Female Infanticide in India: A Feminist Cultural History

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar · Renu Dube · Reena Dube

feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

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Female Infanticide in India is a theoretical and discursive intervention in the field of postcolonial feminist theory. It focuses on the devaluation of women through an examination of the practice of female infanticide in colonial India and the reemergence of this practice in the form of femicide (selective killing of female fetuses) in postcolonial India. The authors argue that femicide is seen as part of the continuum of violence on, and devaluation of, the postcolonial girl-child and woman. In order to fully understand the material and discursive practices through which the limited and localized crime of female infanticide in colonial India became a generalized practice of femicide in postcolonial India, the authors closely examine the progressivist British-colonial history of the discovery, reform, and eradication of the practice of female infanticide. Contemporary tactics of resistance are offered in the closing chapters.

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Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar is an independent scholar who has taught in India and the United States. Renu Dube is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Intercultural Communication at Boise State University. Reena Dube is Assistant Professor of Film, Literature, and Postcolonial Theory at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.