Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice

Demographic Anxieties examines how the Israeli settler-colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom. 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.

What does it mean for Palestinian women to seek fertility treatment inside medical institutions that are part of a settler-colonial state and apartheid regime? In this conversation, Gala Rexer and Andréa Becker discuss Rexer's book Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel (2026, University of California Press). They explore how fertility treatment became a key site of investment for the Israeli state and affective attachment for Israeli society, and consider the politics of reproduction across settler-colonial states and racist healthcare systems more broadly. They also take up the transnational dimensions of the Black feminist reproductive justice framework, what it means to do empirical research on contested medical practices, and discuss the alternative infrastructures of care and reproduction that emerge in authoritarian and ethno-nationalist states.

About the Speaker:

Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL. Previously she was a visiting research fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her ethnographic research examines how political, environmental, and spatial conditions shape reproduction. Rexer’s first book, Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Palestine/Israel, was recently published by the University of California Press, and she is a co-editor of the special issue, Sociology in the Times of Genocide, for The Sociological Review.

The Moderator:

Andréa Becker is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hunter College—City University of New York.
She is a medical sociologist researching “contested medical practices,” or elements of healthcare that are stigmatized or controversial. As part of this agenda, Dr. Becker examines how inequality manifests at every stage of human reproduction—from contraception and sterilization, abortion and birth, to sexual experiences. Becker is the author of Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and others. She is originally from Mexico City and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.