In the Guardian last weekend, there was an article on selecting the sex of your prospective baby. It's illegal in Britain, and according to the article people are spending £25,000-£30,000 on going to abroad for the treatment - that's a fair bit more than the average yearly wage in Britain. What on earth is going on?
These parents are “desperate” to have children of a particular sex. They talk about getting “sick of walking past Baby Gap and seeing these little girl outfits and just getting this pang.” It's interesting that gender is couched mostly in terms of consumption – later in the article there's a description of the bedroom of twin girls born due to sex selection (unsurprisingly, it's pink and frilly). The emphasis on consumption (rather than other gender markers such as, say, the sort of activities one might traditionally do with a child, or behavioural traits) is presumably down to the kind of people who can afford to do this – that is, the very rich – and points to some interesting avenues of analysis around gender and capitalism. What does it mean if gender is a kind of consumption? How might that link into the way that the “pink pound” has redefined sexuality?
The rich parents used as examples are, basically, bosses, and their attitude is not just down to consumption, but also to the way that has made them relate to the world: “Susan says, 'I used to be a CEO of a company... So you can imagine coming from that mindset and having a baby in your body, and your baby holding a secret and you don't know? In the nicest possible way, I needed to know.'” As an illuminating contrast, another (very different) prospective mother, who chose not to find out the sex of her child, says “If I knew, I would have projected a whole future for him or her. I'm excited about that lack of control.” This is getting closer to the heart of the matter: these parents are setting themselves up to define their children. The article rightly points out that sex selection is very much for the parents' benefit. What it doesn't go into is how that relates to capitalism, consumption, and (neo)liberal ideas about choice.
Although the article describes the extreme genderedness that ends up being forced on the children, it doesn't elaborate on what this might mean other than this attitude of trying to control the child, “chipping away at their uniqueness”. It mentions several reasons why people object to sex selection, some of which are salient (the missing girl babies of China and India) and some, um, less so (“the intrinsically virtuous course of nature” and “divine will”). But what is motivating this urge to control? And what is it, specifically, that they are trying to control? Obviously, it's not simply a case of control-freakery in choosing one or the other gender, but a reinforcement of the gender binary itself. Well, it seems glaringly obvious to me, but remarkably they manage to avoid any kind of critique of gender essentialism. The idea that any child should have all possibilities open to them, regardless of gender, is skirted round in a more general discussion of the parent/child relationship, and it's frustrating that they get so close to that sort of much-needed critique and still manage to un-gender it. There is no discussion of the possibility that people should be able to mix together gender traits, to switch around as they like, which is worrying given the heightened reinforcement of gender – in a gender essentialist society, that's tricky already, but if parents have spend £30,000 making you a girl, what are they going to say if you want to climb trees and 
refuse to wear dresses? What on earth are they going to say if you turn out to be trans? Making the sex of a child so important that it's worth £30,000 puts incredibly restraining limits on possibilites. It's frustrating that despite all the potential, an article like this can just... miss out the fact that capitalism and sexism (in the broadest sense of the term) cut out whole swathes of possible ways to be.
(picture courtesy of Sharon. I still like climbing trees!)
That observation about how people talk about the desired gender for their kids through the medium of consumption was superb. The act of buying as an act of power, and not being able to control a child's place in one's bourgeois fantasy, must be an intolerable combination for the poor, rich fuckers. They have all my sympathy.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I'm in favor of the illegality of this sort of thing. Widespread gender choice would be terrible for reproductive economics. The demographic proportions would be decided by Cosmopolitan and various fashion companies, for crying out loud!
I remember an elderly relative for some reason wanting to give me a baby doll when I was about 6 or 7. It's never too early to foster those maternal instincts I suppose. They asked me if I would rather have a boy or a girl doll. I said I didn't care either way and I clearly remember they were mystified. Apparently I was expected to have completed my family planning by then.
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