Thu, 18 Jul 2024 07:00 am - 08:00 am EDT - Online
Palestine as a Feminist Issue: Demographic Anxieties, Palestinian Reproductive Futurity, and Settler Colonial Intimacies
By Centre for Gender Studies - wp.lancs.ac.uk/centre-for-gender-studies/
Dr Gala Rexer, University of Warwick
On the territory between the River and the Sea, Palestinian women’s most intimate reproductive decision-making – whether to have children, how many, when to have them, and how to get pregnant – are in some way or another affected by Israeli settler colonial governance. This is unsurprising in a context where (social and biological) reproduction is one of the main arenas to consolidate power over the land and population. While Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza exemplifies an extreme and violent iteration of setter colonialism’s dual structure of “destroy to replace,” Israeli borders, policies, and ideology have long before worked to limit Palestinian women’s reproduction. This paper explores how Israeli settler colonialism penetrates the most intimate and everyday spheres of Palestinian women’s lives and shapes their reproductive choices, pregnancies, and hopes for their future children. Based on almost three years of research with Palestinian women trying to get pregnant in Israeli fertility clinics and Israeli medical staff, it shows how settler colonial rule is simultaneously political, spatial, and affective. However, crucially, it also attends to the various ways in which Palestinian women navigate and challenge their enforced inclusion in or subjugation to the Israeli state. In centering Palestinian women’s struggle against Israeli occupation, dispossession, and domination, this paper approaches Palestine as a feminist issue. It not only discusses the particular methodological implications of doing research on/in Palestine but also reflects on anthropologist Sarah Ihmoud’s invitation “to think with decolonial Palestinian feminism” (2022) as a mode of transnational solidarity.
Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department. Before that, she was Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre. Her work draws from the fields of feminist and queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and global and medical sociology, and has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Body and Society, Comparative Sociology, and The Sociological Review Magazine. She is currently finishing the manuscript for her first book, “Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine” (under contract with the University of California Press).
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