la fattina/Flickr. Creative Commons.
An economy of desire
“In our village, a childless woman is considered an ill-omen; if we see her face first thing in the morning, the whole day will be spoilt”, observed a man who had come with his wife for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment at a clinic situated on the outskirts of a town in the district of Rajasthan (northwestern India). He said that though there are several children in his extended family, he needed to have his ‘own’ child at any cost. This, of course, is a matter of desire. But then, this desire is not limited to personal inclinations only, but connected to larger, more complex forces.
The impetus to have an ‘own’ (i.e. biological) child results from a conglomeration of desires: the desire of the woman to attain a projected sense of reproductive ‘fulfilment’; the desire of the husband (or male partner) to prove his ‘manhood’; the desire of the family to have an heir who would carry on the family name; the desire of society to ensure that certain ‘norms’ within the triadic institutions of family, marriage and motherhood are maintained; and the much more abstract and structuralised statist desire to generate a future workforce.
