Fertility Frontiers A Decolonial Materialist Feminist Perspective on Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Israel/Palestine

Over the past years, the Republic of Georgia has emerged as an important surrogacy hub at Israel’s “fertility frontier,” where cheaper and more readily available surrogates are recruited to make Israeli couples’ reproductive dreams of a biologically related child come true.  In this article,  I explore how an acute decolonial materialist feminist perspective on “frontiers” can urge us to conceive of them not only in “territorial” terms of land, soil, and minerals, but to also include the gendered territories of bodies, biologies, and "the flesh,” and the ways these are extracted, mined, and commercialized in both older and contemporary bioeconomies. I argue that reproductive technologies operate as a demographic and a commodity frontier in Israel/Palestine, at the crossroads of ongoing histories of biocapitalism and settler colonialism.