Utpal Niranjan Sandesara

UTPAL SANDESARA, University of California, Los Angeles, California, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2021 to aid research and writing on “She Is Not Ours: Sex Selection and the Ambivalence of Care in Western India.” Amid patriarchal social conditions rendering one son necessary and multiple daughters burdensome, selective abortion of female fetuses has become a pervasive family planning practice in India. The fellowship supported preparation of two journal articles (under review) and a book manuscript (entering review mid-2024) based on ethnographic research on sex selection in western India’s Gujarat state between 2012 and 2015. The first article, “The Narrative Governance of Life: Morality, Melodrama, and the Limits of Biopower in Western Indian Efforts against Sex Selection” develops the concept of “biopolitical melodrama” in relation Gujarati anti-sex selection campaigns. It argues that when moralistic, sentimentalized narratives structure behavior change interventions, such interventions can resonate ethically and emotionally without necessarily transforming dispositions or actions. The second article, “Striving against Sonlessness: The Moral Uses of Medical Pluralism in Western Indian Quests for a Boy,” surveys the complementary biomedical, herbal, and religious techniques surrounding sex selection. It argues that medical pluralism can be both a marker of moral concerns and a pragmatic moral intervention. Engaging anthropological insights on medicine, morality, gender-kinship, and governance, the book “She Is Not Ours: Understanding Sex Selection in Western India” examines moral experiences of sex selection and the interventions against it.