‘Productive’ Reproducers: The Political Identity of Mothering in Contemporary India

Abstract

The present article examines the discourses around motherhood in India, as an example of a Third World country that is both neo-liberal and anti-natalist. It unpacks the construction of motherhood within three dominant contemporary intellectual and policy paradigms: (a) gender and development theory, (b) anti-natalism/neo-Malthusianism, and (c) neo-liberalism and global capitalism. Central to the discourses contained in these traditions are the distinct ways in which motherhood and economic work are positioned against each other. This positioning, in turn, has significant implications for women’s agency and political identity as mothers or workers. Fundamental gender and development theory embraces economic activity as the route to women’s personal agency and collective political identity, as economic work connects with the public sphere; motherhood, in contrast, is private and not a primary source of agency. Within anti-natalism or population control agendas, motherhood is projected as a public and national concern, and “good mothers” or those mothers that have few children are also good citizens. Neo-liberalism based on the free-market principles of the 1980s/1990s ignores the relevance of mothering within its discourses of cost effective society. Yet, ironically, it is women’s mothering and caring roles that pick up the gaps in social services that are no longer funded by the state. Further, as part of the growing global capitalism, fertility is increasingly being converted into consumerist interests for promoting sales of contraceptives and other products. Overall, the article argues that these three discourses are in contradiction to each other and promote multiple constructions of motherhood in contemporary developing societies, all of which render women either as subjects or objects of markets and policy, and do not promote either individual or collective agency.