Nitza Berkovitch

THE GLOBALIZATION OF WOMEN'S STATUS: Consensus/Dissensus in the World Polity

The amount of attention devoted to women and womens issues has increased dramatically in the last five decades throughout the world. In this article we examine the cultural construction of women that guided such action by analyzing texts that were produced and activities that were undertaken in relation to women by international organizations from 1945 through 1995. We show that the modernist principles of universalism, liberal individualism, and rationality provided the cultural framework for this global project. We compare the ways in which two issues important to women, education and genital mutilation, were constructed by global actors and the implications of this meaning making for action over time. Our analysis reveals an important link between the extent to which an issue is constructed to be consistent with the modernist principles and the extent to which it receives global attention.

Human Rights Discourse in Domestic Settings: How Does it Emerge?

Building on the literature that analyzes the impact of norms and ideas on international and domestic politics, it is our assumption that the widespread introduction and dissemination of a human rights discourse enables oppressed groups to translate events into rights language and to appeal to courts, politicians and media in order to seek remedies for their grievances. In so far as human rights discourse actually helps introduce more ethical policies and legislation, it is crucial to understand how this discourse, which in the past 55 years evolved and proliferated on the global level, emerges and develops in domestic settings. Using Israel as a case study, and more specifically analyzing the Israeli press, we further develop some of the existing theoretical claims about how the global and local interact. We argue that in order to understand how the rights discourse is imported into the domestic arena and how it expands once it enters the local scene, it is crucial to employ a broader conception of the global and a more differentiated view of the local. We emphasize the significance of local events and practices in determining the impact of the global on national settings, suggesting that one cannot understand transnational flows without unveiling the black box of the domestic arena.

The politics of (in)visibility: On the blind spots of women's discrimination in the academy

The aim of this study is to show how invisible institutional culture participates in the production and propagation of gender difference and hierarchy. To that end, we examine the official publications of one Israeli university in order to explore cultural mechanisms that signify hidden conceptions, ideologies and iconic images of women in the academe. Conceptualizing these publications as cultural products that operate as the public image of the university and hence participate in its overall construction of ideologies of gendered reality, we analyze, both qualitatively and quantitatively, images, visual representations and scripts of university women as they appear in the university bulletins, presidents reports, and various newsletters from 1974 to 2004 (in Hebrew and in English). Having looked at over 5000 articles and photographs, we found that although the presence of women in the publications has increased over the years, their images and roles continue to be feminized and sexist. Thus, more space is devoted and more visibility given to stereotyped femininity and womanhood. Moreover, we explore the ways in which mechanisms that create a complex politics of visibility and invisibility produce contested and contradictory messages and participate in the creation of what we call the blind spots of discrimination.

Gender Imago: Searching for New Feminist Methodologies

Invoking Butlers notion of gender performativity, Kristevas concept of foreignness, and Laplanches reconceptualization of otherness, the authors examine the power of fantasy to change the women and men that we always already are. Using “writing-in-response,” they discuss the meaning of gender performance in relation to their theoretical commitments. The article is structured around three different forms of dialogue: (a) two lectures that the authors presented, each one contesting accepted ideas of gender, self, and society; (b) seven e-mail correspondences that develop the ideas presented in the lectures and that dramatize the transition from speaking to writing-in-response; and (c) a discussion, developed both together and separately, that raises the possibility of exploring a new language of gendered subjectivity. The article challenges the concept of “direct experience,” the separation between psychology and sociology, and destabilizes the space between gender fantasy and performance.