Sara Cohen Shabot
Biographic Data
| ID | 217030 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara Cohen Shabot |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara Cohen |
| FAMILY NAME | Shabot |
| SIGNATURE | SHABOT S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Haifa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9621-8199 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Dietitians’ attitudes toward GLP-1s: Weight bias and professional identity in an Israeli context
The rapid expansion of pharmacological interventions using GLP-1 (Glucagon-like peptide-1) receptor agonists, which induce significant weight loss primarily through appetite suppression, has reshaped contemporary approaches to fatness and “obesity,” raising new professional, ethical, and cultural questions for clinical dietitians. Given the pervasive weight bias in the field, it seems unlikely that dietitians would oppose these drugs solely for c…
My Brother Tried to Eat the Playing Cards: A Phenomenological Reading of Caring and Queering in Dementia
Witnessing my late brother’s dementia was what provided the inspiration for the present article. There are vast numbers of texts about dementia written through a philosophical, and even specifically phenomenological, prism, and lately they have proliferated even more. In this paper, I use some insights from phenomenology, especially critical phenomenology, queer and crip phenomenologies and, in particular, Sara Ahmed’s analysis of objects viewed …
Ecofeminism and menstruation: Menstrual practices with reusable menstrual products among Israeli women
Menstruators perceive and experience their menstruation in diverse ways, influencing their choice of menstrual products and impacting both body literacy and the environment. This article investigates Israeli menstruators who use reusable menstrual products (RMPs), a practice viewed through the lens of ecofeminism, within the context of menstrual concealment culture and its role in perpetuating oppression. This article's objective is to reveal the…
Rectal examinations in childbirth: The violence and humiliation of a silenced practice
Post-vaginal birth protocols frequently require women and other birthing persons to undergo rectal examinations. Protocols for these examinations, which we refer to as PVREs, vary widely, however, and there is a lack of agreement within the medical community concerning whether they are needed at all. This article explores women’s experience of PVREs in light of this ambiguity which, we argue, reflects and reproduces aspects of gendered power rela…
Experience of menstruation with the use of reusable menstrual products: A qualitative study among menstruators in Israel
Menstruation is an embodied experience that influences menstruators' perceptions of the self and body. The stigma surrounding menstruation and its negative representation in popular culture has consequences for women's sexual and reproductive health. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty 18-50 year old participants who used reusable menstrual products to examine their experience of menstruation and how their use of t…
Obstetric Violence and Vulnerability: A Bioethical Approach
At healthcare facilities worldwide, women during childbirth undergo medical procedures they haven’t consented to and experience mistreatment and disrespect. This phenomenon is recognized as obstetric violence (OV), a distinct form of gender violence. The resulting trauma carries both immediate and long-term implications, making it vital to address for promoting women’s health. OV is partly shaped by a narrow, paternalistic conception of vulnerabi…
My Soul Hurt, and I Felt as If I Was Going to Die”: Obstetric Violence as Torture
Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but of gender violence specifically. This feminist-phenomenological analysis demonstrates features that the experiences of torture and of obstetric violence share. Many birthing subjects describe their experiences of obstetric violence as torture. This use of the concept of torture to explain what they have gone through is not trivial and des…
From Women’s Sacrifice to Feminist Sacrifice: Medicalized Birth and “Natural” Birth versus Woman-Centered Birth
The concept of sacrifice poses an interesting challenge to feminist theory. On the one hand, it seems that women must reject self-sacrificing practices. On the other hand, certain recent feminist analyses have recognized sacrifice as a potential empowering tool for women, so long as it is freely chosen and experienced as positively transformative. In this paper I argue that it is possible to relate to childbirth either as an event calling for wom…
Perpetual waiting: Analyzing dieters’ time in WW’s Instagram posts
WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) is one of the biggest and most successful diet companies in the world, and its social media presence, showcasing the company’s mostly female clientele, is saturated with messages regarding time and temporality. Unlike many descriptions of dieters’ experiences from their own points of view, this article examines WW’s corporate perception of dieters’ time as evidenced in its Instagram publications. We argue th…
Not just mechanical birthing bodies: Articulating the impact of imbalanced power relationships in the birth arena on women’s subjectivity, agency, and consciousness
The experiences of birthing women are essential to optimal birth outcomes. Here we examine how obstetric practices and behaviors in the birth arena result in subjugation of birthing women and their treatment as birthing (mechanical) bodies. We demonstrate that cultural practices that relegate women's consciousness and agency increase the likelihood of harmful effects caused unintentionally by medical activity. We suggest a corrective. The concept…
On Motherhood as Ambiguity and Transcendence: Reevaluating Motherhood through the Beauvoirian Erotic
This paper presents an analysis of motherhood as potentially ambiguous and empowering, using the Beauvoirian concept of the erotic. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of the erotic can allow us to reevaluate “nonproductive,” repetitive, apparently immanent activities—such as going through pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising a child—as projects through which we disclose freedom, and, thus, as projects that possibly lead to transcendenc…
You are Not Qualified—Leave it to us”: Obstetric Violence as Testimonial Injustice
Why 'normal' feels so bad: Violence and Vaginal Examinations During Labour - A (Feminist) Phenomenology
In this article, I argue that many women lack the epistemic resources that would allow them to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent or as unnecessary and potentially declinable. I address vaginal examinations during childbirth as a special case of obstetric violence, in which women frequently lack the epistemic resources necessary to recognise the practice as violent not only because of the inherent difficul…
We birth with others: Towards a Beauvoirian understanding of obstetric violence
Obstetric violence – psychological and physical violence by medical staff towards women giving birth – has been described as structural violence, specifically as gender violence. Many women are affected by obstetric violence, with awful consequences. The phenomenon has so far been mainly investigated by the health and social sciences, yet fundamental theoretical and conceptual questions have gone unnoticed. Until now, the phenomenon of obstetric …
Essentialism as a form of resistance: An Ethnography of Gender Dynamics in Contemporary Home Births
Feminist scholars have criticised the essentialist construction of femininity associated with ‘natural’ childbirth movements. Along these debates, planned midwife-attended home births stand as the typical representation of this counterculture. In this article, we present data from a multi-sited ethnography on Portuguese home births where we analyse how gender ideologies are reproduced and operationalised by families and home birth professionals. …
Domesticating Bodies: The Role of Shame in Obstetric Violence
Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but specifically of gender violence. We offer a philosophical analysis of obstetric violence, focused on the central role of gendered shame for construing and perpetuating such violence. Gendered shame in labor derives both from the reifying gaze that transforms women's laboring bodies into dirty, overly sexual, and “not‐feminine‐enough” dysf…
Fleshing Out the Ambiguous Body: J. M. Coetzee's “The Humanities in Africa” as a Critique of Binary Conceptions of Embodiment
Sara Cohen Shabot, Fleshing Out the Ambiguous Body: J. M. Coetzee's “The Humanities in Africa” as a Critique of Binary Conceptions of Embodiment, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017), pp. 67-87
Making Loud Bodies “Feminine”: A Feminist-Phenomenological Analysis of Obstetric Violence
Naming as Oppression and/or Liberation: A Feminist Reading of Triple crónica de un nombre
The short novel Triple crónica de un nombre (Triple Chronicle of a Name) is the prizewinning first novel of writer and photographer Ivonne Saed. Saed was born in Mexico City in 1961, in the third Mexican-born generation of a family of Damascene Jews. I show here how Saed’s short novel sheds significant light on the question of how patriarchal hegemony shaped the existential project of Syrian Jewish women in Mexico. We can analyze Saed’s critique …
How free is Beauvoir's freedom? Unchaining Beauvoir through the erotic body
One of the most important concepts in Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist and phenomenological ethics is the concept of freedom. In this article, I would like to argue that Beauvoir's concept of freedom is problematic in being strongly constrained by its essentially active character. This constraint contradicts some of Beauvoir's major ideas, such as the one that considers the body as a situation, as a source of activity and of freedom in itself,…
Constructing subjectivity through labour pain: A Beauvoirian analysis
Traditional western conceptions of pain have commonly associated pain with the inability to communicate and with the absence of the self. Thus pain, it seems, must be avoided, since it is to blame for alienating the body from subjectivity and the self from others. Recent work on pain, however, has began to challenge these assumptions, mainly by discerning between different kinds of pain and by pointing out how some forms of pain might even consti…
Dogville; Or, on Ambiguity and Oppression: A Beauvoirian Reading
This article argues that Dogville, a film by the polemical Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), has a great deal to say on the themes of freedom and of the ambiguity of oppression. This discussion of the film's philosophical grounding brings several defining ideas of existentialist thought into play, particularly as they are fleshed out in Simone de Beauvoir's treatment of oppression and its counterpart, freedom. Reading Dogville through Beauvo…
Towards a Grotesque Phenomenology of Ethical Eroticism
Over the course of this article, the author argues that ethics and the erotic are interrelated. The author also contends that the way subjectivities are constructed has a strong impact on the development of the ethical and the erotic character of these same subjectivities. Against this backdrop, the author postulates that envisioning or creating oneself as a grotesque subject promises to facilitate one's own development into a moral and erotic hu…
Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs
In this paper, my aim is to show some of the problems that the figure of the cyborg may raise, in order to show how in many cases the cyborg has been used, even if in a dissimulated way, to reinstate the 'natural', normative order with its known distinct and very well defined categories and divisions. But, more importantly, I propose here an alternative to the figure of the cyborg which, I believe, has more possibilities of 'keeping the promises'…
Domesticating Bodies: The Role of Shame in Obstetric Violence
Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but specifically of gender violence. We offer a philosophical analysis of obstetric violence, focused on the central role of gendered shame for construing and perpetuating such violence. Gendered shame in labor derives both from the reifying gaze that transforms women's laboring bodies into dirty, overly sexual, and “not‐feminine‐enough” dysf…
Making Loud Bodies “Feminine”: A Feminist-Phenomenological Analysis of Obstetric Violence
We birth with others: Towards a Beauvoirian understanding of obstetric violence
Obstetric violence – psychological and physical violence by medical staff towards women giving birth – has been described as structural violence, specifically as gender violence. Many women are affected by obstetric violence, with awful consequences. The phenomenon has so far been mainly investigated by the health and social sciences, yet fundamental theoretical and conceptual questions have gone unnoticed. Until now, the phenomenon of obstetric …
Why 'normal' feels so bad: Violence and Vaginal Examinations During Labour - A (Feminist) Phenomenology
In this article, I argue that many women lack the epistemic resources that would allow them to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent or as unnecessary and potentially declinable. I address vaginal examinations during childbirth as a special case of obstetric violence, in which women frequently lack the epistemic resources necessary to recognise the practice as violent not only because of the inherent difficul…
You are Not Qualified—Leave it to us”: Obstetric Violence as Testimonial Injustice
Constructing subjectivity through labour pain: A Beauvoirian analysis
Traditional western conceptions of pain have commonly associated pain with the inability to communicate and with the absence of the self. Thus pain, it seems, must be avoided, since it is to blame for alienating the body from subjectivity and the self from others. Recent work on pain, however, has began to challenge these assumptions, mainly by discerning between different kinds of pain and by pointing out how some forms of pain might even consti…
Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs
In this paper, my aim is to show some of the problems that the figure of the cyborg may raise, in order to show how in many cases the cyborg has been used, even if in a dissimulated way, to reinstate the 'natural', normative order with its known distinct and very well defined categories and divisions. But, more importantly, I propose here an alternative to the figure of the cyborg which, I believe, has more possibilities of 'keeping the promises'…
My Soul Hurt, and I Felt as If I Was Going to Die”: Obstetric Violence as Torture
Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but of gender violence specifically. This feminist-phenomenological analysis demonstrates features that the experiences of torture and of obstetric violence share. Many birthing subjects describe their experiences of obstetric violence as torture. This use of the concept of torture to explain what they have gone through is not trivial and des…
Towards a Grotesque Phenomenology of Ethical Eroticism
Over the course of this article, the author argues that ethics and the erotic are interrelated. The author also contends that the way subjectivities are constructed has a strong impact on the development of the ethical and the erotic character of these same subjectivities. Against this backdrop, the author postulates that envisioning or creating oneself as a grotesque subject promises to facilitate one's own development into a moral and erotic hu…
Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs
In this paper, my aim is to show some of the problems that the figure of the cyborg may raise, in order to show how in many cases the cyborg has been used, even if in a dissimulated way, to reinstate the 'natural', normative order with its known distinct and very well defined categories and divisions. But, more importantly, I propose here an alternative to the figure of the cyborg which, I believe, has more possibilities of 'keeping the promises'…
Towards a Grotesque Phenomenology of Ethical Eroticism
Over the course of this article, the author argues that ethics and the erotic are interrelated. The author also contends that the way subjectivities are constructed has a strong impact on the development of the ethical and the erotic character of these same subjectivities. Against this backdrop, the author postulates that envisioning or creating oneself as a grotesque subject promises to facilitate one's own development into a moral and erotic hu…
Constructing subjectivity through labour pain: A Beauvoirian analysis
Traditional western conceptions of pain have commonly associated pain with the inability to communicate and with the absence of the self. Thus pain, it seems, must be avoided, since it is to blame for alienating the body from subjectivity and the self from others. Recent work on pain, however, has began to challenge these assumptions, mainly by discerning between different kinds of pain and by pointing out how some forms of pain might even consti…
Dogville; Or, on Ambiguity and Oppression: A Beauvoirian Reading
This article argues that Dogville, a film by the polemical Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), has a great deal to say on the themes of freedom and of the ambiguity of oppression. This discussion of the film's philosophical grounding brings several defining ideas of existentialist thought into play, particularly as they are fleshed out in Simone de Beauvoir's treatment of oppression and its counterpart, freedom. Reading Dogville through Beauvo…
Making Loud Bodies “Feminine”: A Feminist-Phenomenological Analysis of Obstetric Violence
Naming as Oppression and/or Liberation: A Feminist Reading of Triple crónica de un nombre
The short novel Triple crónica de un nombre (Triple Chronicle of a Name) is the prizewinning first novel of writer and photographer Ivonne Saed. Saed was born in Mexico City in 1961, in the third Mexican-born generation of a family of Damascene Jews. I show here how Saed’s short novel sheds significant light on the question of how patriarchal hegemony shaped the existential project of Syrian Jewish women in Mexico. We can analyze Saed’s critique …
How free is Beauvoir's freedom? Unchaining Beauvoir through the erotic body
One of the most important concepts in Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist and phenomenological ethics is the concept of freedom. In this article, I would like to argue that Beauvoir's concept of freedom is problematic in being strongly constrained by its essentially active character. This constraint contradicts some of Beauvoir's major ideas, such as the one that considers the body as a situation, as a source of activity and of freedom in itself,…
Fleshing Out the Ambiguous Body: J. M. Coetzee's “The Humanities in Africa” as a Critique of Binary Conceptions of Embodiment
Sara Cohen Shabot, Fleshing Out the Ambiguous Body: J. M. Coetzee's “The Humanities in Africa” as a Critique of Binary Conceptions of Embodiment, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017), pp. 67-87
Domesticating Bodies: The Role of Shame in Obstetric Violence
Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but specifically of gender violence. We offer a philosophical analysis of obstetric violence, focused on the central role of gendered shame for construing and perpetuating such violence. Gendered shame in labor derives both from the reifying gaze that transforms women's laboring bodies into dirty, overly sexual, and “not‐feminine‐enough” dysf…
Essentialism as a form of resistance: An Ethnography of Gender Dynamics in Contemporary Home Births
Feminist scholars have criticised the essentialist construction of femininity associated with ‘natural’ childbirth movements. Along these debates, planned midwife-attended home births stand as the typical representation of this counterculture. In this article, we present data from a multi-sited ethnography on Portuguese home births where we analyse how gender ideologies are reproduced and operationalised by families and home birth professionals. …
We birth with others: Towards a Beauvoirian understanding of obstetric violence
Obstetric violence – psychological and physical violence by medical staff towards women giving birth – has been described as structural violence, specifically as gender violence. Many women are affected by obstetric violence, with awful consequences. The phenomenon has so far been mainly investigated by the health and social sciences, yet fundamental theoretical and conceptual questions have gone unnoticed. Until now, the phenomenon of obstetric …
On Motherhood as Ambiguity and Transcendence: Reevaluating Motherhood through the Beauvoirian Erotic
This paper presents an analysis of motherhood as potentially ambiguous and empowering, using the Beauvoirian concept of the erotic. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of the erotic can allow us to reevaluate “nonproductive,” repetitive, apparently immanent activities—such as going through pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising a child—as projects through which we disclose freedom, and, thus, as projects that possibly lead to transcendenc…
You are Not Qualified—Leave it to us”: Obstetric Violence as Testimonial Injustice
Why 'normal' feels so bad: Violence and Vaginal Examinations During Labour - A (Feminist) Phenomenology
In this article, I argue that many women lack the epistemic resources that would allow them to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent or as unnecessary and potentially declinable. I address vaginal examinations during childbirth as a special case of obstetric violence, in which women frequently lack the epistemic resources necessary to recognise the practice as violent not only because of the inherent difficul…
From Women’s Sacrifice to Feminist Sacrifice: Medicalized Birth and “Natural” Birth versus Woman-Centered Birth
The concept of sacrifice poses an interesting challenge to feminist theory. On the one hand, it seems that women must reject self-sacrificing practices. On the other hand, certain recent feminist analyses have recognized sacrifice as a potential empowering tool for women, so long as it is freely chosen and experienced as positively transformative. In this paper I argue that it is possible to relate to childbirth either as an event calling for wom…
Perpetual waiting: Analyzing dieters’ time in WW’s Instagram posts
WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) is one of the biggest and most successful diet companies in the world, and its social media presence, showcasing the company’s mostly female clientele, is saturated with messages regarding time and temporality. Unlike many descriptions of dieters’ experiences from their own points of view, this article examines WW’s corporate perception of dieters’ time as evidenced in its Instagram publications. We argue th…
Not just mechanical birthing bodies: Articulating the impact of imbalanced power relationships in the birth arena on women’s subjectivity, agency, and consciousness
The experiences of birthing women are essential to optimal birth outcomes. Here we examine how obstetric practices and behaviors in the birth arena result in subjugation of birthing women and their treatment as birthing (mechanical) bodies. We demonstrate that cultural practices that relegate women's consciousness and agency increase the likelihood of harmful effects caused unintentionally by medical activity. We suggest a corrective. The concept…
Obstetric Violence and Vulnerability: A Bioethical Approach
At healthcare facilities worldwide, women during childbirth undergo medical procedures they haven’t consented to and experience mistreatment and disrespect. This phenomenon is recognized as obstetric violence (OV), a distinct form of gender violence. The resulting trauma carries both immediate and long-term implications, making it vital to address for promoting women’s health. OV is partly shaped by a narrow, paternalistic conception of vulnerabi…
My Soul Hurt, and I Felt as If I Was Going to Die”: Obstetric Violence as Torture
Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but of gender violence specifically. This feminist-phenomenological analysis demonstrates features that the experiences of torture and of obstetric violence share. Many birthing subjects describe their experiences of obstetric violence as torture. This use of the concept of torture to explain what they have gone through is not trivial and des…
Rectal examinations in childbirth: The violence and humiliation of a silenced practice
Post-vaginal birth protocols frequently require women and other birthing persons to undergo rectal examinations. Protocols for these examinations, which we refer to as PVREs, vary widely, however, and there is a lack of agreement within the medical community concerning whether they are needed at all. This article explores women’s experience of PVREs in light of this ambiguity which, we argue, reflects and reproduces aspects of gendered power rela…
Experience of menstruation with the use of reusable menstrual products: A qualitative study among menstruators in Israel
Menstruation is an embodied experience that influences menstruators' perceptions of the self and body. The stigma surrounding menstruation and its negative representation in popular culture has consequences for women's sexual and reproductive health. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty 18-50 year old participants who used reusable menstrual products to examine their experience of menstruation and how their use of t…
My Brother Tried to Eat the Playing Cards: A Phenomenological Reading of Caring and Queering in Dementia
Witnessing my late brother’s dementia was what provided the inspiration for the present article. There are vast numbers of texts about dementia written through a philosophical, and even specifically phenomenological, prism, and lately they have proliferated even more. In this paper, I use some insights from phenomenology, especially critical phenomenology, queer and crip phenomenologies and, in particular, Sara Ahmed’s analysis of objects viewed …
Ecofeminism and menstruation: Menstrual practices with reusable menstrual products among Israeli women
Menstruators perceive and experience their menstruation in diverse ways, influencing their choice of menstrual products and impacting both body literacy and the environment. This article investigates Israeli menstruators who use reusable menstrual products (RMPs), a practice viewed through the lens of ecofeminism, within the context of menstrual concealment culture and its role in perpetuating oppression. This article's objective is to reveal the…
Dietitians’ attitudes toward GLP-1s: Weight bias and professional identity in an Israeli context
The rapid expansion of pharmacological interventions using GLP-1 (Glucagon-like peptide-1) receptor agonists, which induce significant weight loss primarily through appetite suppression, has reshaped contemporary approaches to fatness and “obesity,” raising new professional, ethical, and cultural questions for clinical dietitians. Given the pervasive weight bias in the field, it seems unlikely that dietitians would oppose these drugs solely for c…
Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Maternal and Perinatal Health Interventions (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Political science (9 works)