The narrative governance of life: Morality, melodrama, and the limits of biopower in western Indian efforts against sex selection.

Abstract

Selective abortion of female fetuses is a widespread, illegal, and profoundly consequential form of family planning in contemporary India. In Gujarat state, public health campaigns against the practice rely on narratives exhibiting the hallmarks of melodrama: good-evil binaries, stock characters, emotional provocations, simplistic diagnoses, and inevitable triumphs. As biopolitical truths, such narratives resonate ethically and emotionally for people. By individualizing blame, obscuring structure, circumscribing discourse, and legitimizing authority, such narratives also exert many classic biopolitical effects. But they do not necessarily transform subjectivity or behavior, as biopower is often assumed to. Anti-sex selection messaging illustrates how moralistic, sentimentalized interventions against potentially harmful practices can provoke strong responses without changing actions. In highlighting resonance as a relevant biopolitical limit, the not-quite-paradoxes of Gujarati public health narratives-encapsulation without accuracy, regulation without discipline, authority without efficacy, participation without transformation-suggest one approach for analyzing the governance of life without falling into determinism.