"They Make Death, and I’m the Labor of Life”: Palestinian Prisoners’ Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life

Abstract

How is life affirmed under conditions of death, destruction, and debilitation? This article addresses this question by looking at the practice of sperm smuggling in Palestine as a life-affirming practice. The practice of sperm smuggling emerges in a context where reproductive injustices against Palestinians are daily occurrences of life under Israeli settler colonialism. The legal, social, and militarized targeting of Palestinian mothers and children, the mass incarceration of Palestinian men, and the attack on infrastructures of livability are Israeli biopolitical and necropolitical strategies of incapacitating the conditions necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of life in Palestine. Against this backdrop, the author argues that the practice of sperm smuggling circumvents settler-colonial efforts to curtail the reproduction of life and inaugurates a practice of life-making and a conception of life beyond its adjudication in the language of “rights.” Critically engaging with the work of Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti, the author argues that sperm smuggling enacts an “affirmation of life” that refuses submission to the totalizing hold of physical, social, and political death.