Interdisciplinary Research
" More girls in India and China are eliminated every year than the number of girls born in US. Over the last decade, 6 million+ girls were eliminated before birth in India; this is more than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust by the Nazis.”
—Dr. Sabu George Hearing on India's Missing Girls by House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights & International Organisations
United States Congressional Hearings
10 September 2013
I grew up in India, in Rajasthan, a state that ranks 3rd in the least number of girls born in the entire country. At around 10 years of age, I had a sense of what was happening. A woman would be visibly pregnant one day, and then not. What I did not understand at that time was this: the desire for having a boy led to prenatal sex selection, and in most cases, a termination of pregnancy if it was a girl and not the desired male sex. This was around the 1980s. I never heard or overheard adults talk about these matters. As I grew older, I knew I wanted to do something about this issue of female feticide. That moment came in 2013.
As a visiting assistant professor in the women's and gender studies program at Virginia Tech, in 2013, I worked on the project, Gendered Arrangements. Funded by a creativity grant from ICAT at Virginia Tech, I set out to understand what was female feticide, the act of sex determination leading to pregnancy termination if it is a girl. Studying the research left me more confused than ever before. It also led to a revelation - If I, who was immersed in the culture where female feticide was rampant, could end up confused after reading the research, how could someone who knew nothing about this even understood how grave is the situation???
The issue needed simplification.
I taught an undergraduate class with students from multiple disciplines and we worked toward simplifying female feticide. Information graphics, animations, and research papers, exhibitions were some of the deliverables of this project. A year later, the project evolved into a full-fledged research project, where I spent 12 months in the field, interviewing people. The result was several pages of verse, collaborations with music composers, designers and engineers, and The Vanishing was born. It is a manuscript of poems, and an art-sound installation.
Visit www.genderedarrangements.com to learn exclusively about this project.
As a visiting assistant professor in the women's and gender studies program at Virginia Tech, in 2013, I worked on the project, Gendered Arrangements. Funded by a creativity grant from ICAT at Virginia Tech, I set out to understand what was female feticide, the act of sex determination leading to pregnancy termination if it is a girl. Studying the research left me more confused than ever before. It also led to a revelation - If I, who was immersed in the culture where female feticide was rampant, could end up confused after reading the research, how could someone who knew nothing about this even understood how grave is the situation???
The issue needed simplification.
I taught an undergraduate class with students from multiple disciplines and we worked toward simplifying female feticide. Information graphics, animations, and research papers, exhibitions were some of the deliverables of this project. A year later, the project evolved into a full-fledged research project, where I spent 12 months in the field, interviewing people. The result was several pages of verse, collaborations with music composers, designers and engineers, and The Vanishing was born. It is a manuscript of poems, and an art-sound installation.
Visit www.genderedarrangements.com to learn exclusively about this project.
