Eva Fiks

EVA FIKS, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid the writing of ‘State Intimacies: Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India’. The book draws on 18 months of fieldwork in rural Rajasthan (and continued engagement with the field) and provides an ethnographic account of tubal ligation (sterilization) procedures as they are carried out and experienced by women in rural India. Grounded in women’s everyday realities and experiences in sterilization camps, this book examines the process, effects, and narratives of an unprecedented biopolitical intervention attempting to control population growth. The book offers innovative theoretical insights into the relationship between care, violence, and chronicity and argues that care that is available to rural women and their communities may temporarily provide relief but inevitably deepens reproductive and other chronicities that characterize life in rural India. The care that is available is almost always ambivalent — closely entangled with violence, neglect, or disgust — and rural women use these ambivalences for their own agendas, to resolve or confirm what matters in their lifeworlds: be it more functional bodies, easier everyday lives, more stable social positions, more reproductive control or more prosperous anticipated futures.