Profile

Gala Rexer is a feminist sociologist who researches gender, sexuality, and race in relation to health inequalities and the body. Drawing from the fields of feminist and queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and global sociology, she studies reproductive and environmental injustice and practices and movements that resist them. Broadly, her work explores the historical connectedness and contemporary spatial and embodied conditions of nationalism, settler colonialism, and (racial) capitalism in Israel/Palestine, Germany, and the UK. She is interested in the relationship between theory and methodology, transnational feminisms, and global solidarities.

Before joining Warwick’s Sociology Department as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, she was a Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, as well as the Centre’s inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-23). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (awarded in 2022). Gala has been involved in various collectives of critical and feminist knowledge production and volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) in a project with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (2021-2023).

Research

My first book manuscript, tentatively titled Demographic Anxieties: Bodies, Borders, and Reproductive Injustice in Israel/Palestine (under contract with the University of California Press), shows how Israeli policies profoundly impact Palestinian women’s reproductive rights, health, and decision-making and foregrounds 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, Demographic Anxieties argues that reproductive injustice is a feature, not a bug of the settler colonial project.

My current project,Entangled Reproduction: Life in the Wastelands of Racial Capitalism(funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick, 2024-27), explores how ongoing exposure to pollution, waste, and toxicity affects reproductive choices, pregnancy outcomes, and parenting practices of communities living near toxic infrastructures in London.

Project abstract:

Industries require sites to deposit waste and other toxic matter. In global cities, the majority of pollution is imposed on disadvantaged neighborhoods, adding complex socio-environmental factors to existing social inequalities. This study explores how ongoing exposure to pollution, waste, and toxicity affects reproductive choices, pregnancy outcomes, and parenting practices of communities living near toxic infrastructures in London. It traces how local environmental movements measure the effects of pollution and investigates how affected families protect themselves and their children. Producing novel data on environmental pollution and reproduction, this project also formulates a theoretical response to living with toxicity.

Teaching

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Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Rexer, Gala (2023) The Materiality of Power and Bodily Matter(ing): Embodied Resistance in Palestine. Body & Society, 29(4), 3-28.

Rexer, Gala (2023). Borderlands of Reproduction: Bodies, Borders, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Israel/Palestine. In: Special Issue “The Sexual Politics of Border Control”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(9),1549-1568.

Yurdakul, Gökçe, Rexer, Gala, Eilat, Shvat & Mutluer (2019) Contested Authorities over Life Politics: Religious-Secular Tensions in Abortion Debates in Germany, Turkey, and Israel. Comparative Sociology, 18(5), 706-734.

Editor-reviewed articles, podcasts & public scholarship

2023 Suhaila Abu Jalala, Anat Rosenthal, Gala Rexer, and Ghada Majadli. The Consequences of Israeli Human Rights Violations on the Health of Women in the Gaza Strip. Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Research Report.

Rexer, Gala (2023). In Conversation with Xine Yao. SPRC Podcast.

Rexer, Gala (2023). In Conversation with Akwugo Emejulu. SPRC Podcast.

Rexer, Gala (2023). In Conversation with Maya Mikdashi. SPRC Podcast.

Rexer, Gala (2022). In Conversation with Françoise Vergès. SPRC Podcast.

Rexer, Gala (2022). Words failed us: Repairing sociology’s haunted past means finding new language to write about the social world. The Sociological Review Magazine.

Rexer, Gala (2022). How Race, Nationality, and Gender shape Fieldwork and Data Collection. ASA Political Sociology Section Newsletter Spring/Summer 2022.