Danny Kaplan

Fraternal Friendship and Commemorative Desire

Based on a case study of Israeli mens friendships, this arti cle examines the inter-relations between the experience of male rela tionships in everyday life and established representations of fraternal friendship. We delineate a script for male bonding that echoes ancient epics of heroism. This script holds a mythic structure for making sense of friendship in everyday life and places male relatedness under the spectral ideal of death. Whereas various male-to-male arenas present diverse and often displaced expressions of male affection, we con tend that sites of commemoration present a unique instance in which desire between men is publicly declared and legitimized. The collec tive rituals for the dead hero-friends serve as a mask that transforms a repudiated personal sentiment into a national genre of relatedness. We interpret fraternal friendship as a form of private/public identifica tion/desire whereby the citizen brother becomes, via collective rituals of commemoration, the desired brother.

The Nerd and His Discontent The Seduction Community and the Logic of the Game as a Geeky Solution to the Challenges of Young Masculinity

This article explores the worldview of the “seduction community” operating within the homosocial spaces of North-American “Guyland.” This community provides seduction workshops catering mainly to men stereotyped as nerds who are situated at the bottom of the social–sexual hierarchy despite their privileged position in the postindustrial workplace. Based on content analysis of the community’s self-help literature, the article argues that the community offers a “geeky” solution to the dilemmas of young masculinity and fosters a pickup model based on gaming logic. Courtship is construed as a standardized, rule-governed social skill and is characterized by hyperconsumerism and objectification of women. As part of his self-empowerment, the pickup artist adopts an avatar persona and employs teasing and make-believe techniques. As trainees aim to accomplish control over self and others in compliance with hegemonic masculinity, the strict reliance on gaming logic culminates in the dehumanization of all parties and suspends moral considerations.

Masculine body ideologies as a non-gynocentric framework for the psychological study of the male body.

Psychological research of the body disproportionately centers on body-appearance concerns. Grounded in womens experience of objectification, it neglects much of mens bodily experience. To address this we introduce Masculine Body Ideologies (MBI), a set of belief systems that prescribe how men should engage with their bodies. Three MBI ideal-types are identified and situated within broader masculinity ideologies: unattended, functional body ideology associated with traditional masculinity rooted in modern industrial society; metrosexual body ideology associated with post-industrial, consumer masculinity and reemploying signifiers of body functionality to form an objectified body esthetics; and holistic body ideology emphasizing inner-harmony, authenticity and expressivity, manifesting post-industrial trends of self-aware masculinity. As a normative framework, MBI underscores how similar body practices may be motivated by different body concerns associated with alternative body ideologies. This framework can clarify conceptual and empirical inconsistencies in studies of male body-appearance concerns and inform emerging research and mental-health considerations.

Marketing Nationalism in the Absence of State: Radio Haifa During the 2006 Lebanon war

Following privatization reforms in Israeli media, we explore local and global factors beyond the state that may promote national identifications. In an ethnographic study of commercial Radio Haifa during and after the 2006 Lebanon War, we describe how the local radio replaced state and military functions in the home front as local residents came under attack by Hezbollah rockets. The radio station gave warning of incoming rockets, guided residents during their stay in shelters, engineered the collective mood, and promoted civic welfare. By subscribing to a Zionist-heroic discourse, the station attained legitimacy and commercial success and transformed into a player in the national field, well beyond its regional mandate. Against claims that global-commercial pressures undermine both state structures and national sentiments, this study suggests that commercial and peripheral actors present new ways for promoting nationalism in lieu of the state.

Folk models of dyadic male bonds in israeli culture

This article explores the phenomenology of dyadic male bonds in Israeli culture, based on a secondary analysis of friendship narratives derived from a sample of Israeli-Jewish men. Two folk models of male friendships are delineated, situated in local images of hegemonic masculinity in Zionist ideology. The first model is the hevreman style of relatedness, underscoring sociability and adventure seeking. It endorses “cool” sharing involving nonverbal modes of communication and physical support. The countermodel is “intellectual” relatedness, stressing the exchange of ideas and “soul talk.” It endorses psychologistic support and the verbal articulation of emotions. These tropes are discussed in comparative context. Against the dominant psychological-feminist paradigm of “being” versus “doing,” it is argued that experiences of male intimacy are richer than overriding stereotypes of male inexpressivity suggest. The article calls for an attentive use of folk models in the sociology of emotions, taking into account the effect of hegemonic meaning systems. Rather than viewing emotional behavior, gender stereotypes, and ideology as separate features in the study of emotions, it underscores how emotional experience is dependent on cultural-interpretative processes nested in local and global social norms, collective history, and gendered ideology.

What about Nontraditional Masculinities? Toward a Quantitative Model of Therapeutic New Masculinity Ideology

Despite scholarly interest in changes in masculinity, no study to date offers quantitative measures of nontraditional masculinity ideologies. We identify common denominators of “new masculinity” (NM) ideology rooted in therapeutic discourse, which includes themes of authenticity and holistic self-awareness. A theoretical construct of NM was formalized from in-depth interviews and operationalized as the NM Inventory (NMI). The NMI was tested for structural and external validity in two quantitative samples of Israeli men. The inventory demonstrated discriminant validity with traditional and consumer masculinity ideologies, converged with self-labeling as feminist, and was uniquely predicted by lower levels of modern sexism. This suggests stronger associations between NM and feminist attitudes than previously argued. Lay responses confounded between self-labeling as new man and as metrosexual, echoing ambiguities in public rhetoric of NM. As a unique measure of nontraditional masculinity, the NMI can spur more systematic research into variable outcomes of contemporary understandings of masculinity.

Can We Really Distinguish Between Civic and National Solidarity

While this book centers on national rather than civic attachments, Chapter Six calls attention to the fact that when it comes to the question of solidarity (as opposed to identity), the two are not easily distinguishable beyond the symbolic cultural level. Reviewing other prominent bottom-up approaches to mass solidarity, it is shown how from a phenomenological and empirical point of view the analytic distinction between civic and national solidarity is too often overstated. The chapter goes on to address the critic of methodological nationalism and the normative bias that distinguishes between “good” civic and “bad” national attachment. This warrants a reconsideration of the contractual-civic model of nationalism (civic nationalism) too easily dismissed by recent scholars.

The Meta-Narrative of Strangers-Turned-Friends

This chapter unravels the symbolic cultural level of national solidarity discourse. National rhetoric reconciles two distinct tropes for close-knit ties, family and friendship, by invoking the figure of the “brother.” The magic of the national imagination lies not only in the transformation of strangers into friends but also in imagining these new friends as rediscovered brothers (and, only obliquely, sisters) of the same primordial tribe. Epitomizing the continuing demand for salvation in modern social life, this meta-narrative gives sacred meaning to mundane performances of sociability, operating as a set of binary codes that transform abstract, anonymous, inclusive, indifferent, and interest-based relations between strangers into concrete, familiar, intimately exclusive, loyal, and passionate relations between friends.

Public and Collective Intimacy

This chapter spells out the research strategy of public and collective intimacy. The chapter revisits the concept of intimacy and its use in public life, problematizing the “identitarian” focus in current scholarship (among them Herzfeld, Illouz, and Ringmar). Drawing on the understudied dimension of intimacy as a social relationship, the chapter turns to explain how public intimacy mediates between interpersonal and collective ties through a dynamic of seduction. Personal relationships formed in social institutions are staged under the gaze of spectators in ways that not only reinforce feelings of exclusivity but also tease and invite others to become participants. To understand how this affects collective solidarity, the chapter draws correspondences between the move from occurrences to events in the study of social performance and the move from sociability to solidarity in public events and media events. Other neo-Durkheimian accounts of ritualized events have centered on the reaffirmation of the national community in terms of the group’s collective identity. Instead, building on past experiences of public intimacy, collective intimacy points to the emergence of shared feelings of group complicity, an imagining of the community as a cohesive network of friends.

Big Brother: Viewers Turned Accomplices on Reality TV

This chapter presents the case of the highly popular reality television show Big Brother. Drawing on semiotic analysis and extended audience research in Israel, the chapter demonstrates various practices of “mediated public intimacy” taking place between two or more contestants with the audience serving as an absent third party. Certain features built into the Big Brother format create atypical “folds” in the veil that separates insiders from outsiders. These serve to mobilize viewers’ sense of participation, moving them from the position of spectator to privileged confidants of the contestants. Interactions between viewers in everyday life and on social media locate them as accomplices and reinforce emergent feelings of collective intimacy. This analysis emphasizes the importance of social ties for understanding how media events generate national solidarity.