Orna Sasson-Levy
Biographic Data
| ID | 1249007 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Orna Sasson-Levy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Orna |
| FAMILY NAME | Sasson-Levy |
| SIGNATURE | SASSON-LEVY O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bar-Ilan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9516-0960 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 467 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
We Have to Be Allies to the Allies: Social Activists' Emotional Labor in Interactions With Allies
Extensive research has examined how social movements use emotions to mobilize participants and sustain commitment among beneficiaries of the movement, those who belong to the marginalized groups the movement serves. Less is known about the emotional means through which social movements mobilize and retain allies, who are insiders who actively work to achieve the movement's goals yet are also members of dominant society who benefit from the very s…
A Vitapolitics Frame: How Trans Activists Make Sense of Trans Lives in Interactions with Allies
This study explored how activists frame their lived experience in the context of a social movement that uses suffering as a key frame, and the implications of this framing for their relationships with allies. Suffering can garner support for marginalized groups, yet the resulting allyship can be patronizing. In an interview study of 41 trans social movement activists, we found that they resist the simplicity of the suffering frame and the 'vulner…
Failing Homonationalism? Gay Israeli Eurovision Geeks Negotiating Nationalism and Masculinity
In 2019, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) was hosted in Tel Aviv. Like other national contests such as the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, the ESC is a political event. For gay Israeli men who are ESC fans, this was an opportunity to become more integrated in the gay and national communities through homonormativity and homonational processes. However, as this case study shows, Israeli gay men ESC fans mostly rejected homonational masculinity in …
Gendered gratitude: The Civic Subjectivity of Israeli Women Soldiers
Although most Western militaries include women, the military remains a hyper-masculine organization where women’s service is threatened and unstable. Since the military is a citizenship-conferring institution, we ask, what civic subjectivity do women soldiers develop considering their enduring experience of inequality? Based on 141 retrospective accounts by Israeli women soldiers, we argue that women’s civic subjectivity is based on a sense of gr…
The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities
Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife, and Oriental flavor. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individual…
Re-Reading Homonationalism: An Israeli Spatial Perspective
In this article we stress the need for specifically located understandings of the concept of homonationalism, by introducing an analysis of spatial and political power relations dissecting disparate constructions of LGBT arenas. The article explores three spaces: Tel-Aviv-an urban space of LGBT belonging; Jerusalem-the Israeli capital where being an LGBT individual is problematic both in public and in private spaces; and Kiryat-Shmona-a conservat…
Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State
Being [in] the center: Sexual citizenship and homonationalism at Tel Aviv’s Gay-Center
Tel Aviv’s Gay-Center is unique in Israel for being sponsored, managed and controlled by the municipality. This article focuses on the Gay-Center as a material, symbolic and discursive space in order to clarify the relationship between LGBT individuals and the nation. Based on an ethnographic study, we show that since its establishment the Gay-Center has undergone centralization processes as a result of being located in central Tel Aviv and by st…
Gender, Emotions Management, and Power in Organizations: The Case of Israeli Women Junior Military Officers
Avoiding Military Service in a Militaristic Society: A Chronicle of Resistance to Hegemonic Masculinity
This article examines the connection between masculine identity and avoidance of military service in a militaristic society. Based on retrospective interviews with Israeli middle‐class men who initiated their release from military service on medical–psychological grounds, we argue that this choice embodies resistance to patterns identified with the local hegemonic masculinity and that this resistance gradually intensifies over the life course. Th…
Serving the army as secretaries: Intersectionality, Multi-Level Contract and Subjective Experience of Citizenship
With the growing elusiveness of the state apparatus in late modernity, military service is one of the last institutions to be clearly identified with the state, its ideologies and its policies. Therefore, negotiations between the military and its recruits produce acting subjects of citizenship with long-lasting consequences. Arguing that these negotiations are regulated by multi-level (civic, group, and individual) contracts, we explore the vario…
Voluntary simplifiers as political consumers: Individuals practicing politics through reduced consumption
This article seeks to contribute to the discourse on the politicization of voluntary simplifiers’ consumption patterns. Some scholars argue that voluntary simplifiers’ consumption practices are individualistic and escapist in nature, and therefore cannot be defined as political, and that they are likely to become such only if they organize for collective action. Conversely, we argue that voluntary simplifiers’ lifestyle is an individual political…
Ethnic Generations: Evolving Ethnic Perceptions among Dominant Groups
This study suggests that generational affiliation is significant in explaining distinctive ethnic perceptions among dominant groups. In Israel, the Ashkenazim, Jews of European descent, constitute the political, social, and economic elite. In-depth interviews with two generations of Ashkenazim showed similarities in ethnic perceptions, but also revealed important differences among the two generations. For the older group, Ashkenaziness is both an…
Genre et violence dans les paroles de soldates: Le cas d'Israël
The military is a hyper-masculine organization designed to manage violence for the state. As such, the military and militarization processes create a tight link between gender and violence. Most often, the literature on militarization of women’s lives focuses on women as victims of military violence. As Israel is unique among Western states in that it imposes compulsory conscription on both men and women, we ask how gendered militarization in gen…
A Different Kind of Whiteness: Marking and Unmarking of Social Boundaries in the Construction of Hegemonic Ethnicity
This article proposes a new theoretical approach to the analysis of hegemonic ethnicity through an examination of the construction of white ethnicity among Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) in Israel. Contrary to the theory of symbolic ethnicity, I argue that “Ashkenaziness” in Israel is not an optional, voluntary identity; rather, it is constituted by employing narratives that continually establish cultural, color‐based, and ethnic boundaries…
Passing' as (Non)Ethnic: The Israeli Version of Acting White
This article offers a cultural analysis of the practice of 'acting white' in a society where the distinction between black and white is vague and primarily symbolic and where the hegemonic discourse denies the existence of ethnic inequality and encourages ethnic integration. In the Israeli context, acting white or passing (in Hebrew, hishtaknezut or 'Ashkenazification') refers to mimicking the habitus of the dominant (European) ethnic group. Base…
Research on Gender and the Military in Israel: From a Gendered Organization to Inequality Regimes
This article offers an analytical review of the research on gender and the military in Israel since the 1970s. I argue that the research in this field has undergone a paradigmatic shift that is based on five analytical transformations: (1) a move from a binary gendered conception to intersectionality analysis; (2) a shift from a dichotomous perception of the military organization to an analysis based on 'inequality regime' theory; (3) an emphasis…
Women Breaking the Silence: Military Service, Gender, and Antiwar Protest
This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women's antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of 'Women Breaking the Silence' (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women's antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women's antiwar discourse from the gendered margina…
Militarized Socialization, Military Service, and Class Reproduction: The Experiences of Israeli Soldiers
Exploring the links between militarized socialization and social inequality in Israel, the authors aim to examine both the pattern of political socialization, which extols the role of the combat soldier as the emblem of the 'good citizen,' and the ways by which social agents themselves respond to this socialization. Although an all-encompassing phenomenon, the authors find militarized socialization is not equally 'distributed' or 'received.' Rath…
Individual Bodies, Collective State Interests: The Case of Israeli Combat Soldiers
The primary question this article raises is how democratic societies, whose liberal values seem to contradict the coercive values of the military, persuade men to enlist and participate in fighting. The author argues that part of the answer lies in alternative interpretation of transformative bodily and emotional practices. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Israeli combat soldiers, the author claims that the warrior's bodily and emotional pract…
Contradictory Consequences of Mandatory Conscription: The Case of Women Secretaries in the Israeli Military
This article examines the implications of mandatory conscription for women by studying the experience of women soldiers who serve as secretaries in the Israeli military. The author argues that the military service of the secretaries is shaped by three organizing principles: an employment principle of cheap labor, a matrimonial principle of the office wife, and a hierarchy principle that shapes the secretaries as status symbols. Employing the theo…
Gender Integration in Israeli Officer Training: Degendering and Regendering the Military
Military, Masculinity, and Citizenship: Tensions and Contradictions in the Experience of Blue-Collar Soldiers
This article seeks to problematize the relationship between military service, masculinity, and citizenship, from the perspective of lower-class soldiers who serve in blue-collar roles in the Israeli military. Introducing class and ethnicity into the “taken for granted” equation of men, military, and the state reveals counter-hegemonic conceptions of masculinity and citizenship, and exposes tense and often contradictory relationships between them.…
Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case
The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement (Women in Black) and a mixed-gender one (The 21st Year), which protested against the Israeli Occupation in t…
Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in 'Masculine' Roles
Women's military service is the focus of an ongoing controversy because of its implications for the gendered nature of citizenship. While liberal feminists endorse equal service as a venue for equal citizenship, radical feminists see women's service as a rei•cation of martial citizenship and cooperation with a hierarchical and sexist institution. These debates, however, tend to ignore the perspective of the women soldiers themselves.This paper se…
Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in 'Masculine' Roles
Women's military service is the focus of an ongoing controversy because of its implications for the gendered nature of citizenship. While liberal feminists endorse equal service as a venue for equal citizenship, radical feminists see women's service as a rei•cation of martial citizenship and cooperation with a hierarchical and sexist institution. These debates, however, tend to ignore the perspective of the women soldiers themselves.This paper se…
Individual Bodies, Collective State Interests: The Case of Israeli Combat Soldiers
The primary question this article raises is how democratic societies, whose liberal values seem to contradict the coercive values of the military, persuade men to enlist and participate in fighting. The author argues that part of the answer lies in alternative interpretation of transformative bodily and emotional practices. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Israeli combat soldiers, the author claims that the warrior's bodily and emotional pract…
Constructing Identities at the Margins: Masculinities and Citizenship in the Israeli Army
This article examines the construction of multiple gendered and national identities in the Israeli army. In Israel, hegemonic masculinity is identified with the masculinity of the Jewish combat soldier and is perceived as the emblem of good citizenship. This identity. I argue, assumes a central role in shaping a hierarchal order of gendered and civic identities that reflects and reproduces social stratification and reconstructs differential modes…
Militarized Socialization, Military Service, and Class Reproduction: The Experiences of Israeli Soldiers
Exploring the links between militarized socialization and social inequality in Israel, the authors aim to examine both the pattern of political socialization, which extols the role of the combat soldier as the emblem of the 'good citizen,' and the ways by which social agents themselves respond to this socialization. Although an all-encompassing phenomenon, the authors find militarized socialization is not equally 'distributed' or 'received.' Rath…
A Different Kind of Whiteness: Marking and Unmarking of Social Boundaries in the Construction of Hegemonic Ethnicity
This article proposes a new theoretical approach to the analysis of hegemonic ethnicity through an examination of the construction of white ethnicity among Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) in Israel. Contrary to the theory of symbolic ethnicity, I argue that “Ashkenaziness” in Israel is not an optional, voluntary identity; rather, it is constituted by employing narratives that continually establish cultural, color‐based, and ethnic boundaries…
Re-Reading Homonationalism: An Israeli Spatial Perspective
In this article we stress the need for specifically located understandings of the concept of homonationalism, by introducing an analysis of spatial and political power relations dissecting disparate constructions of LGBT arenas. The article explores three spaces: Tel-Aviv-an urban space of LGBT belonging; Jerusalem-the Israeli capital where being an LGBT individual is problematic both in public and in private spaces; and Kiryat-Shmona-a conservat…
Serving the army as secretaries: Intersectionality, Multi-Level Contract and Subjective Experience of Citizenship
With the growing elusiveness of the state apparatus in late modernity, military service is one of the last institutions to be clearly identified with the state, its ideologies and its policies. Therefore, negotiations between the military and its recruits produce acting subjects of citizenship with long-lasting consequences. Arguing that these negotiations are regulated by multi-level (civic, group, and individual) contracts, we explore the vario…
Passing' as (Non)Ethnic: The Israeli Version of Acting White
This article offers a cultural analysis of the practice of 'acting white' in a society where the distinction between black and white is vague and primarily symbolic and where the hegemonic discourse denies the existence of ethnic inequality and encourages ethnic integration. In the Israeli context, acting white or passing (in Hebrew, hishtaknezut or 'Ashkenazification') refers to mimicking the habitus of the dominant (European) ethnic group. Base…
Contradictory Consequences of Mandatory Conscription: The Case of Women Secretaries in the Israeli Military
This article examines the implications of mandatory conscription for women by studying the experience of women soldiers who serve as secretaries in the Israeli military. The author argues that the military service of the secretaries is shaped by three organizing principles: an employment principle of cheap labor, a matrimonial principle of the office wife, and a hierarchy principle that shapes the secretaries as status symbols. Employing the theo…
Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case
The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement (Women in Black) and a mixed-gender one (The 21st Year), which protested against the Israeli Occupation in t…
Avoiding Military Service in a Militaristic Society: A Chronicle of Resistance to Hegemonic Masculinity
This article examines the connection between masculine identity and avoidance of military service in a militaristic society. Based on retrospective interviews with Israeli middle‐class men who initiated their release from military service on medical–psychological grounds, we argue that this choice embodies resistance to patterns identified with the local hegemonic masculinity and that this resistance gradually intensifies over the life course. Th…
Gender Integration in Israeli Officer Training: Degendering and Regendering the Military
Gender, Emotions Management, and Power in Organizations: The Case of Israeli Women Junior Military Officers
Women Breaking the Silence: Military Service, Gender, and Antiwar Protest
This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women's antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of 'Women Breaking the Silence' (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women's antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women's antiwar discourse from the gendered margina…
Research on Gender and the Military in Israel: From a Gendered Organization to Inequality Regimes
This article offers an analytical review of the research on gender and the military in Israel since the 1970s. I argue that the research in this field has undergone a paradigmatic shift that is based on five analytical transformations: (1) a move from a binary gendered conception to intersectionality analysis; (2) a shift from a dichotomous perception of the military organization to an analysis based on 'inequality regime' theory; (3) an emphasis…
The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities
Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife, and Oriental flavor. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individual…
Voluntary simplifiers as political consumers: Individuals practicing politics through reduced consumption
This article seeks to contribute to the discourse on the politicization of voluntary simplifiers’ consumption patterns. Some scholars argue that voluntary simplifiers’ consumption practices are individualistic and escapist in nature, and therefore cannot be defined as political, and that they are likely to become such only if they organize for collective action. Conversely, we argue that voluntary simplifiers’ lifestyle is an individual political…
Gendered gratitude: The Civic Subjectivity of Israeli Women Soldiers
Although most Western militaries include women, the military remains a hyper-masculine organization where women’s service is threatened and unstable. Since the military is a citizenship-conferring institution, we ask, what civic subjectivity do women soldiers develop considering their enduring experience of inequality? Based on 141 retrospective accounts by Israeli women soldiers, we argue that women’s civic subjectivity is based on a sense of gr…
Failing Homonationalism? Gay Israeli Eurovision Geeks Negotiating Nationalism and Masculinity
In 2019, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) was hosted in Tel Aviv. Like other national contests such as the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, the ESC is a political event. For gay Israeli men who are ESC fans, this was an opportunity to become more integrated in the gay and national communities through homonormativity and homonational processes. However, as this case study shows, Israeli gay men ESC fans mostly rejected homonational masculinity in …
Constructing Identities at the Margins: Masculinities and Citizenship in the Israeli Army
This article examines the construction of multiple gendered and national identities in the Israeli army. In Israel, hegemonic masculinity is identified with the masculinity of the Jewish combat soldier and is perceived as the emblem of good citizenship. This identity. I argue, assumes a central role in shaping a hierarchal order of gendered and civic identities that reflects and reproduces social stratification and reconstructs differential modes…
Military, Masculinity, and Citizenship: Tensions and Contradictions in the Experience of Blue-Collar Soldiers
This article seeks to problematize the relationship between military service, masculinity, and citizenship, from the perspective of lower-class soldiers who serve in blue-collar roles in the Israeli military. Introducing class and ethnicity into the “taken for granted” equation of men, military, and the state reveals counter-hegemonic conceptions of masculinity and citizenship, and exposes tense and often contradictory relationships between them.…
Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case
The authors suggest that social movements research should recognize more the potential of the protesting body as an agent of social and political change. This contention is based on studying the relations among the body, gender, and knowledge in social protest by comparing two Israeli-Jewish leftist protest movements, a woman-only movement (Women in Black) and a mixed-gender one (The 21st Year), which protested against the Israeli Occupation in t…
Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in 'Masculine' Roles
Women's military service is the focus of an ongoing controversy because of its implications for the gendered nature of citizenship. While liberal feminists endorse equal service as a venue for equal citizenship, radical feminists see women's service as a rei•cation of martial citizenship and cooperation with a hierarchical and sexist institution. These debates, however, tend to ignore the perspective of the women soldiers themselves.This paper se…
Contradictory Consequences of Mandatory Conscription: The Case of Women Secretaries in the Israeli Military
This article examines the implications of mandatory conscription for women by studying the experience of women soldiers who serve as secretaries in the Israeli military. The author argues that the military service of the secretaries is shaped by three organizing principles: an employment principle of cheap labor, a matrimonial principle of the office wife, and a hierarchy principle that shapes the secretaries as status symbols. Employing the theo…
Gender Integration in Israeli Officer Training: Degendering and Regendering the Military
Militarized Socialization, Military Service, and Class Reproduction: The Experiences of Israeli Soldiers
Exploring the links between militarized socialization and social inequality in Israel, the authors aim to examine both the pattern of political socialization, which extols the role of the combat soldier as the emblem of the 'good citizen,' and the ways by which social agents themselves respond to this socialization. Although an all-encompassing phenomenon, the authors find militarized socialization is not equally 'distributed' or 'received.' Rath…
Individual Bodies, Collective State Interests: The Case of Israeli Combat Soldiers
The primary question this article raises is how democratic societies, whose liberal values seem to contradict the coercive values of the military, persuade men to enlist and participate in fighting. The author argues that part of the answer lies in alternative interpretation of transformative bodily and emotional practices. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Israeli combat soldiers, the author claims that the warrior's bodily and emotional pract…
Research on Gender and the Military in Israel: From a Gendered Organization to Inequality Regimes
This article offers an analytical review of the research on gender and the military in Israel since the 1970s. I argue that the research in this field has undergone a paradigmatic shift that is based on five analytical transformations: (1) a move from a binary gendered conception to intersectionality analysis; (2) a shift from a dichotomous perception of the military organization to an analysis based on 'inequality regime' theory; (3) an emphasis…
Women Breaking the Silence: Military Service, Gender, and Antiwar Protest
This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women's antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of 'Women Breaking the Silence' (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women's antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women's antiwar discourse from the gendered margina…
Ethnic Generations: Evolving Ethnic Perceptions among Dominant Groups
This study suggests that generational affiliation is significant in explaining distinctive ethnic perceptions among dominant groups. In Israel, the Ashkenazim, Jews of European descent, constitute the political, social, and economic elite. In-depth interviews with two generations of Ashkenazim showed similarities in ethnic perceptions, but also revealed important differences among the two generations. For the older group, Ashkenaziness is both an…
Genre et violence dans les paroles de soldates: Le cas d'Israël
The military is a hyper-masculine organization designed to manage violence for the state. As such, the military and militarization processes create a tight link between gender and violence. Most often, the literature on militarization of women’s lives focuses on women as victims of military violence. As Israel is unique among Western states in that it imposes compulsory conscription on both men and women, we ask how gendered militarization in gen…
A Different Kind of Whiteness: Marking and Unmarking of Social Boundaries in the Construction of Hegemonic Ethnicity
This article proposes a new theoretical approach to the analysis of hegemonic ethnicity through an examination of the construction of white ethnicity among Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin) in Israel. Contrary to the theory of symbolic ethnicity, I argue that “Ashkenaziness” in Israel is not an optional, voluntary identity; rather, it is constituted by employing narratives that continually establish cultural, color‐based, and ethnic boundaries…
Passing' as (Non)Ethnic: The Israeli Version of Acting White
This article offers a cultural analysis of the practice of 'acting white' in a society where the distinction between black and white is vague and primarily symbolic and where the hegemonic discourse denies the existence of ethnic inequality and encourages ethnic integration. In the Israeli context, acting white or passing (in Hebrew, hishtaknezut or 'Ashkenazification') refers to mimicking the habitus of the dominant (European) ethnic group. Base…
Voluntary simplifiers as political consumers: Individuals practicing politics through reduced consumption
This article seeks to contribute to the discourse on the politicization of voluntary simplifiers’ consumption patterns. Some scholars argue that voluntary simplifiers’ consumption practices are individualistic and escapist in nature, and therefore cannot be defined as political, and that they are likely to become such only if they organize for collective action. Conversely, we argue that voluntary simplifiers’ lifestyle is an individual political…
Avoiding Military Service in a Militaristic Society: A Chronicle of Resistance to Hegemonic Masculinity
This article examines the connection between masculine identity and avoidance of military service in a militaristic society. Based on retrospective interviews with Israeli middle‐class men who initiated their release from military service on medical–psychological grounds, we argue that this choice embodies resistance to patterns identified with the local hegemonic masculinity and that this resistance gradually intensifies over the life course. Th…
Serving the army as secretaries: Intersectionality, Multi-Level Contract and Subjective Experience of Citizenship
With the growing elusiveness of the state apparatus in late modernity, military service is one of the last institutions to be clearly identified with the state, its ideologies and its policies. Therefore, negotiations between the military and its recruits produce acting subjects of citizenship with long-lasting consequences. Arguing that these negotiations are regulated by multi-level (civic, group, and individual) contracts, we explore the vario…
Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State
Being [in] the center: Sexual citizenship and homonationalism at Tel Aviv’s Gay-Center
Tel Aviv’s Gay-Center is unique in Israel for being sponsored, managed and controlled by the municipality. This article focuses on the Gay-Center as a material, symbolic and discursive space in order to clarify the relationship between LGBT individuals and the nation. Based on an ethnographic study, we show that since its establishment the Gay-Center has undergone centralization processes as a result of being located in central Tel Aviv and by st…
Gender, Emotions Management, and Power in Organizations: The Case of Israeli Women Junior Military Officers
Re-Reading Homonationalism: An Israeli Spatial Perspective
In this article we stress the need for specifically located understandings of the concept of homonationalism, by introducing an analysis of spatial and political power relations dissecting disparate constructions of LGBT arenas. The article explores three spaces: Tel-Aviv-an urban space of LGBT belonging; Jerusalem-the Israeli capital where being an LGBT individual is problematic both in public and in private spaces; and Kiryat-Shmona-a conservat…
The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities
Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife, and Oriental flavor. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individual…
Gendered gratitude: The Civic Subjectivity of Israeli Women Soldiers
Although most Western militaries include women, the military remains a hyper-masculine organization where women’s service is threatened and unstable. Since the military is a citizenship-conferring institution, we ask, what civic subjectivity do women soldiers develop considering their enduring experience of inequality? Based on 141 retrospective accounts by Israeli women soldiers, we argue that women’s civic subjectivity is based on a sense of gr…
Failing Homonationalism? Gay Israeli Eurovision Geeks Negotiating Nationalism and Masculinity
In 2019, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) was hosted in Tel Aviv. Like other national contests such as the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, the ESC is a political event. For gay Israeli men who are ESC fans, this was an opportunity to become more integrated in the gay and national communities through homonormativity and homonational processes. However, as this case study shows, Israeli gay men ESC fans mostly rejected homonational masculinity in …
We Have to Be Allies to the Allies: Social Activists' Emotional Labor in Interactions With Allies
Extensive research has examined how social movements use emotions to mobilize participants and sustain commitment among beneficiaries of the movement, those who belong to the marginalized groups the movement serves. Less is known about the emotional means through which social movements mobilize and retain allies, who are insiders who actively work to achieve the movement's goals yet are also members of dominant society who benefit from the very s…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Gender Studies (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (15 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works)