Orly Benjamin

Feminists’ scholarship and critique of gender climate injustice have exposed just how scarce the practical efforts to correct it are. The challenge of generating incentives designed to encourage urban planning that accounts for expected intersectional vulnerabilities during climate disasters reflects a gap in knowledge: how does professionals’ awareness of intensified vulnerabilities inform climate adaptation plans (CAPs)? We propose an intersectional critical feminist perspective evaluating recognition, dialog, and budgeting that decodes the social process by which professionals’ knowledge of intersectional vulnerabilities is lost before informing CAPs. Based on an empirical investigation of the increasing gender awareness among administrators who accumulate knowledge about women’s vulnerabilities, our analysis contributes an explanation of the marginalization of gender mainstreaming toolkits in urban CAPs. We show that even in municipalities characterized by increasing levels of r...

Previous studies on women’s experiences with sexually explicit material used by their long-term partners indicate that women’s responses were complex. Neutrality and acceptance were the dominant responses even though some women continued to report negative emotions and experiences. This complexity has not yet been explored from the perspective of maintaining intimacy and the meanings of togetherness. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with 20 Israeli Jewish women, we identified a process in women who expect to have passionate and sexually active relationships. Apparently, embracing pornography and using it as a guiding resource for developing couples’ sexuality is characteristic of women for whom togetherness implies the need to nurture mutual passion. We also examine how pornographic images of intimacy in heterosexual relationships can lead to the development of alienated and hierarchical sexuality in the lives of married women who feel entitled to fulfill their sexuality.

ABSTRACT We live in a time of powerful forces that operate to isolate us—to disconnect us from each other, from women who struggled against injustice and oppression in the past and those who are still engaged in the very same struggles. Powerful disputations disconnect us from feminist women who are resisting power structures around us, and from women who took part in feminist endeavors over the years. Our separate struggles for success in careers, intimate relationships and inner growth, and for our own economic survival, often expose us to individualist ideologies and practices that help us forget the enormous amount of human effort invested in our current understanding of women's lives. Hannah Safran's book, Don't Wanna Be Nice Girls: The Struggle for Suffrage and the New Feminism in Israel, is an attempt to challenge these forces and connect us to significant feminist projects that took place in Israel—projects that we didn't know of, or knew of but have forgotten. This sense of connection to Israeli feminists in the 1920s and 1970s generates an exciting journey of encounter with their courage and persistence, but at the same time a terribly sad one. Safran's account of the complex feminist struggle to enhance the legitimacy of the movement and its cause in the wider society is both optimistic and pessimistic: Wonderful women devoted the best of their resources to improving Israeli society, yet so very little was achieved. In many ways, things are now worse. Even more devastating is the issue of relationships among feminist women, which are portrayed in this historical account as vicious Women in Israel, who shared the goal of improving women's lives, had great difficulties cooperating with each other. Each felt that the other threatened her and the women's movement as a whole. Safran, who touches delicately on these internal conflicts in an effort not to rekindle them, connects us, too, with this basic difficulty in Israeli women's activism. We have beautiful ideas of a nurturing femininity, of self in relation and care for others, but the women around us often and terribly easily become those against whom we fight. Current theoretical discussions of globalization, gender and the women's movement ask important questions about the way feminist ideas have traveled around the world and the processes by which the ideas of the international women's movement have been localized. For example, Susan Stanford Friedman writes: The notion that a given social order privileges the masculine does not, I believe, have a single origin. Nor does the advocacy of gender equity. Rather, these constitutive components of locational feminism have emerged differently in particular times and places and have travelled from one culture to another, producing hybridic cultural formations of indigenous feminism influenced by other travelling forms of feminism. Friedman's argument is important, because it allows for multiple directions of development and for recognition of various sources and forces that may have contributed to the process of localization. Safran, however, appears to promote a different line of argument. Throughout the book, she attempts to convince readers that the roots of Israeli feminism are American. To be sure, she mentions the east European background of many feminist leaders in the 1920sand describes European developments from which they drew support, particularly in the Zionist movement. Nevertheless, she systematically returns to underscore the American connections of feminists in Eretz Israel and the State of Israel, both in the 1920s and in the 1970s. This line of argument traps itself into generating an implicit hierarchy between those feminists whose biographies fit into the "American connection" and those who do not, who are somewhat excluded. Furthermore, Safran's historical account focuses on three feminist groups in Israel's three largest cities who, by naming themselves feminists, differentiated themselves from other, more traditional forms of feminist activism. As a result, women who actively promoted women's issues elsewhere, in different groups or by different means, are hardly mentioned. In the last chapter, Safran goes back to list many of these exclusions and justify them, but these justifications do not undermine the power of the exclusion. The connection thus generated with the more American-influenced feminists, framed...

Abstract The view that physical education (PE) positively affects students’ perception of their own body efficacy and self-esteem is not often seen as related to issues of gender equality. Nevertheless, PE classes leave many girls with a negative physical experience, of weakness, clumsiness and heaviness. Although the ways in which the beauty myth undermines girls’ self-esteem and body image are quite known, until recently researchers in the field of PE have not focused on the possibility that PE teachers also play a role in disciplining girls’ bodies and subjectivities. Consequently, studies in this area tend to marginalize the covert exclusionary mechanism potentially exerted on girls who find their bodies unsuitable for PE. This study is the first to examine PE in Israel from a gender perspective. Some PE teachers in Israel are already aware to a certain extent of their educational role in legitimizing diversity in girls’ body shapes. How then do PE teachers negotiate this awareness with regard to the dominant discourses related to girls’ bodies? To explore this question, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 PE teachers. The analysis revealed two key features of PE teachers’ talk about girls’ bodies: acceptance of body shape diversity, and awareness of girls’ issues about their bodies. Our findings suggest that these progressive aspects of teachers’ perspectives on girls’ bodies are negotiated against older forms of girls’ body disciplining.

This chapter introduces the voice of the administrators and reveals the rhetoric of dialogue and consensus they use, contrasting it with the voice of OS admins and their point of view on the process. The erasure of occupational voices emerged as a mechanism to effectively reproduce low-quality jobs and intensify job insecurity for those in the caring and service occupations. In addition to avoiding actual control over service deliverers’ employment practices, and on top of standardized tables that flatten rewards and trim job sizes, budgeting ceilings also contributed to the deterioration in job quality. It emerged that budgeting administrators are more interested in generating services on the level of lip service; namely, taking pride in having an operating service, rather than actually taking an interest in the interpersonal processes in these services.

PurposeWelfare reforms introduced conditionality into cash transfers often by diverse welfare-to-work programs achieving its vast legitimization. Meanwhile in-kind poverty alleviation policies maintained their universal character in the forms of national budgeting of municipal services. Utilizing justification work, the authors aim at showing how conditionality of in-kind support is replacing universalism. The authors ask which justification work assist administrators in shaping the relationship between in-kind and cash transfer and the changing meanings of poverty alleviation practices.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with senior administrators in Israeli local governments analysing them along principles of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010). Further, seeking to elicit the justification work, the authors added some guidelines from the discourse interaction approach.FindingsThe findings identified administrators' justific...

Typical storytelling in advanced capitalist societies involves individualistic and active ways of narrating life’s events as choices, decisions, capacities, compromises, and personality. As identified by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), people are no longer willing to think of their lives as prescribed by alien forces outside their control. “Living one’s own life” (p. 25) means magnifying choice and responsibility as the only way of experiencing life as meaningful at a time of increased precariousness. Accordingly, many of the women we interviewed narrated the transition from families of origin into families of procreation as a celebration of their choice, or more specifically of their ability to produce their unique individuality through their choices. In this chapter, we portray four identities that these women reproduce through their naming practices: the ideal feminized women, the ideal wife, the ideal mother, and the ideal citizen. In many ways, this chapter discusses how women try to get more out of the naming dilemma, as they discover that it opens a range of opportunities for them in their dealings with various aspects of names and naming in their day- to-day lives. In a wider sociological perspective, we show how these four individual ideal types allow understanding the discursive order in interviewees’ world, and more specifically the power position of “political familism” and the subjugation of feminism in Israel.

In this chapter, we turn our focus from the communities of practice within which women negotiate their identity and social value to the intimate sphere of couples’ relations. The discussion of the broad institutional context remains relevant for analyzing the constitution of women’s subjectivities, while power hierarchies embedded in the cultural loading of the name permeate marital power relations. Here, however, we present a discussion of the feminine self in the context of issues specifically arising from the dimension of women as wives and partners. In the area of couples relations, feminist research indicates how different contrasting ideal models of intimacy rise in the socio- historical specificity of cultural dimensions (Cancian, 1987; Jameison, 1998). The current structure of gender and its related expectations and values shape current couples’ relationships in such way that ambivalence and contradicting expectations are heightened (Risman, 1999). The powerful cultural trend of divorce, argues Hackstaff (2000), simultaneously emphasizes marital contingency and marital work ethics. Hackstaff’s findings are considered to be relevant here as, unlike other cultural niches in Israel, the middle-class professional, secular women in our sample tend to position themselves against first-world trends. These trends include the following: lengthy premarital cohabitation, postponed transitions to parenthood, and high expectations for a continuously passionate and satisfying relationship (Benjamin and Tilustan, 2010).

Israeli women’s understanding of the historical process that enabled the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 has a significant effect on their identity formation. In the context of the local bloody battlefield, almost everybody in Israel has strong views concerning entitlements, rights, resolutions, and hopes. These views develop, among other things, as part of beliefs regarding the continuous conflict between Jews and Arabs/Palestinians in this area. Thus, emotionally intense national matters affect all aspects of day-to-day life, including the relative importance of other identity dimensions aside from the national one. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that our study reveals the Israeli scene to be the one where women’s marital names are not a gender issue alone, but also, concurrently, a national and ethnic issue. Preparing the background for analyzing the specificities of local naming practices thus necessitates an exposition of several of the main political processes. We begin this chapter with such an exposition, followed by a discussion on names from an Israeli perspective and a methodological note on the research presented in this book.

... Ó Springer 2008 ... The definition of CSR The field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is currently experiencing rapid growth and is a com-posite of many theories, approaches, and terminolo-gies (Carroll, 1994; Garriga and Mele, 2004; Lepoutre and Heene, 2006). ...

Three recent Israeli books on local feminism describe how many among the natural constituency of Israeli feminism refuse to identify themselves with feminism or with the women’s movement. Erella Shadmi (2007) argues that the feminist idea, in general, and radical feminism, in particular, have not struck proper roots in Israeli society or among Israeli women (p. 145). Tali Rosin (2000) explains upfront that the problem is feminism’s bad public relations: “nobody wants to be thought of as bitter, evil, wicked, leftist, elitist, ambitions, lesbian, frigid, or otherwise lacking feelings” (Rosin, 2000: 17). Her book, entitled What is This Feminism and How Did We Come to Know Nothing About It?, begins with a question presented to the reader right on the first page, directly asking her about her tendency to distance herself from feminism: “When you say that you are not a feminist, do you mean that unlike feminists you don’t hate men? That you like to be courted? That you want to have kids, and that your looks are very important to you?” (p. 17). Apart from exposing local prejudice against feminists and feminism, Rosin’s question also reflects the dichotomy that many Israeli women believe to exist between feminism and femininity. Apparently, this is not merely a local belief. In The Female Thing, Laura Kipnis explains that feminism and femininity are incompatible within each individual psyche.

A Women’s choice to undergo breast augmentation surgery with silicone implants may develop into a choice to surgically remove them. In our paper, we employ dimensions of power relating to such decisions to elaborate differential knowledgeability as organizing the temporal dimension of a process and its potential for changing the meaning of a decision formerly taken. Until recently, the possibility of differential access to knowledge relating to silicone implants’ hazards was not explored from a temporal perspective, thus leaving vague the weight of women’s participation in digital platforms that constitute knowledge-supporting space. Our findings relate to a turning point in which increased knowledgeability manifests a change in women’s perception of augmentation surgery as a risk and fed a reflexive process towards a decision to remove the implants surgically. The neoliberal discourse our research participants adopted to describe their experiences demonstrates self-critical perception; thus, their increased knowledgeability did not influence the balance of power between women and medical professionals. Our findings also relate to the development of emotional ambivalence post implants removal surgery, anchored in the research participants’ separation from their culturally appreciated former appearance.

PurposeWhen union representatives are included in government procurement procedures for contracting-out of social welfare services, organizational diversity is enhanced if the job quality parameter, as reflected in the contract, is improved. Asking how unions are treated in government procurement procedures, this paper discusses an approach to diversity management based on the inclusion of unions.Design/methodology/approachAs part of a broader research project, interviews were conducted with six budget administrators and 16 occupational standards administrators employed by the Israeli ministries of Welfare, Education and Health; and with eight trade union activists. Grounded theory was applied for data analysis, revealing meanings of “trade unions” and “job quality.”FindingsBudgeting administrators manifested diversity resistance by means of only partially supporting trade union demands to enhance job quality. Their power position enabled them to prioritize the profit imperative of ...

Scholars of intimate partner violence (IPV) cite the various forms of IPV perpetrated by violent male partners to establish their coercive control over women. This scholarship emphasizes IPV’s long-term destructive effects on survivors’ lives. However, until recently, the role of the state in the relationship between different manifestations of IPV has received little attention, leaving hazy the meaning of absent formal legislation. An opportunity to clarify the significance of this condition lies in Israel, where economic abuse is not yet recognized as grounds for legal and social sanctions. Based on in-depth interviews with 33 IPV survivors, the present study explores state actions involved in transitions between types of violence as revealed in cases of ongoing economic abuse.

Abstract Gendered moral rationalities (GMRs) have been proposed as a means of grounding mothers’ employment-related choices in the structural, policy, and social support contexts of their maternal routines. This article analyzes a form of GMR that is anchored in the class-ethno-national position of mothers and comprises a manifestation of their maternal responsibility toward their daughters’ futures. By focusing on this form of parenting among working-class parents, we are bridging a gap in the scholarship, which has overlooked the salience of the intergenerational transmission of GMRs. Based on the analysis of semistructured interviews with 20 working-class Palestinian mothers living in poverty in Israel, we found that their responsibility for their daughters’ future reflects both the struggle to resist early marriage and prioritize education and the struggle to encourage a model of market citizenship. These struggles reshape mothers’ own GMRs and their attempts to transmit these values to their daughters.

In the aftermath of the 2003 neoliberal welfare reform in Israel, impoverished mothers who have to provide for their children in a situation that deprived them of their social rights of citizenship have been forced to choose survival solutions that violate their human rights. Lister regards such violations as a process of social exclusion indicating second-class citizenship, whereas Regev-Messalem’s process of claiming citizenship, suggests active insistence on inclusion. We propose that the non-normative survival strategy that risks a mother’s right to control over her body provides a particularly relevant case for the conceptualization of excluded citizenship as accompanied by a sense of privatized entitlement. Narrative analysis of one interview from a qualitative study of 50 women struggling to provide for their children in poverty, we explore a non-normative form of survival: the payment of rent in the coin of sexual relationship positioning women between exclusion and belongin...

This chapter introduces the voice of the administrators and reveals the rhetoric of dialogue and consensus they use, contrasting it with the voice of OS admins and their point of view on the process. The erasure of occupational voices emerged as a mechanism to effectively reproduce low-quality jobs and intensify job insecurity for those in the caring and service occupations. In addition to avoiding actual control over service deliverers’ employment practices, and on top of standardized tables that flatten rewards and trim job sizes, budgeting ceilings also contributed to the deterioration in job quality. It emerged that budgeting administrators are more interested in generating services on the level of lip service; namely, taking pride in having an operating service, rather than actually taking an interest in the interpersonal processes in these services.

In this chapter I unsilence three forms of women’s feelings of job insecurity. Each of the emerging emotional processes captures a different form of emotional politics served by emotional labor that SACO employees implement to escape the shame and humiliation of their employment conditions and transform it into pride. In the first, I focus on the social process in which a sense of belonging becomes a resource that supports women’s emotional labor. The second social process suggests that the same emotional politics relies on a different resource: that of imagined alternatives. The third process shows how SACO employees struggle to put forward claims for skill recognition. Finally, in the discussion I utilize Barbalet’s perspective on emotion and social change in order to examine the potential embedded in the elicited forms of emotional politics for change on both the personal the politcal levels.

This chapter develops a feminist perspective on job quality. It argues that exploitation is accelerated by policies promoting undervaluation, deskilling and de-professionalization in service and care occupations. Job quality must be evaluated, then, in light of specific employment arrangements within occupations according to three dimensions: remunerations, that is, the extent to which knowledge, skill and experience are reflected in payment scales; certification, namely the extent to which on-the-job training practices allow both certified and uncertified employees to benefit from skill development; and decommodification, the benefits ensuring women’s income when unable to work because of caring emergencies, illness or old age. When these three aspects are minimized, low quality of jobs reproduces women’s disadvantage in the labour market, in families and in society. Based on these three dimensions I introduce a feminist perspective to job quality, one that accords particular atten...

Recent research provides ample evidence indicating that care work is a source of job polarization in advanced economies. Explanations for the polarization trend have rarely examined the specific contribution of public procurement to polarization and, specifically, to polarization among women of the same occupation. In this study, I aim to explore the contribution of the Israeli procurement policy to deskilling in gendered occupations, particularly nursing, social work, and teaching; areas with a rich history of unionization. I ask how polarization in general and polarization within the same occupation is accelerated by deskilling, as differentially used for core and peripheral employees. To answer this question, I examine how job size allocation in contracted-out social services generates, and often legitimizes, de-skilling and under-valuation of women's work. Three Israeli government tender calls for projects in the area of education, health and welfare, were analyzed. The data shows a systematic administrative effort to reduce skilled employees' funded time. The implications for linking public procurement of services and polarization among gendered occupations are discussed.

IntroductionIn her recent analysis of debates over the issue of skill recognition, Armstrong (2013) raises the salience of issues relating to time in the field. She reminds us that time is involved in the ways skills are "defined, assessed and practiced" (p. 274). Moreover, drawing on the organization of work in health services, Armstrong shows that under the New Public Management (NPM) shaping of social services, women in caring occupations are unable to manifest their occupational skills because of time constrains embedded in the work process. In looking at the role of states in promoting deskilling as linked to time allocation in social services, she recognizes that measurement has replaced the notion of a caring service. But, how did time constraints become so salient to deskilling in caring occupations? What institutional spaces shape these time constraints? Are time constraints imposed on core employees and peripheral employees in similar ways? I attempt to examine t...

Local Context of Identity Formation Naming Identities - Politics of Identity Israeli Ambivalence and Gender Relations The Appropriate Name Getting More out of It - Identity Positioning through the Name Time and Space Dimensions of Self-Naming Name in Relations Personal Notes on our Naming Stories Naming Practices and Research Methods

Feminism Family and Identity: Women's Marital Name demonstrates an analysis of the micro-macro aspects of women's choices concerning feminist practices. Drawing on interviews with more than forty women it introduces the notion of 'ambivalent belonging' as a reflexive form of femininity emerging from the application of feminist frameworks. These include, Sara Mills' 'community of practice'; Bronwyn Davies' 'positioning' and Michelle Lazar 'ambivalence' in feminist discourse analysis. 
Here's what others have said of the book:
“Using feminist theory and first-hand sociological research, Rom and Benjamin have produced a fascinating insight into a rarely studied but widespread sociocultural practice. They investigate when and why women do and do not change their names on marriage and come up with data on identity, family, and ethnicity that will surprise and inform you. You’ll look at your society’s wedding announcements with new eyes.” --Judith Lorber, Professor Emerita, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and author of Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change and Paradoxes of Gender

“As Rom and Benjamin remind us, because most countries’ family naming practices diminish women’s identity, the international feminist movement fought hard and succeeded legally to give women more naming choices upon marriage. Strangely, however, women have not embraced this freedom. In this tightly argued and intriguing study of married women’s name choices in Israel, these creative scholars explain why pre-feminist practices persist and what impact conservative name choice has on gendered power relations in society.” –Shulamit Reinharz, Jacob S. Potofsky Professor of Sociology, Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Director of the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University

“This is a book providing readers with much knowledge about naming practices in society and their roles in defining self, identity, biography, and history. More importantly, it is a book about the power of naming and how conflicts about names among women and men have much to do with processes of subjugation as well as of liberation. With a point of departure in what the authors call “the cultural loading of the name,” the book provides a multifaceted account of how women and men use different strategies in struggling to define themselves and their identities in contemporary Israeli society.” --Irene Levin, Professor, Oslo University College, Norway