EDCMA

Description

“The situation here doesn’t encourage us to get pregnant and give birth to children, the political situation is scary and plays a big role, like you would count to 1000 before getting pregnant.” This is how Hala, a 24-year-old woman who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp at the outskirts of East Jerusalem, described her pregnancy journey under Israeli occupation in 2019. At the time, Hala, like many other East Jerusalemite women, was trying to become pregnant in an Israeli fertility clinic. In this talk, I ask what we can learn about reproductive injustice when we listen to Palestinian women in Occupied East Jerusalem, a particularly complex geography of Israeli spatial and demographic control. Thinking from this geography and with women like Hala, I offer three interconnected observations. Firstly, I explore the centrality of sexuality and reproduction for Israeli demographic politics. This allows me to show, in a second step, how Palestinian women’s experiences of reproductive injustice reveal the broader contours of the gendered impact of Israeli settler colonialism. Finally, I will reflect on what it means to present ethnographic data collected five years ago today, 1.5 years into Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian population of Gaza. Situating the current genocide in Gaza in a longer history of reproductive injustice and control opens a broader lens into the gendered dimension of settler colonial projects, in Israel and beyond.

About our speaker:

Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Sociology Department and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC). Before joining Warwick, she was a Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at the SPRC as well as the Centre’s inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow. Her work draws from the fields of feminist and queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and medical sociology and has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Body and Society, Comparative Sociology, The Sociological Review Magazine, and Social Text (Palestine Now Series). Her first book, “Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine,” is forthcoming with the University of California Press.

This is an in-person event, which takes place in Seminar Room 5, Chrystal Macmillan Building, School of Social and Political Science.

This event may be recorded. The recording will be used for internal University of Edinburgh teaching purposes only.

The event is organised and chaired by Chiara Chiavaroli, Teaching Fellow, Social Anthropology, and Lucy Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Medical Anthropology, University of Edinburgh.