Reproductive nationalism: Eugenic feminist literature in the United States and India

This dissertation reads Anglophone literature from the U.S. and India to formulate the concept of "eugenic feminism." Eugenic feminism is a self-purifying and -perfecting rhetoric that works to create a feminist subject free of race. In so doing, eugenic feminism comes to depend on race---in the form of phantom and figural racial others---to shape an identity in negative terms, defining what a feminist subject must avoid incorporating in order to advance the nation as a whole. The first chapter analyzes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," with Bharati Mukherjee's novel, Jasmine. It suggests that both model the development of a eugenic feminist subject by narrating the psychic violence required to enter modernity: the shearing away of alterity in the name of nationalist and feminist progress. Chapter two considers Charlotte Perkins Gilman's economic theory and utopian novels to contend that she produces an ideal feminist subject through an economic discourse of production, reproduction, and consumption that depends upon policing racial difference. Chapter three demonstrates a similar eugenic logic in Katherine Mayo's controversial 1927 text, Mother India. It reveals how feminism, imperialism and immigration collaborate to create a version of American identity that is at once isolationist and imperialist. Like Gilman, Mayo makes use of subaltern Indian women to redefine white American women's proper reproductive roles. The next two chapters maintain that Indian nativist feminism paradoxically employs subaltern reproductive bodies in much the same fashion. Chapter four engages the poetry and political speeches of Gandhian nationalist feminist Sarojini Naidu to assert that she posits the new, bourgeois, Indian woman as the model for the abstract citizen subject of the nascent nation. In doing so, however, Naidu effaces the subaltern woman from the nationalist narrative. The fifth and final chapter turns to representations of subaltern subjects in post-Independence India and Pakistan. It reads Indian novelist Nayantara Sahgal's novel, Rich Like Us, with Sara Suleri's diasporic memoir, Meatless Days, to examine how eugenic feminism informs the structure of individual feminist identity in a "postnational" moment of diaspora.