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

Demographic Anxieties examines how the Israeli settler-colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom. Grounded in a Black feminist reproductive justice framework, this work foregrounds the sexual politics of settler colonialism by demonstrating how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making. Based on in-depth interviews and more than two years of ethnographic research with Israeli medical staff and Palestinian women undergoing fertility treatment, the book takes Israeli hospitals, fertility departments, maternity wards, and infrastructures of care as sites of inquiry into the governance of Palestinians’ lives.

Demographic Anxieties examines everyday encounters between Palestinian patients and Jewish Israeli doctors and argues that, alongside spectacular and disastrous forms of Israeli state violence, we must also consider more quotidian forms of surveillance and control. Written from an anticolonial feminist perspective, it asks what Palestine, as a site of knowledge production, enables, complicates, or demands from a transnational feminist approach to reproductive justice.

Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 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 Racialization (SPRC). She was previously a Visitin Research Fellow at NYU and Yale University, as well as the SPRC's inaugural postdoctoral fellow. Her first book, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel, was recently published by the University of California Press. Broadly, her ethnographic research examines how political, environmental, and spatial conditions shape reproduction.

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