Explore how infertility advertisements in India reinforce traditional gender roles by leveraging reproductive desires, and how the fertility industry shapes cultural expectations of motherhood.
In media narratives, becoming a mother is portrayed as a pleasant, exciting, and intriguing experience. The motherhood myth is ingrained in wider patriarchal structures, which causes a naturalized link between mothering and women. Despite a wide range of cultural and societal shifts in women's wants over the course of the 20th century, parenting and reproduction have continued to take precedence over other traditionally assigned responsibilities for women.
In her edited book, Infertility Around the Globe, anthropologist and novelist Marcia C. Inhorn writes, "Making babies is how women are supposed to build adult identities throughout the world, and in non-Western 'developing' civilizations the gendered ramifications of infertility can be deadly." This is also true of the socio-cultural fabric of India, where motherhood is elevated to the point where a woman without one is viewed as "fragmented."
The gender performances of mothering are affected by these parenting ideas. In the setting of infertile women in society, dominant conceptions of parenthood become problematic. Since infertility entails the inability to fulfill a desired social role, the presence of infertility is conveyed not by the presence of pathological symptoms but rather by the absence of a desirable state. The ability to bear children determines the value of women's life in many communities, both past and contemporary. In India, childlessness is strongly discouraged.
Infertility is a condition where the social construction of health and illness is perhaps even more apparent than it is in other conditions. This critical viewpoint clarifies how an infertility diagnosis is markedly burdened with negative connotations and qualifies as a disability. As a result of this "invisible impairment" within the cultural construction of gendered reproduction, fertility clinics have become increasingly popular in India. A significant socio-cultural discourse on gender roles, motherhood, body politics, and the burgeoning fertility industry in India is called into question by the medicalization of infertility.
In terms of commercial assisted reproductive technology, India is a leader. In India, the scientific and healthcare industries, as well as procreative technology, have taken over the culture. The concept of "test-tube" children has become more commonplace due to popular culture, print and electronic media, and the thriving IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinic industry in India.
In the 1990s, India became a market for assisted reproductive technology as a result of the emergence of globalization and other liberal economic policies. Infertility was medicalized in the nineteenth century, turning sufferers into patients. In the twenty-first century, with the rise of new reproductive technologies and the confluence of neoliberalism, globalization, and free-market capitalism, the same patients became consumers.
As gendered technologies, assisted reproductive technologies themselves have very specific and distinct applications on the bodies of men and women. The commodification of human desires opens up a market when social or medical priorities are linked to unpredictable consequences from a cultural-economic perspective. Through the "microphysics of power," to use Foucault's phrase, desire is crucial in supporting the societal norms of fertility behavior.
Capitalism performs best when it observes people's most valued desires and tailors this information to keep consumerism in motion. The market for assisted reproduction technology employs dynamic advertising methods through the employment of street hoardings, wall advertisements, posters with exquisite designs, fantastic websites, and media, print, and institutional advertisements.
Images of happy babies, perplexing statistics, and good pregnancy test results are frequently used in infertility commercials to highlight the commercial nature of reproductive technologies and entice customers to choose their clinics over those of their corporate rivals.
In order to instill a sense of reproductive desire in infertile women, advertising serves as an ideological arm of the fertility markets. Reproductive desire is both a social construct and a deeply personal emotion. Different types of reproductive impulses are processed and shaped by culture, economy, religion, gender, and technology.