Rexer, G. (2023)
Body and SOciety, 29(4), 3-28.
Body and SOciety, 29(4), 3-28.
The Materiality of Power and Bodily Matter(ing): Embodied Resistance in Palestine
Rexer, G. (2021)
In: Special Issue “Sexuality and Borders”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(9),1549-1568.
In: Special Issue “Sexuality and Borders”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(9),1549-1568.
Borderlands of reproduction: bodies, borders, and assisted reproductive technologies in Israel/Palestine.
Yurdakul, G., Rexer, G., Eilat, S. & Mutluer, N (2019)
Comparative Sociology, 18(5), 706-734.
Comparative Sociology, 18(5), 706-734.
Contested Authorities over Life Politics: Religious-Secular Tensions in Abortion Debates in Germany, Turkey, and Israel
Suhaila Abu Jalala, Anat Rosenthal, Gala Rexer, and Ghada Majadli (2023)
physicians for human Rights Israel
The Consequences of Israeli Human Rights Violations on the Health of Women in the Gaza Strip
Research ReportGala Rexer (2022)
The sociological Review Magazine
The sociological Review Magazine
Words failed us
Repairing sociology’s haunted past means finding new language to write about the social world#4 most read paper on The Sociological Review Magazine website in 2022.
Gala Rexer (2022)
asa Political Sociology section newsletter, Spring/summer 2022
asa Political Sociology section newsletter, Spring/summer 2022
How Race, Nationality, and Gender shape Fieldwork and Data Collection
Tales from the FieldGala Rexer (2022)
Diffrakt | Centre for Theoretical Periphery
Diffrakt | Centre for Theoretical Periphery
What’s in your bag, Ursula K. Le Guin?
The Carrier Bag Approach to Storytelling and White FeminismI have taught, co-taught, or am currently teaching the following classes:
The Politics of Health and Medicine: Race, Gender, Nation (postgraduate, module convenor, Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies)
Topics in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies (postgraduate, co-convenor, Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies)
Body Politics and the Margins of Life: The Secular/Religious Tensions (postgraduate, module convenor 2017/18 and co-convenor 2016/17, Social Sciences and Gender Studies)
Supervision
I have supervised a number of Master’s dissertations in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies (2023)
Workshops
The Politics of Health and Medicine: Race, Gender, Nation (postgraduate, module convenor, Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies)
Topics in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies (postgraduate, co-convenor, Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies)
Body Politics and the Margins of Life: The Secular/Religious Tensions (postgraduate, module convenor 2017/18 and co-convenor 2016/17, Social Sciences and Gender Studies)
Supervision
I have supervised a number of Master’s dissertations in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies (2023)
Workshops
| From 2021-2023, I have been on the steering committee for an EU-funded study on the consequences of Israeli human rights violations on the mental health of Palestinian women in the Gaza strip, led by Physicians for Human Rights Israel and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. I have designed and taught a two-day introductory workshop on qualitative research methods and data collection for the projects’ research assistants in Gaza. |
Guest Lectures
Bsc Sociology, UCL,
Session on Sexual Politics and the nation-state (2024)
MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL, session on Feminist and abolitionist Ethnography (2023/2024)
MA History & Philosophy of Science, UCL, session on Reproductive (In)Justice (2023)
MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL, session on Race, Capital, Feminism,(2023)
MA Gender, Society, and Representation, UCL, session on Decolonial Feminism (2022)
BA Gender Studies, humboldt University, session on Migration and Eugenics, (2022)
Bsc Sociology, UCL,
Session on Sexual Politics and the nation-state (2024)
MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL, session on Feminist and abolitionist Ethnography (2023/2024)
MA History & Philosophy of Science, UCL, session on Reproductive (In)Justice (2023)
MA Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies, UCL, session on Race, Capital, Feminism,(2023)
MA Gender, Society, and Representation, UCL, session on Decolonial Feminism (2022)
BA Gender Studies, humboldt University, session on Migration and Eugenics, (2022)
Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine
(under contract with University of California Press)This book examines how the Israeli settler colonial state and its borders shape Palestinian women’s reproductive freedom. Demographic Anxieties uses the Black feminist reproductive justice framework to show how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making and to foreground the sexual politics of settler colonialism in Israel and beyond. Based on in-depth interviews and more than two years of ethnographic research with Israeli medical staff and Palestinian women undergoing fertility treatment in Israeli hospitals, this 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 the everyday encounters between Palestinian patients and Jewish Israeli doctors to argue that alongside the spectacular and disastrous forms of Israeli state violence, we must also consider quotidian forms of surveillance and control to understand Israeli politics. The key intervention of this book is to show how these overlooked sites of “tender violence” are foundational for the settler state to implement its sexual and demographic politics. It explores how Israeli political subjectivity, and its collective structure of feeling is founded on the control and restriction of the Palestinian population’s reproduction. In other words, Demographic Anxieties argues that reproductive injustice is a feature, not a bug of the settler colonial project.
SPRC podcast series
Gala Rexer welcomes Xine Yao, Associate Professor at UCL and author of Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2021).
Reflecting on how Disaffected has travelled as a book, a theory, and a method over the past two years, Xine speaks about what thinking through and with the fields of Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian diasporic studies, and queer of colour critique does to our understanding of race, gender, and affect, and how we approach literary and cultural text as theory. They discuss how their citational practices shape teaching and scholarship, and explore modes of affective disobedience that engender counter-intimacies and new forms of decolonial solidarity.
Gala Rexer welcomes Akwugo Emejulu, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, 2022).
Discussing the figure of the fugitive from a Black feminist perspective, Akwugo addresses questions about solidarity and coalitional work, strategies of counter-storytelling and playing with new forms of writing, and discusses the difficulties of staying in the liminal space of fugitivity as a mode of experimentation, ambivalence, and disidentification from the figure of the Human.
Gala Rexer welcomes Maya Mikdashi, Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Lecturer in the Middle East Studies Program at Rutgers University, to talk about her book Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (Stanford, 2022).
Maya reflects on the multi-disciplinary genealogy of her book, and describes what it means to take different fields (anthropology, gender studies, and Middle East studies) seriously. This conversation also engages with the relationship between geopolitics, epistemology, and methodology, and with the making and unmaking of categories when we ask the same question from different locations.
Gala Rexer welcomes Françoise Vergès, franco-Reunionnese activist, independent curator, and public educator, to talk about her most recent books, A Feminist Theory of Violence (2022), The Wombs of Women. Race, Capital, Feminism (2020,) and A Decolonial Feminism (2019).
Françoise discusses how women’s rights have been deployed in the service of the carceral state, and how a decolonial feminism needs to reimagine a collective politics of protection against violence, pollution, and exhaustion outside of the nation-state form and capital. Françoise calls upon us to strike, unionize, and fight back, to rethink the family, reproduction, and care outside of racialized frameworks of security and deservingness, and to nourish comrade- and friendship, revolutionary love, and inter-generational transmission of feminist thought.
Events archive
Supported by the British Sociological Association (BSA) and the LSE Phd Academy, Writing as Repair/Repair as Writing is a day of talks, discussions and workshop encouraging participants to think critically and in an interdisciplinary way about writing practices in academia. The day will include an opening talk by Dr Gala Rexer, a writing workshop led by Heba Hayek and a panel and group discussion chaired by Anna Nguyen.
Organised by: Yasmine Kherfi, Sophie Marie Niang, Sarai Kirshner, rémy-paulin twahirwa
UCL's Sarah Parker Remond Centre is pleased to announce a new seminar series, Perspectives on Racialisation, Gender and Feminist Methodologies 2022-23, organised by Dr Gala Rexer, Postdoctoral Fellow at the SPRC.
Event recording: Decolonial feminism: a politics, working towards the abolition of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and the state; a theory, rethinking logics of exploitation, oppression, and the institutions that engender them; a pedagogy, recognizing and understanding difference as a pre-condition for working together across difference. Françoise Vergès and Edna Bonhomme repoliticize feminist thinking and practice, which have been increasingly deployed in the service of the carceral state, neoliberalism, and developmental paternalism. In this conversation, they will think through state violence, climate catastrophe, racial capitalism, and reproductive (in)justice in order to map out a cartography of decolonial feminist thought.
Sexuality and Borders is a two-day international symposium hosted and funded by New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, 2019 (participant). Special Issue The Sexual Politics of Border Control published in the Journal for Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Three-part interdisciplinary symposium on technology, gender, and sexuality “<Interrupted =“Cyfem and Queer>” happening across various queer community spaces in Berlin 2018-2019 (academic curator/organiser) 