"Reproductive Injustice and Settler Colonialism": Gala Rexer in conversation with Andrea Becker

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.

Gala Rexer is a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick and an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL. 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.

Andréa Becker is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hunter College—City University of New York. Her research and writing interrogate the ways social inequality shape reproductive healthcare. 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.

Please note that by signing up to this event you will automatically be added to The Philosopher's weekly mailing list. If you don't want to receive emails from us, it's easy to unsubscribe!