Ruth Preser
Biographic Data
| ID | 283958 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth Preser |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth |
| FAMILY NAME | Preser |
| SIGNATURE | PRESER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Hai Academic College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7764-3181 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Archives of loss
This paper examines the archival remnants of defunct Israeli feminist peace organizations, exploring how social movements sustain memory amid erasure and political violence. Based on a collaborative feminist ethnography (2019–2021) involving archival collections and interviews with Jewish and Palestinian feminist peace activists, the study traces six defunct organizations that were active between 1987 and 2018. We argue that the fate of feminist …
Who Gets to Lead Together? Considering the Uneven Terrains in Shared and Collective Leadership
Shared and collective leadership scholarship has compellingly challenged heroic models by locating leadership in relational, plural, and distributed influence processes, rotating roles, and participatory design. Yet, the egalitarian impetus of “leading together” often falters in practice. Building on a scenario of an intentionally inclusive, collaboratively led conference that nonetheless stratifies participation and influence, this paper argues …
Regulating the Undesirable
This paper explores how laws and procedures in Israel concerning various forms of legal status deem women foreigners to be “statusless.” In particular, it examines the treatment of three groups: Palestinian women residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel; asylum-seeking women from Africa; and women from the former Soviet Union who have been trafficked by the sex industry, or who have lost …
Smaller Goals Were Achieved
The article engages with the potential of feminist archiving-as-activism as a communal method of repair that can enable a more responsible research agenda toward women’s resistance to armed conflict. The study is based on a local, dialogical approach and on qualitative data obtained through a series of 35 interviews with Israeli feminist peace activists, scholars and archivists and on an ethnographic survey of 11 Feminist Peace Archives (FPAs) co…
The Archival Phase in Feminist Organizations
The article is based on a series of interviews (61) and a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 2019-2021 which traced archival records of 20 feminist organizations in Israel: local women's peace organizations (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centres (RCCs). We describe the study and the complex methodological concerns and meta-questions relating to the study of feminist community archives in relation to content (types of testimonials or records), metho…
Structures of abandonment
This article asks the question: What does the term status mean with regard to women without legal status in Israel? Ostensibly, status represents a sovereign state’s formal classification system. In practice, however—according to the accounts of statusless women, civil society activists, and welfare and health officials, as analyzed in this article—status, or its lack thereof, is not a one-off, absolute condition, but an ephemeral and vulnerable …
Feminist Semiotics of “Safe”
This article explores the discursive politics of intimate partner violence during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Israel. It asks how, despite greater awareness and recognition, intimate violence disappeared from the mindset of those managing the pandemic, even as it soars. The analysis traces the conditions that enable the dialectic of presence-disappearance, by reading the ideological prescriptions in policy papers, parliamentary debates, court …
What therefore discourse has joined together
This paper explores lesbian intimacy and the conditions for being public. It traces the performative effects of coupledom and argues that intimacy is understood, performed and experienced against the backdrop and in response to prevailing discourses of tolerance which regulate the public sphere. Employing Wendy Brown's discussion of liberal tolerance and Eve Sedgwick's concept of periperformativity, the paper addresses the performative effects of…
The lesbian complaint
This article discusses lesbian relationships dissolutions and the stories about them. Applying a narrative approach, the critical reading of breakup stories which are conceptualized as dramas by their participants seeks to problematize the distinction between private and public, respectable and scandalous, normative and deviant, and constructive and destructive in order to discuss queer publics and some longings that are attached to them. While t…
Lost and found in Berlin
In response to a call for interview partners for an ethnography on the Israeli-Jewish lesbian diaspora in Berlin, my prospective partners contacted me, offering their migration stories while apologetically stating that they were no longer, or not exactly, lesbians. Admittedly, such transformations should not come as a surprise. Scholarship on queer migration to urban spaces elaborates the sexual imaginary, which brands the city as the scene in wh…
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman
One may expect an account that opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma in a Jewish context to conclude with Zionism or “Jewish and democratic” as the circumventing script that counters past and prevents future violence. Accordingly, one may also expect diaspora and violence to be used interchangeably. That Sarah Schulman’s book opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma but arrives at totally different conclusions is one of the significant…
A methodology of damage
This paper explores the methodological implications of working with damage: damaged relationality, injured belonging, impaired narratives, and vulnerable identities. The conceptualization of damage as a methodology was the outcome of a narrative investigation into queer relationships’ dissolution. The study explored the way in which lesbians narrate romantic failures and relational dramas in an era marked by gay possibilities and compulsory happi…
Coherent deviants
What therefore discourse has joined together
This paper explores lesbian intimacy and the conditions for being public. It traces the performative effects of coupledom and argues that intimacy is understood, performed and experienced against the backdrop and in response to prevailing discourses of tolerance which regulate the public sphere. Employing Wendy Brown's discussion of liberal tolerance and Eve Sedgwick's concept of periperformativity, the paper addresses the performative effects of…
A methodology of damage
This paper explores the methodological implications of working with damage: damaged relationality, injured belonging, impaired narratives, and vulnerable identities. The conceptualization of damage as a methodology was the outcome of a narrative investigation into queer relationships’ dissolution. The study explored the way in which lesbians narrate romantic failures and relational dramas in an era marked by gay possibilities and compulsory happi…
Lost and found in Berlin
In response to a call for interview partners for an ethnography on the Israeli-Jewish lesbian diaspora in Berlin, my prospective partners contacted me, offering their migration stories while apologetically stating that they were no longer, or not exactly, lesbians. Admittedly, such transformations should not come as a surprise. Scholarship on queer migration to urban spaces elaborates the sexual imaginary, which brands the city as the scene in wh…
Coherent deviants
The Archival Phase in Feminist Organizations
The article is based on a series of interviews (61) and a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 2019-2021 which traced archival records of 20 feminist organizations in Israel: local women's peace organizations (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centres (RCCs). We describe the study and the complex methodological concerns and meta-questions relating to the study of feminist community archives in relation to content (types of testimonials or records), metho…
The lesbian complaint
This article discusses lesbian relationships dissolutions and the stories about them. Applying a narrative approach, the critical reading of breakup stories which are conceptualized as dramas by their participants seeks to problematize the distinction between private and public, respectable and scandalous, normative and deviant, and constructive and destructive in order to discuss queer publics and some longings that are attached to them. While t…
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman
One may expect an account that opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma in a Jewish context to conclude with Zionism or “Jewish and democratic” as the circumventing script that counters past and prevents future violence. Accordingly, one may also expect diaspora and violence to be used interchangeably. That Sarah Schulman’s book opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma but arrives at totally different conclusions is one of the significant…
Coherent deviants
A methodology of damage
This paper explores the methodological implications of working with damage: damaged relationality, injured belonging, impaired narratives, and vulnerable identities. The conceptualization of damage as a methodology was the outcome of a narrative investigation into queer relationships’ dissolution. The study explored the way in which lesbians narrate romantic failures and relational dramas in an era marked by gay possibilities and compulsory happi…
Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman
One may expect an account that opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma in a Jewish context to conclude with Zionism or “Jewish and democratic” as the circumventing script that counters past and prevents future violence. Accordingly, one may also expect diaspora and violence to be used interchangeably. That Sarah Schulman’s book opens with diaspora, persecution, and trauma but arrives at totally different conclusions is one of the significant…
The lesbian complaint
This article discusses lesbian relationships dissolutions and the stories about them. Applying a narrative approach, the critical reading of breakup stories which are conceptualized as dramas by their participants seeks to problematize the distinction between private and public, respectable and scandalous, normative and deviant, and constructive and destructive in order to discuss queer publics and some longings that are attached to them. While t…
Lost and found in Berlin
In response to a call for interview partners for an ethnography on the Israeli-Jewish lesbian diaspora in Berlin, my prospective partners contacted me, offering their migration stories while apologetically stating that they were no longer, or not exactly, lesbians. Admittedly, such transformations should not come as a surprise. Scholarship on queer migration to urban spaces elaborates the sexual imaginary, which brands the city as the scene in wh…
What therefore discourse has joined together
This paper explores lesbian intimacy and the conditions for being public. It traces the performative effects of coupledom and argues that intimacy is understood, performed and experienced against the backdrop and in response to prevailing discourses of tolerance which regulate the public sphere. Employing Wendy Brown's discussion of liberal tolerance and Eve Sedgwick's concept of periperformativity, the paper addresses the performative effects of…
Structures of abandonment
This article asks the question: What does the term status mean with regard to women without legal status in Israel? Ostensibly, status represents a sovereign state’s formal classification system. In practice, however—according to the accounts of statusless women, civil society activists, and welfare and health officials, as analyzed in this article—status, or its lack thereof, is not a one-off, absolute condition, but an ephemeral and vulnerable …
Feminist Semiotics of “Safe”
This article explores the discursive politics of intimate partner violence during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Israel. It asks how, despite greater awareness and recognition, intimate violence disappeared from the mindset of those managing the pandemic, even as it soars. The analysis traces the conditions that enable the dialectic of presence-disappearance, by reading the ideological prescriptions in policy papers, parliamentary debates, court …
Smaller Goals Were Achieved
The article engages with the potential of feminist archiving-as-activism as a communal method of repair that can enable a more responsible research agenda toward women’s resistance to armed conflict. The study is based on a local, dialogical approach and on qualitative data obtained through a series of 35 interviews with Israeli feminist peace activists, scholars and archivists and on an ethnographic survey of 11 Feminist Peace Archives (FPAs) co…
The Archival Phase in Feminist Organizations
The article is based on a series of interviews (61) and a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 2019-2021 which traced archival records of 20 feminist organizations in Israel: local women's peace organizations (FPAs) and Rape Crisis Centres (RCCs). We describe the study and the complex methodological concerns and meta-questions relating to the study of feminist community archives in relation to content (types of testimonials or records), metho…
Regulating the Undesirable
This paper explores how laws and procedures in Israel concerning various forms of legal status deem women foreigners to be “statusless.” In particular, it examines the treatment of three groups: Palestinian women residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel; asylum-seeking women from Africa; and women from the former Soviet Union who have been trafficked by the sex industry, or who have lost …
Archives of loss
This paper examines the archival remnants of defunct Israeli feminist peace organizations, exploring how social movements sustain memory amid erasure and political violence. Based on a collaborative feminist ethnography (2019–2021) involving archival collections and interviews with Jewish and Palestinian feminist peace activists, the study traces six defunct organizations that were active between 1987 and 2018. We argue that the fate of feminist …
Who Gets to Lead Together? Considering the Uneven Terrains in Shared and Collective Leadership
Shared and collective leadership scholarship has compellingly challenged heroic models by locating leadership in relational, plural, and distributed influence processes, rotating roles, and participatory design. Yet, the egalitarian impetus of “leading together” often falters in practice. Building on a scenario of an intentionally inclusive, collaboratively led conference that nonetheless stratifies participation and influence, this paper argues …
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Anthropology (4 works)