LAUSR

During the same month that the Indian Edition of Business Insider—an American financial and business news portal—published this article on mother-entrepreneurs, the Indian pharmaceutical giant Mankind launched a marketing campaign for its pregnancy test kit, Prega News, with the hashtag: #YourSecondHome. This campaign that focused on working pregnant Indian women was actualized through a dedicated website, media releases and most notably a viral advertisement that racked up over 10 million views on YouTube. However, both the Business Insider article and the #YourSecondHome Campaign (which has since been followed up with two more viral advertisements in 2018 and 2019) fail to account for the context in which these pregnancies are located: specifically, postcolonial India, where the labor force participation from women is abysmally low and where women earn only 62% of what their male colleagues earn for performing the same work (Catalyst 2018). This short essay by focusing on Prega News’ #YourSecondHome campaign, as representative of “spectacularised and idealised ideas of pregnancy” (Melanie Kennedy and Safiya Noble 2019), reflects on how postcolonial pregnant subjectivities are mediated through neoliberalism. As postcolonial subjects ourselves, we point out that such reductive mediations reflect a neoliberal framework, which “as a dominant structural condition . . . projects totalizing social change” (Aihwa Ong 2007, 4) and renders important intersectional identity markers in the postcolonial sphere, like caste and class, invisible. Such representations divert audiences’ attention from realities of a deeply gendered and partisan Indian labor market as well as the challenges for “matricentric feminism[s]” in (supposed) postfeminist spaces. (O’ Reilly 2016). Contextually, the heterotopic (Michel Foucault 1986) nature of postfeminist landscapes has been cogently articulated: