“Promote gender equality and empower women” is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations adopted in the year 2000 and aims to achieve by 2015. Gendered Arrangements, an initiative of the Women’s and Gender Studies program in the department of Sociology at Virginia Tech, is in response to the third goal of promoting gender equality and empowering women. Spearheaded by Manisha Sharma, a Visiting Assistant Professor of WGS, the project Understanding Female Feticide in India uses a visual and digital rhetoric to explore a gendered arrangement.

Gendered Arrangements: Understanding Female Feticide is supported by a SEAD grant from the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology at Virginia Tech. In India female fetuses are selectively aborted during the second trimester of pregnancy. Research has shown that this is largely done by using ultrasound technology and the clinical procedure of feticide. This conscious and well-planned gendered arrangement has resulted in a skewed gender ratio, giving rise to a plethora of social problems.