Join us for the second seminar of our Spring Series, featuring Dr Mytheli Sreenivas, with the paper titled: ‘Heterosexuality and the “Happy Family”: Desire, Development, and Population Control in India, 1930s-1970s’
Wednesday 26th January 2022 at 4pm GMT
Register for your place on the Zoom webinar here!
‘Heterosexuality and the “Happy Family”: Desire, Development, and Population Control in India, 1930s-1970s’
This paper explores population control as a site for the elaboration of (hetero)sexuality in India. I argue that feminists, demographers, birth control advocates, and others mobilized heterosexuality to naturalize certain modes of family planning, orientations towards time, structures of sexual intimacy and economic rationality, and visions of future consumption. As sexual discourses aimed to create in citizens a desire for development, the histories of sexuality and economy became intimately connected. The paper investigates these connections to ask how visions of the “happy family” can help us to re-think both desire and development in the mid-20th century.
About the Speaker:
Dr Mytheli Sreenivas is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University. She is also the Director of the South Asian Studies Initiative. She has recently released Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washington Press: June 2021): in addition to this Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is published in South Asia by Women Unlimited Press, 2021.
Register for your place on the Zoom webinar here.
We do have a limit of 100 attendees, but you can also view the livestream of the seminar on the Women’s History Network Facebook page (available for 24 hours).
