Demographic Anxieties

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 to argue that alongside spectacular and disastrous forms of Israeli state violence, we must also consider 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.