Demographic Anxieties. Bodies, Borders and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine / Israel

Event details

Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel (University of California Press).

The book examines how the Israeli settler-colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom. Drawing on a Black feminist reproductive justice framework, Demographic Anxieties demonstrates how Israeli policies profoundly affect Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making, while foregrounding the sexual politics of settler colonialism in Israel and beyond. Based on in-depth interviews and more than two years of ethnographic research with Israeli medical staff and Palestinian women undergoing fertility treatment in Israeli hospitals, the book takes hospitals, fertility departments, maternity wards, and infrastructures of care as sites for examining the governance of Palestinian lives.

Demographic Anxieties focuses on everyday encounters between Palestinian patients and Jewish Israeli doctors, arguing that, alongside the spectacular and devastating forms of state violence, attention must also be paid to quotidian forms of surveillance and control in order to understand the workings of Israeli politics. A key intervention of the book is to demonstrate how these often-overlooked sites of “tender violence” are foundational to the settler state’s sexual and demographic politics. It explores how Israeli political subjectivity and its collective structure of feeling are shaped by the control and restriction of Palestinian reproduction.

In this sense, Demographic Anxieties argues that reproductive injustice is not an incidental feature of the settler-colonial project, but a constitutive element of it.

About the speaker

Gala Rexer

Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). She was previously a visiting research fellow at NYU and Yale University, as well as the SPRC's inaugural postdoctoral fellow. She is the author of Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel, and a co-editor of the special issue, Sociology in the Times of Genocide, for The Sociological Review. Broadly, her ethnographic research examines how political, environmental, and spatial conditions shape reproduction.