Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India by Asha Nadkarni (review)

As a conceptual framework and theoretical approach, transnational feminism has provided Asian American studies a welcome method by which to complicate any number of critical givens in the field: who counts as its subjects, what spaces fall under its purview, how social formations come into existence and how transformations in them take place, and how to rethink what we understand to be political resistance, subjection, and agency. And yet, like so many such critical discursive concepts, on its own and without being anchored in the particular histories and lifeworlds of women, transnational feminism is a rubric that can feel slippery and abstract, despite its very aim to the contrary. In other words, as a rejoinder to liberal feminism, a transnational feminist methodology cautions against positing any simplification and homogenization of women and women’s experience. The best of transnational feminist scholarship thus makes border crossings with great care, attentive to the specificities that render “woman” unviable as a singular, monolithic category of identity, but able to deploy gender and sexuality as powerful analytics for culture and society nonetheless.

In her 2014 monograph, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India, Asha Nadkarni accomplishes this task with precision and clarity, and it is a book that makes important contributions to a number of fields beyond Asian American studies, including transnational American literary and cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, South Asian diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies. Nadkarni demonstrates how, in its both positive and negative aspects, what she calls “eugenic feminism” comes to center on modern national development and the reproduction of national populations, which hence become the object of intensely regulated social and political cultivation. Building on the work of feminist critics who have demonstrated the extent to which Anglo-American feminisms mobilized racial and class differences, Nadkarni considers American feminist discourses—and reactionary responses to them by those such as Katherine Mayo—in relation to Indian nationalist feminism. She argues that both movements “launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation” and shows that, by locating biological reproduction as the key to both national progress and women’s rights, eugenic feminisms in the United States and in India take reproductive practices as central to women’s citizenship in each nation (5).

Nadkarni further describes a “maternalist feminism” that homes in on women’s reproductive capacities as the locus for generating social and political agency (i.e., women as having “choice”) and implementing national(ist) objectives. Eugenic Feminism begins with the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late nineteenth century and ends with the period of Emergency Rule under Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, with an epilogue that turns to current transnational reproductive technologies and market in the twenty-first century to consider how eugenics morphs into population control over the course of the twentieth century. In relating eugenics and population control (while also distinguishing the affective and political dimensions of each) by way of transnational analysis, Nadkarni further considers the global implications for “fit” and “unfit” forms of life as construed through imperial and postcolonial imaginaries of racial, gender, religious, and class difference.

By way of Asian Americanist and transnational feminist perspectives, Nadkarni supplements postcolonial feminist studies that tend to focus upon either imperial feminist politics or patriarchal nationalism. As her discussions of the poet and activist Sarojini Naidu in chapters 2 and 3 and of Indira Gandhi in chapter 5 demonstrate, Indian feminism was itself quite active in producing visions of the nation and programs for its future (albeit neither of these women willingly adopted the moniker of “feminist”). On the other hand, Nadkarni’s analyses of Gilman and Mayo illustrate how the anxiety-ridden representations of Asia and “Mother India” bear upon conceptions of American national health, American women’s social and religious practices, and U.S. imperial ventures, immigration, and cultural...