Talk:Sharmila Rudrappa

By Rutvi Dattani

Sharmila Rudrappa is Director of South Asia Institute at the college of Liberal Arts, the University of Texas at Austin.

She teaches on, and researches issues related to gender, race, and labour. Her specific interests are on "reproductive markets" in the U.S. and India.

In her Book chapter titled "Law’s Culture and Cultural Difference” published in the book "Body Evidence: Intimate Violence against South Asian Women in America" the term South Asian refers generically to women facing violence in the region but she treats women as a homogeneous group in the region and ignores the reality that laws & treatment of women vary widely across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.

Her work is focused on reproductive rights in India and the United States and hold no relevance to the allegation she made in a letter supporting the "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference.

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

• Rudrappa. S (2015) Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India. New York, NY: New York University Press. 224 pages.

• Rudrappa. S(2004) Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 256 pages.

• Rudrappa. S (2017) “Reproducing Dystopia: The Politics of Transnational Surrogacy in India, 2002-2015,” Special issue in Critical Sociology, edited by Jennifer Chun, Heidi Gottfried, and Ito Peng. November 2017 (44:7/8).

• Rudrappa. S (2018) Land, Women and Techno-pastoral Development in Southern Karnataka, India. Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online. Vol. 7, Nov 2018.

• Rudrappa. S (2016) “What to Expect When You’re Expecting: The Affective Economies of Consuming Surrogacy in India.” Positions: Asia Critique, 24 (1).

• Rudrappa. S (2012) “Working India’s Reproductive Assembly Line: Surrogacy and Reproductive Rights?” Western Humanities Review, 66(3), 77-101.

• Rudrappa S. (2010) “Making India the ‘Mother Destination’: Outsourcing Labor to Indian Surrogates.” Research in the Sociology of Work, 20, 253-285.

• Rudrappa. S (2009) “Cyber-Coolies and Techno-Braceros: Race and Commodification of Indian Information Technology Guest Workers in the United States.” University of San Francisco Law Review, 44(2), 353-372.

• Rudrappa. S (2016) “From Manufacturing Clothes to Manufacturing Babies: Economic Precarity and Labor Options Among Surrogate Mothers in Bangalore, India.” Edited by Virginie Rozée Gomez and Unisa Sayeed. Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Global South and North: Issues, Challenges and the Future. Routledge, London.

References

• Sharmila Rudrappa page on University of Texas at Austin accessed on August 9, 2022
• Sharmila Rudrappa page on Academia accessed on August 9, 2022