 2017; Lilja 2016; Lilja et al. 2017). As repeatedly stated by scholars such as Foucault (1982) and Scott (1990), specific forms of power give rise to specific forms of resistance. If resistance is a reaction to power, then the characteristics of the power strategy or relation affect the kinds of resistance that subsequently prevail. In most cases, the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals is not organized. Rather, we deal with the cumulative cases of elimination; for example, the individual witch burnings that accumulated over time and space can be labeled as “mass murder” (Carpenter 2002, 88). If hierarchical gender norms induce the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals through emotional time travels, these norms could be resisted in specific and related ways. The struggles should, per se, target the repetition of norms, emotional regimes, and temporal patterns.

As claimed above, repetitions of gendered positions serve to maintain such positions. Therefore, one strategy could be to repeat alternative truths that counter dominating discourses, to establish a time-lagged (re)signification of “women” (Butler 1993; Lilja 2018). One such (re)signification of the elimination of female bodies could be to address it with the concept of gendercide, which pinpoints the abnormality of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals.

Four other possibilities for change are highlighted here. First, we propose that “un-sticking” representations from bodies should be seen as a possible path of resistance. Newborn bodies with male and female genitals are nodes that attract specific imageries. In the case of India, “high dowry” and “less educated” are representations that stick to babies with female genitals. To remove the motivations for gender-based lethal violence, the bodies who “cost dowry,” “could be someone else’s wife,” or are “caregivers for parents-in-law” should be released from these representations. Un-sticking different bodies from representations may then prevail as an imaginable form of resistance. This may be achieved through generally introducing role models who are doing things “otherwise,” or by introducing new norms that are accompanied by new disciplinary techniques (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018).

Some efforts in this direction have already taken place in India. Different possible futures are currently being illuminated through, for example, popular Indian television soap operas that challenge contemporary imageries of women through female characters who are active in public life and work outside the home. Studies have shown that exposure to alternative gendered norms is associated with a reduced preference for sons and thus opens up new visions of the future (see for example Das Gupta 2017). Affirmative action to increase women’s political participation has also been introduced in India. According to recent research, this has weakened gender stereotypes in the population as a whole (Das Gupta 2017; see by way of comparison Majumdar, Mishra, and Kaur 2021).

A second resistance strategy, suggested by queer scholars, could be to attempt to remove the future from the now (see by way of comparison Dinshaw 2007, 2013; Dinshaw et al. 2007; Edelman 2004; Freeman 2010; Halberstam 2005; Weston 2002). New imageries of the future should be constructed to move beyond the contemporary situation with many missing women. This is currently being done at various locations around the globe, as a form of resistance, through prefigurative politics (Koefoed 2017). Subjects build elements or whole worlds of alternative imagined realities by embodying their aspired futures and materializing these futures in the present as a form of resistance that is a “nutopia” or “nowtopia” (Lilja, Baaz, and Vinthagen 2015; Yates 2015; Young and Schwartz 2012). As a further option, one could start living without constructing the now from the future. One resistance strategy could be to cultivate a willingness to refuse the current temporal order.

Third, the non-performance of suggested subject positions provides another option for negotiating the current situation. Norms are relevant to how one recognizes oneself in relation to the subject positions that are suggested and with which one can identify or disidentify. For example, the “perpetrators” in Cambodia’s post-war rhetoric have been defined through their binary opposition to the victims (Bernath 2016; Bouris 2007; Zucker 2017). However, research by Sirik (2020) shows that many former Khmer Rouge cadres refuse to perform the subject position as perpetrators but instead identify themselves as victims (see by way of comparison Bernath 2016). As the subjects who are expected to materialize as perpetrators refuse to do so, the figure of the “perpetrator” becomes unbodied. Since it is not performed, it is not “proven” to exist. The misfit between the images and the bodies opens the possibility of deconstructions, (re)categorizations, and new discourses. As suggested by Ahmed (2019), the constructions of the “perpetrator” may be described as non-performative speech acts that do not bring into effect that which they name. Accordingly, when investigating self-making in the context of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals, we should further investigate different unbodied, embedded, and embodied social positions. The refusal to perform will produce an indirect effect. Gendered discourses will probably change if gendered positions become increasingly unbodied. Thus, even though specific constructions of “mothers” and “fathers,” “wives,” “mothers-in-law,” and the like are assumed to be performed by the “right” bodies, there is always some space for performing otherwise.

The final avenue of resistance concerns the fear or anxiety interwoven with the imageries of having daughters. Emotion is part of our understanding of reality, encourages social participation, and inspires directions and actions. How can anxiety and other emotions that fuel gender-based lethal violence be addressed and redirected? Hochschild (1983), in her work The Managed Heart, points to the possibility of emotion management, which has been theorized as a form of resistance within the field of resistance studies. Lindqvist and Olsson (2017), as well as Koefoed (2017), have explored resistance through Hochschild’s theories of emotional labor. Ultimately, interrogating emotional reactions and the possibilities for negotiating, resisting, and (re)directing these emotions should be prioritized within gendercide studies.

Above, we have argued that the (re)constitution of our understandings of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals should take into consideration the temporal dimension while also highlighting the materializing aspect of norms. Another overarching purpose of this article has been to advance some notion of resistance in relation to the material and discursive characteristics of the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals. Having taken stock of existing research on resistance, time, and gender, we suggest that such resistance should be formulated to respond to important aspects of gender-based lethal violence; temporal, gendered discourses should be addressed to understand how gendercidal practices can be ruptured. In light of this, there is a need for further studies that address gendered micro-processes to provide novel insights into the ways in which we can make use of different understandings of time, manage emotions, and un-stick bodies from representations, as paths to resist the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals.

Conclusion

According to Guo, Das Gupta, and Shuzhuo (2016, 135), sex selection, which emerges from the preference for sons rather than daughters, has attracted much attention because it is one of the “most striking manifestations of gender inequality” that exists. Embracing the concept of gendercide, to describe gendered lethal practices, can be interpreted as an insistence that the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals is worthy of attention; that is, it should be seen as a phenomenon that is to be neither accepted nor normalized. Nevertheless, how we name the “missing” women, is only one question that needs to be addressed. As we suggest, some reformulation of the earlier theories of gender-based lethal violence is also needed. Some aspects of gender stand out as particularly salient for investigating the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals (in India). We suggest that more research within the field of gendercide should be carried out on (1) gender as productive and materializing, (2) the temporal dimensions of lethal violence, and (3) resistance against the elimination of bodies.

The focal point in previous studies on gendercide is the intertwined relationship between sex and gender (Carpenter 2002; Jones 2003). Scholars of gender-based lethal violence draw a familiar line of distinction between sex and gender, alongside an emphasis on the intersectional experiences of many (self- and society-defined) women and men. However, we have suggested that the way in which gendered positions are performed may have little importance when investigating the specific situation in which parents take the decision to eliminate fetuses and bodies with female genitals. Indeed, introducing the concept of time is fundamental to understanding the sex imbalance that is caused by infanticide and feticide. From previous studies, we have learned that bodies with female genitals evoke emotive imageries concerning the future. Parents imagine their declining years without a son’s economic support and security, with no chance of continuing the family name. At the same time, they imagine the high cost of the dowry for a daughter. Combined, these provide the incentive for eliminating some bodies in favor of others (European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality 2013). This temporal logic thus creates a situation in which fetuses and bodies with female genitals – through the imageries of the future to come – have the future playing against them. To change this pattern, a rupture is required to break the linear connection between the present and the future. The causality should be replaced with alternative patterns. By engaging with the temporal dimensions of causality, we have opened space to critically rethink the research agenda in regard to the elimination of gendered bodies (in India).

In analyzing the “Indian gendercide,” we have pinpointed the importance of emphasizing the productive and materializing aspects of norms and gender discourses and, simultaneously, highlighted the importance of the temporal dimension. These theoretical arguments may appear to be distinct and free-standing. However, we argue that they should be fully integrated. The materializing effects of gender discourses intersect with time in different ways. First of all, gender discourses provide a perspective through which we come to articulate (contextually bound) projections of futurity. One common logic is that what we consider true now will probably be true in the future; the now stretches between the past and the present and also comes to form our expectations of what will come to be (Baaz 2016, 2017). In this sense, contemporary conceptions of gender are projected on the future and materialize in the form of gender-based lethal violence.

Second, gendered discourses have a temporal dimension such that the discourse itself often seems to promise the continuation of the order. This is contrary to the colonial discourse in which the promise of the metropolis was a profound transformation of the distribution of power in the future, as long as the power structure was preserved in the present (Azar 2002, 2009). Gendered discourses rarely contain promises of change but rather imply naturalization of the present, which strengthens the materializing effects of the gendered discourses.

As researchers, we suggest that it is important to investigate not only how meaning has been imposed upon the missing bodies but also how to resist the lethal violence that it provokes. We have proposed that un-sticking representations from bodies or removing the future from the now offer possible paths of resistance. In addition, the fear or anxiety connected to the imageries of having daughters should be addressed, ruptured, and redirected. Moreover, to advance our understanding of the possibilities of resistance to the elimination of fetuses and bodies with female genitals, we should further explore power relations within families, the meaning of the individual versus the collective, and more constructive forms of resistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet: [Grant Number 2019-06237].

Notes on contributors

Mona Lilja

Mona Lilja currently serves as a Professor in Peace and Development Research in the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her 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. In this regard, she is currently working on how different articulations of gendered resistance emerge. Some of her articles have appeared in Signs, Global Public Health, Nora, Feminist Review, and the Journal of Political Power. She is the author of several books, including Constructive Resistance: Repetitions, Emotions, and Time (2021).

Mikael Baaz

Mikael Baaz is a Professor of International Law, an Associate Professor of Political Science, and an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies. He is Head of the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Among several other commitments, he is also the research leader for the project “Genocide, Gendercide and Resistance,” which is funded by the Swedish Research Council (project no. 2018-01914). His latest publications include (with Mona Lilja) “The Unfortunate Omission of Entangled Resistance in the ‘Local Turn’ in Peace-Building: The Case of ‘Forced Marriage’ in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC),” published in Conflict, Security & Development in 2021, and (with Filip Strandberg Hassellind) “Just Another Battleground: Resisting Courtroom Historiography in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” published in the Journal of Political Power in 2020.

Filip Strandberg Hassellind

Filip Strandberg Hassellind is a doctoral candidate in International Law at the University of Gothenburg, 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 Toward the end of the twentieth century, Dreze and Sen (1989) estimated that 37 million women were missing in India. Statistics from the 2011 Census of India continue to demonstrate a decline in the female population (Vickery and van Teijlingen 2017).

2 This critique can also be compared to a domestic Indian discussion on gender-selective abortion and the right to abortion as such. See for example Menon (1995, 2012); Nanda (2018).

3 The extent of infanticide in India is unknown as most cases are not reported, but there are some statistics (Statista 2021).

4 For further discussion of the emotional stress that surrounds the son preference, see for example Larsen (2009).