Languaculture and Linguistic Sexuality among Young Women in Prostitution
An extensive literature addresses various subcultures in language, but there exists little research into language use by populations involved in prostitution. This paper contributes to knowledge about prostitution by investigating the connection between language, culture and sexuality among young women involved in prostitution in Israel. Based on qualitative research including two years of fieldwork, the paper presents a "pussy language" – a linguistic sexuality which constitutes an ambiguous space and linguistic testimony to their life course. The "pussy language," I argue, is a unique languacultureconsisting of a vast variety of intersecting, contradicting and complementary meanings. Although this "pussy language" has a limited vocabulary, their myriad ways of pronouncing just a few words reflects an intellectual richness and linguistic virtuosity.
The Will of the Deceased: Three Israeli Case Studies
Yael Hashiloni-Dolev, Dafna Hacker, Hagai Boas
The paper examines three case studies involving dilemmas having to do with the wish of the deceased: a. Organ donations b. Posthumous sperm retrieval c. Succession disputes. It offers a socio-legal analysis of the value system operated by various Israeli legal authorities (Courts, the General Attorney and the Parliament (“Knesset”)), in their decisions concerning matters having to do with the body and the property of the deceased. The study’s findings reveal a gap between, on the one hand, a legal rhetoric of a deep obligation to respect the wishes of the deceased, and on the other hand, medical and legal practices that overlook the wish of the dead, or unconvincingly assume about it, while leaving the final decisions in the hands of the living relatives of the deceased. Suppressing the wishes of the dead, and preferring his family’s requests, is based on the idealization of family relations, which denies possible conflicts between family members, as well as possible contradicting interests of the dead and the living.
The Housing Machine: Towards Alternative Modernity
This article discusses the concept of alternative modernity in its architectural context, and the relationship between the architecture of the “housing machine” and its dwellers. Based on interviews, data gathered from planning documents, archival work and visual documentation this article presents the tension between modern architecture, constructed as part of a hegemonic national project, and the tenants who “failed” to fulfill the project of modernity. Following our findings and the theoretical discussion we would like to formulate the contrast between the aspirations “housing machine” and the users’ actions which produced in their homes a “third place”. This article presents both a historical-architectural perspective as well as a socio–political analysis which is often absent from the body of knowledge that deals with housing as spatial and social phenomena.
War Without Bullets: The History of Violence In the Israeli Football
Apparently, there is a real reason for violence in football: the game is an aggressive one, and the crowd, mainly from lower socio-economic class, tends to aggressive behavior. However, the reasons for violence are not imprinted in the game nor in the crowd, but in the cultural-political parameters that shape the football surroundings. The paper studies the violence patterns in the Israeli football since 1949 until the present. The point of departure is the ‘historical domain of opportunities’’ and the dominant instance at that domain. Two different domains are identified in this study: the two first decades of the state where politics was the dominant instance, and the last decades since the 1990s, where economics was the dominant instance. In the first domain the inciter were the players,while in the second domain the inciter were the crowds. The commodification of football is responsible to the change in the pattern of violence. However, crowd’s behavior is still influenced by the politics in Israel: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reached the football stadium and imported racist violence.
Ethnicity, Class an Gender in Kavkazi Dance Class in Israel
This article examines questions of personal and collective identity in the context of ethnicity, class and gender, as they are reflected in a Caucasian [Kavkazi] dance class. The article is based on participant observation, informal conversations and questionnaires given to children and youth who participated in the class. The article construes the class as a cultural practice of bridging between past and present as well as a social institution utilized by the community for its positive repositioning vis-a-vis the Israeli society and as a conservative institution for gender supervision. The article traces the differential meanings assigned to the class by the participating boys and girls.
Care and Calculation: Parent-Teen Bargaining
This paper examines the way in which parents and teens from the social periphery of Israel negotiate money and shopping. The paper aims to characterize the nature of the autonomy children develop through arguing and bargaining with their parents over financial and consumer issues. Children negotiate the value of various services they provide for the household within an expectation for mutual consideration. In Hebrew, the root of the word for “consideration” (hitchashvut), h.sh.v., has a number of meanings: besides its primary meaning of using discretion and paying attention, it is also connected to the concept of “calculation. The multiple meanings of this word reflect the complexity and symbolic dimensions of the material exchange between parents and adolescents. The nature of autonomy that is expressed in bargaining interactions matches the feminist notion “relational-autonomy”, accordingly autonomy develops through interacting with others.
The Social Resources of the Popular Religious Music Renewal in Israel
This article concerns one of the major developments in contemporary Jewish music in Israel – the phenomenon of popular religious music. We will analyze this development in terms of three social arenas which have helped to shape Judaism in Israel over the past two decades: the evolution of the Haredi teshuva (“return” to religious observance) movement; the efforts to consolidate a religious-Zionist culture; and the emergence of secular discourse in Judaism. In all three endeavors, religious popular music challenges the dichotomist religious/secular divide characterizing Israeli society. While appearing outwardly to represent a critical statement, it actually harnesses the privatization of culture and political tensions.
Book Reviews:
On: Modernity and the Holocaust \ Zygmunt Bauman
On: Current Flow: The Electrification of Palastine \ Ronen Shami
On: 1929: Year zero of the Jewish-Arab conflict \ Hillel Cohen
On: Remembring, Forgetting and the Construction of Space \ Haim Yaacobi and Tovi Fenster (eds.)
On: The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-politics in a Mixed Community \ Haim Yacobia
On: Cut to measure : Israel's Policies Regarding the Aliyah of North African Jews, 1951-1956 \ Avi Picard
On: Walla Bseder: A Linguistic Profile of the Israeli-Arabs \ Abed Al-Rahman Mar'i
On: Jewish life in Twenty-first-century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance \ Marcy Brink-Danan
On: Prelude to Paradise: Life in a Contemporary Old Age Site \ Aviva Kaplan
On: Paths of Middle-Class: Mobility Among Second-Generation Moroccan Immigrant Women \ Beverly Mizrachi
(See comment on this review in the next issue)
On: Sinews of the Nation: Constructing Irish and Zionist Bonds in the United States \ Dan Lainer-Vos
On: Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy \ Yoel Finkelman