Demographic Desires: Mediated Medicine, and Emergency Contraception in India

Exploring the intertwined histories of hormonal contraception and population anxiety, in Demographic Desires: Medicine, Media, and Emergency Contraception in India, Appleton shows how historic discourses and practices of ’family planning’ remerge as desires of the Indian state and Indian women. In examining the relationship(s) between demographic desires of a nation, reproductive justice on the ground, and women’s everyday material conditions, in this book, Appleton posits that under neoliberal regimes of ’empowered consumerism’ Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs) introduced as non-prescription pills in 2005 bring histories of demographic control projects and demographic anxieties into the present.

The book highlights nuances of demographic realities which are co-constituted through historical and contemporary narratives, media images, public policy, and medical discourse. Addressing recurring questions about demography, women’s reproductive justice, and the visual manifestations of neoliberal aspirations of Indians, this book contributes to conversations that provide an ’alter-narrative’ to demographic anxieties. Appleton proposes that demographic desires exist not in opposition to demographic anxiety, but rather as vital adjacent project.

Demographic Desires brings together debates in medical anthropology, media and cultural studies, and a feminist engagement on the medical, scientific, and cultural to showcase the myriad ways emergency contraception in India offers new opportunities for complicating the relationship between contraception, mediated medicine, and demography.

Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton is a Senior Lecturer at the interdisciplinary School for Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Trained as a feminist medical anthropologist and STS Scholar (with a PhD in cultural studies) she has co-edited (w/Bennett) Methods, Moments, and Ethnographic Spaces in Asia (2021) and (w/ Van Hollen) A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology (2023). Most recently, in light of COVID-19, she has been working collaboratively to research and write over a dozen articles about the experiences withing diverse communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is part of a collaboration that has been thinking and writing about COVID-19 since its very start and the collaboration is called CARUL (Care And Responsibility Under Lockdown). She has also individually written about ’the bubble’ in NZ as new public health vocabulary and ’looking away’ in India as a complex COVID-19 reality.

She has published in leading academic journals (Anthropology and Medicine, American Anthropologist, Economic and Political Weekly, to list but three) and non-academic public facing news platforms (The Hindu, The Wire, The Citizen, again, to just list three). She serves on numerous academic publishing/journal editorial boards, including Science, Technology, and Human Value (STHV). She is also the recipient of the New Zealand Royal Society’s Marden Fast Start grant (2023) which is focused on researching the Social Lives of Sex Hormones: Our Hormones, Our Selves in Aotearoa New Zealand.