Using bodies: negotiating reproductive health in an Indian village

This thesis considers the ways in which women’s bodies are at once objects of state population planning and subjects of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) discourse. By examining the everyday geographies of 29 women in Daultabad Village, India, it is possible to see the ways in which bodies become tools to negotiate sexual and reproductive desires, reshaping power relations related to SRH. The strategies employed by women in light of multiple and conflicting state and village discourses on SRH make visible the spaces of hope created by and with bodies. Women both reproduce and subvert village patriarchy, state planning and nationalism and in doing so foreground their bodies and the village in which they live as spaces of political action. This project draws upon interview-based research conducted by the author in India in 2005 as well as scholarly work on bodies, states, nationalism and sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing.