Intimate Territories and the Experimental Subject in Ladakh, India

TLDR: This paper explored the management of reproduction and sexuality as experimental political practice in Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, where vote bloc politics and a tenuous geopolitical context highlight the reproductive body's potential to maintain political and territorial control through demographic trends.

Abstract: This paper explores the management of reproduction and sexuality as experimental political practice. In Leh District of India's Jammu and Kashmir State, vote bloc politics and a tenuous geopolitical context highlight the reproductive body's potential to maintain political and territorial control through demographic trends. Conflict between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority is articulated partly through the regulation of fertility and sexuality. Population is described as a zero-sum game in which each side acquires or cedes territory; activists and religious leaders experiment with the body as a territorial tool. These projects collide with the hopes and fears of women and men considering love, marriage, pregnancy, and contraceptive use. This paper draws on research conducted in 2004 and 2007–2009 to explore how women's desiring and reproductive bodies are folded into geopolitical experiments, how women cope under this experimental regime, and the ways that they turn to a tactic of ‘not kno...