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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 Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London.
"One of the most compelling books I have read in years. Gala Rexer's skillful, sensitive, and sophisticated writing deftly pulls together disparate concepts from existing research on reproductive politics and from Indigenous and Black feminist thought. The book argues persuasively that reproductive injustice is a feature, not a side effect, of the settler-colonial project."—Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, author of Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel
“In Demographic Anxieties, Gala Rexer tells an important story about reproductive control—even through nominal inclusion—under settler-colonial militarism. Rexer’s careful ethnographic research shows how Palestinians, across all of historic Palestine and under different iterations of Israeli occupation and colonial rule, navigate and narrate their mediated and differential access to reproductive health.”—Jennifer Lynn Kelly, author of Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine
“A powerful and deeply researched work that takes us into the lives of Palestinian women who, engaging in the physically and emotionally taxing pursuit of reproductive assistance, are both further exposed to the violence of the Israeli state and in active resistance of it. In concise and moving prose, Gala Rexer captures how Israeli colonialism, more than a political and legal structure, is an intimate experience of slow and tender violence, as the occupying state targets reproduction in its attempts to deny the future of Palestinians as a people. This book, which masterfully meets the challenge of being both devastatingly timely and historically grounded, is a must-read for anyone interested in reproductive health, apartheid, colonialism, or the enduring fight for Palestinian liberation.”—Heba Gowayed, author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential