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Abstract
This dissertation explores the Palestinian experience of sperm smuggling from Israeli prisons. Since 2012, dozens of Palestinian couples, otherwise denied conjugal visits and the right to reproduce, have had 117 children through this practice. Drawing on numerous interviews with families and other involved individuals, this research examines how these acts of reproduction and intimacy challenge Israel’s settler-colonial control over Palestinian bodies, spaces, and temporalities. By focusing on these familial experiences, the research traces how domestic life emerges as a site of domination and counter-domination, and as a realm of counter-representation, where violence, resistance, suffering, and competing colonial, national, and familial imaginaries of the future are contested and negotiated.