Tricky Tools for Feminist Struggle

This article takes up shifting meanings of the population sex ratio in select times and places. Through historicization and contextual analysis, I seek to identify possible origins and continuities of the gendered imperial and racialized logics that undergird current dilemmas for feminists related to the sex ratio. I argue that sex ratios, like other numerical abstractions that stand in as representations of empirical reality, are tricky tools for addressing social problems. Regardless of whether they are viewed primarily as natural, biological, cultural, racial, or even social, they have been both friend and foe to feminist struggle. Feminists might invest in interpretations of the ratio as a mutable, social indicator of the status of women and girls in need of improvement. Yet this idea runs the risk of misappropriation and conflation with diehard interpretations of sex ratios that reproduce hierarchy based on race/ethnicity and nationality.