Spermology of the nation.

Fertility ideology and settlement colonialism in Israel

Resumen

The entanglement between scientific research, medical institutions, and state policies of reproductive control is well documented. This paper focuses on a specific Israeli case: the practice of retrieving and preserving sperm from soldiers killed in combat, known as Posthumous Assisted Reproduction (PAR). Through the lens of critical discourse analysis, we examine the intersection of societal militarisation and reproductive militarisation. Analysing a corpus of interrelated textual and visual materials, we explore the militarised imaginary of «posthumous reproduction» as mobilised by the Israeli state to promote selective fertility. This is achieved through the deployment of reproductive technologies and incentive systems whose ideological and rhetorical foundations can be traced back to the 1930s. We propose the term spermology of the nation to describe this discursive regime, in which the soldier’s sacrifice is symbolically compensated with posthumous fatherhood, and the voluntary gestation of his sperm becomes a patriotic act. This selective and ‘deterministic’ technopolitical management of fertility constructs an image of Israel as a progressive, high-tech nation, while simultaneously masking its settler colonial logics.

Keywords: sperm, reproductive technologies, posthumous fatherhood, militarism, settler colonialism, reproductive justice.