Sperm Smuggling and the Right to Life in Palestine

Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is currently working on a project entitled 'Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival'.

The project explores the politics of life and living in conditions of proximity to death and debilitation, both human and environmental, in the settler colonial context of Palestine. The project is supported by a 4 year Dutch Research Council VENI grant in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Before joining Utrecht University, Dr. Ftouni lectured at SOAS, University of London, and earned her PhD from the University of Westminster. She writes across the fields of cultural studies, gender studies, Palestine studies, and critical theory.

“They make death, and I am the labour of life”. These are the words of Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqa (1961-2024), written in the voice of his unborn child, Milad, who was conceived of sperm smuggled from Ayalon prison. Daqqa's statement is an insistence on life, and the labour that makes it possible, in the face of the death-making worlds of Israeli settler colonialism.

What does it mean to reproduce life from behind bars? And how does the practice of sperm-smuggling circumvent settler-colonial efforts to curtail the reproduction of life?

In this lecture, Ftouni argues how sperm-smuggling inaugurates a practice of life making that both affirms the inalienable “right to life” but also exceeds the limits of the law.