Fertility refers to the production of children, which is a biological process. Usually, a man and a woman have sexual intercourse, and the woman conceives, resulting in a live birth. Although the production of a child is a biological process, the activities and events that lead to the act of sexual intercourse and, later, to giving birth are affected by the social, economic, cultural, and psychological characteristics of the woman and the man, and by the environment in which they live. In this chapter, we consider the conceptualization and measurement of fertility. Second, we discuss the proximate determinants of fertility. We next consider world fertility patterns and how they have changed over time. We next focus on fertility trends in the United States. We follow with a discussion of adolescent fertility, nonmarital fertility, childlessness, and male fertility. We conclude with a discussion of popular and unpopular dates of birth.

Sexual orientation refers principally to a person’s sexual behavior, sexual self-identification, and sexual attraction to others, whether they are of the same sex, different sex, all sexes, or no sex. The chapter first breaks down the LGBTQIA acronym and shows that the acronym does not represent the same general population. It then discusses two basic strategies for conceptualizing sexual orientation, seven different dimensions of sexual orientation, and survey data for measuring the prevalence of sexual orientation. These are followed by empirical analyses of sexual orientation for females, for males, and for asexuals.

Locating Prohibition's Origins in Colonial India

India is the only country in the world to have prohibition written into its national constitution as an ideal. Article 47 of the Constitution of India establishes that ‘the state shall undertake rules to bring about prohibition of the consumption, except for medicinal purposes, of intoxicating drinks and of drugs which are injurious to health’. Although the state is obligated to implement the policy, there is no compulsion to do so within a stipulated time frame, which makes it a Directive Principle of State Policy – an ideal. As much a national ideal as an instrument of state power, prohibition's fate has been entwined with the rise and fall of state governments since the country's independence.

Prohibition has also spawned its own political economy in India, with a broad spectrum of political parties professing commitment – though usually short-lived – to its enforcement. The specific circumstances of its introduction have varied across the country, as have the policy's trajectories and outcomes. Local cultures, economic circumstances and the demands of state governance have directly contributed to these differences. Besides Gujarat, which has enforced prohibition since 1947 despite a series of hooch-related tragedies and other controversies, Bihar, Mizoram and Nagaland are all ‘dry’ states at the time of this book's writing. Alcohol is all but banned in the union territory of Lakshadweep, although prohibition has been greatly contested in recent years. The association between prohibition and M. K. Gandhi has been the strongest in Gujarat, whereas evangelical Christianity paved the way for the policy's introduction in Nagaland. Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Manipur and Haryana have all tried prohibition on for size at various times since independence, only to suspend it as better suited for implementation at an unspecified time in the distant future. Crippling fiscal deficits and a strong liquor lobby heralded prohibition's termination in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala respectively.

The first part of this chapter discusses issues of sex structure. It next considers sex as a demographic concept, and then considers the five biological definitions of sex. It next focuses on demographic indexes of sex composition, especially the sex ratio and the sex ratio at birth, followed by discussions of the importance of sex and the demographic processes. The section ends with a discussion of intersex. The second section of the chapter focuses on gender identity; first discussed are definitions and terminology dealing with gender identity, particularly transgender. It next examines various issues dealing with trans men and trans women, trans gender nonbinary persons, and cis men and cis women. Empirical research is next discussed comparing trans persons with cis persons. There are significant differences between the trans male and trans female populations compared to the cis male and cis female populations.

Using the case study of the American Petroleum Institute’s citizen mobilization efforts, this chapter explores how the largest U.S.-based oil trade group came to embrace, for the first time, a constant and preemptive mode of citizen mobilization. Through interviews with API staff and analysis of campaign materials, the chapter traces the Institute’s efforts to build a predictable support base for the industry, identifying backers ready to fight on the sector’s behalf as new issues or projects become politically controversial. This “citizen reserve” has become an influential model of mobilization, allowing oil companies to vie for short-term legislative wins and the industry’s long-term repute.

Chapter 4 shows how novels engaged with narratives of racial coherence as Cuban slavery came to an end. Because of their ability to construct clashing voices, bring them into a tense truce via free indirect discourse, and engage the reader’s own knowing and refusal to know, novels were uniquely poised to stage racial passing. The chapter puts the first novel published by a Cuban of African descent, Martín Morúa Delgado’s Sofía (1892), in dialogue with two others: Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882) and Ramón Meza’s Carmela (1887). As Sofía shows, white identities were secured through hypocrisy and cynicism – an open secret that Villaverde and Meza had not fully acknowledged. In this way, the chapter traces the conditions of possibility for passing-as-open-secret. While in the United States passing is generally understood as a divergence between the private and public identities of a given subject – the public one being perceived as a deception that serves to hide the private one – these novels delved into situations in which this divergence was willfully ignored, and in which white identity was not invalidated by the perception of fraud.

This chapter explains how the oil sector’s citizen mobilization ends up being commandeered by registered lobbyists, who use their manufactured publics to speak to politicians and regulators. Examining the case of the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska, the chapter explores how state government developed an array of forums for hearing citizen sentiment about the proposed project. The chapter shows that although pro- pipeline groups attracted a robust base of support, they leveraged their memberships to allow oil lobbyists to speak on behalf of citizens in these new government forums. By claiming to represent a public, pro-pipeline groups’ paid lobbyists were afforded a right to speak in meetings, hearings, and online spaces intended for everyday people. This, the chapter argues, is a main strategic driver behind the formation of many contemporary pro-oil groups.

The first “international” migration of humans began around 60,000 years ago, and the migrations continue to this day. International migration is migration that occurs between countries. Its dynamics differ from those of internal migration, that is, migration within the geographical boundaries of a single country. Thus, a separate chapter is devoted here to international migration. This chapter first considers some of the definitions and concepts used in the study of international migration. It next covers world immigration patterns over time. This is followed by a discussion of immigration to the United States. The chapter then considers some of the positive and negative economic issues pertaining to international migration. Considerations of legal and unauthorized immigration are next reviewed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the meaning of the concept of zero net international migration.

Prohibitioning and the Constitution of India

Prohibition was reviewed and re-conceptualised following the achievement of independence, when the foundations of the modern Indian state were formally established. In the long run, the prohibition ideal filtered through new administrative and legal frameworks that nevertheless bore the imprint of both colonialism and the struggle against it. As the independent Indian republic was premised upon the founding principles of secular democracy and federalism, prohibition had to reckon with both debates relating to personal liberties and issues of state autonomy.

Following independence, the national democratic state – having won the mandate of representing national society – sought to intervene in that domain in order to transform it. The processes that had accompanied the birth of the Indian nation had brought forth institutions, structures and practices that enabled policies like prohibition to be operationalised through the workings of the state. However, the problem remained that a national society still had to be fashioned anew from the fluid, overlapping identities that made up the fabric of Indian social life. Amidst such a ‘recalcitrant social’, which, Prathama Banerjee argues, continued to function as ‘a network of multiple nodes of caste, community and regional sovereignties’, postcolonial governmentality appeared from the very outset ‘a compromised project’.

In this, however, postcolonial governmentality did not constitute as radical a rupture from the colonial past as Banerjee's discussion would suggest. The careful balancing act that the nationalist government attempted to strike between ‘mobilising the social and mobilising the political’ had already set the tone for things to come before independence was achieved; prohibition's colonial-era origins are a case in point.

Infectious diseases are caused by pathogenic agents, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites. These agents may infect a human directly from contaminated air, water, or food. The agents may also be spread from infected animals or infected humans, called vectors, to a healthy human. An epidemic is a major increase or upswing of an infectious disease in an area that results in a large number of cases, followed then by a decline. Many infections and contagious diseases have become epidemic, including scarlet fever, chicken pox, measles, influenza, and cholera, among others.

Demographers have developed several theories or explanations about why and how populations change their size. Many have written about world population growth and decline. In this chapter we consider first the general meaning of the term “population.” Then we review the works of some of the early writers who discussed population and population change. Malthus is the most well-known of the early scholars, and so we discuss him and his writings in some detail. Our discussion of Malthus is contrasted with shorter discussions of Karl Marx and Ester Boserup. We then turn to a detailed discussion of demographic transition theory and its major extensions. Finally, we discuss some of the principal theories and perspectives that demographers have developed that focus specifically and separately on fertility, mortality, and migration. These theories are discussed in greater detail in the chapters devoted to these topics.