Mediating postcolonial pregnancies in neoliberal times

Abstract

During the same month that the Indian Edition ofBusiness Insider—an Americanfinancial and business news portal—published this article on mother-entrepreneurs,the Indian pharmaceutical giant Mankind launched a marketing campaign for itspregnancy test kit,Prega News, with the hashtag:#YourSecondHome. This campaignthat focused on working pregnant Indianwomen was actualized through a dedicatedwebsite, media releases and most notably a viral advertisement that racked up over10 million views on YouTube. However, both theBusiness Insiderarticle and the#YourSecondHome Campaign (which has since been followed up with two more viraladvertisements in 2018 and 2019) fail to account for the context in which thesepregnancies are located: specifically, postcolonial India, where the labor force parti-cipation from women is abysmally low and where women earn only 62% of whattheir male colleagues earn for performing the same work (Catalyst2018).This short essay by focusing onPrega News’#YourSecondHome campaign, asrepresentative of“spectacularised and idealised ideas of pregnancy”(MelanieKennedy and Safiya Noble2019), reflects on how postcolonial pregnant subjectivitiesare mediated through neoliberalism. As postcolonial subjects ourselves, we point outthat such reductive mediations reflect a neoliberal framework, which“as a dominantstructural condition . . . projects totalizing social change”(Aihwa Ong2007,4)andrenders important intersectional identity markers in the postcolonial sphere, likecaste and class, invisible. Such representations divert audiences’attention fromrealities of a deeply gendered and partisan Indian labor market as well as thechallenges for“matricentric feminism[s]”in (supposed) postfeminist spaces. (O’Reilly2016). Contextually, the heterotopic (Michel Foucault1986) nature of postfe-minist landscapes has been cogently articulated