Volume 11 Issue 1
August 2009
Special Issue: Israeli Sociology and the Body Debate
Introduction by the Editor of the Special Issue:
A Tale of the Body: Body-Identity Experiences of Women Undergoing Fertility Treatments
Hila Ha’elyon
New Reproductive Technologies focus on the female body because this usually is the site of the intervention. Technological practice transfers the female body from a private to a public context, entailing a “ bodily transformation”, which combines the “ natural” with the artificial”. The female body thus objectified is exposed to a discourse which generates control and discipline mechanisms. In this context body images described by women have a great importance. This research is based on interviews with Israeli women undergoing IVF. The findings indicate that the female body’s potential for interpretation is wide-ranging and varied, despite similar material circumstances (non-impregnation) and a common pro-natalist context (the Israeli context).
The paper analyses the discussion in the public-professional committee that examined in 2000 the issue of egg donation in Israel. The committee, dominated by gynecologists, helped to institutionalize medical domination over the policy and organization of this field. A quasi-pluralistic discussion turned into an exclusivist discourse, in which ethical and social problems were reduced to medical ones, for which physicians are the authorized experts. This discourse was couched in semi-economic-consumerist rhetoric which portrayed the physicians as suppliers of services to customers in a free medical market. The women were depicted to accord with such a discourse. The paper raises bio-ethical and social dilemmas regarding the medicalization of fertility and the role of medical experts (agents with interests) in decision-making processes concerning egg donation.
Perceptions of the moral standing of the fetus by Israeli genetic counselors and obstetricians are discussed. These medical experts’ ethical reasoning in their consideration of treatment strategies of fetuses suggest that while genetic counselors understand pregnant women and not the fetus to be their patients, obstetricians who manage high risk pregnancies construct the fetus as a patient de facto, despite its lack of rights in Israeli and Jewish law. Both professional groups, however, similarly apply a “ relational ethics” model, which associates the moral status of the fetus with its family relationships. This model’s dominance in Israeli reproductive medicine stems from the ways the fetus was constructed in various Jewish-Israeli contexts, rather than from professional training in reproductive medicine.
The article deals with the social mechanisms of medical treatment and health education in use during the mass immigration to Israel in the 1950s. The aim of the medical practices associated with reproduction (birth, contraceptives, abortion and breastfeeding) was to acculturate the immigrants. The declared aim of the absorption process was to eliminate the differences between immigrants and veterans, but the reproductive practices served to perpetuate them. The study is based on 35 in-depth interviews with Israeli nurses and doctors who worked with immigrants during the 1950s and on vast archival documentation.
Becoming Body in Aikidō: A Pacifistic Martial Art
Einat Bar-On Cohen
All exercises of Aikidō, the Japanese martial art, unfold similarly: one participant attacks and the other rolls the attacker away from the zone of belligerence. Violence is created and immediately eradicated. While violence is perpetrated and annihilated, the lived-in body erases the gap between body and mind, me and other, violence and its eradication, and between practice and its meaning, namely a non-dual body emerges. In search of an anthropological way of interpreting this pacifistic world, I suggest new tools to understand the active body as it creates sociality, through motility and sensing, in its own right. In it, the lived-in body is formed as it recursively acts and forms a world-of-meaning.
Research examining the Yishuv rarely deals directly with the issue of masculinity. The reciprocal relations of the concepts of masculinity, honor and body have been investigated even less. This study checks the extent and the character of these relationships in the rural area of the PJCA settlements of Lower Galilee during the Yishuv period. The analysis is based on two case studies, an attempted rape of the daughter of farmers at Sejera in 1923, and the double murder of a farmer and his son at Menahemia in 1942.
I examine how young Haredi men construct their bodies in relation to the secular body, which is considered their main “Other”. Together with Haredi men’s criticism of the secular body, more positive feelings can be discerned such as appreciation, envy and even adoration. I argue that due to the transition of many Haredi men into the wider Israeli space, the secular body’s influence is increasing. I also examine the principles whereby certain aspects of the secular body are being adopted while others are rejected or adopted in part.
The complex relationship of linguistic expression, body, identity and emotions assume a central role in shaping the illness narratives of Israeli and American gay men who are HIV+. The dramatic narratives constructed in the disembodied medium of the Internet portray AIDS as a transformative experience, demanding the problematization of the relationship between body, emotion and identity. This interpretive study examines ‘inspiration stories’ published on Israeli and American bulletin boards using narrative analysis. Comparison of the groups of narrators revealed two discernible models of gay masculinity. Yet, interestingly, both groups framed their physical and emotional coping with the disease in terms that resemble Agemban’s (1998) notion of “The life worth living”. The study sheds light on the mutual effect of nationalistic and gendered ethos on the performance of personal life practices.
The Struggle over the Last Minute: Debating Brain Death in Israel
Hagai Boas
In 1968 a new set of criteria for determining death was published. Death was now based on the absence of neurological activity in the brain. This additional and new definition of death destabilized the delicate balance between “death as a moment” and “death as a process”. In this liquid phenomenology of life” and “death”, a debate loomed over the legitimacy and authority of defining death. This paper discusses the different aspects of this debate and focuses on its local expression in the Israeli context.
Book Reviews:
On: Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism \ Eva Illouz
On: Generations, Locations, Identities: Contemporary Perspectives on Society and Culture in Israel - Essays in Honor of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt \ Hanna Herzog, Tal Kohavi and Shimshon Zelniker (eds.)
On: Migrants and Workers \ Adriana Kemp and Rebeca Raijman
On: A Rainbow of Opinions: A Mizrahi Agenda for Society in Israel \ Yossi Yonah, Yonit Naaman and David Machlev (eds.)
On: To My Sister: Mizrahi, Feminist Politics \ Shlomit Lir (ed.)
On: Citizenship Gaps: Migration, Fertility and Identity in Israel \ Yossi Yonah and Adriana Kemp (eds.)
On: Welfare to Work: Conditional Rights in Social Policy \ Amir Paz-Fuchs
On: Parenthood in the Law: Custody and Visitation Construction upon Divorce \ Daphna Hacker
On: Readers' Voices: The Act of Reading in the Multi-Media Environment \ Hanna Adoni and Hillel Nossek
On: Oh, Such a Delightful War! Isarelies Football Fans \ Amir Ben-Porat
On: Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv \ Anat Helman
On: Women on the Margins: Gender and Nationalism in Mandate Tel Aviv \ Deborah S. Bernstein