Sharon Halevi

NEGOTIATING NATIONAL BOUNDARIES: PALESTINIAN AND JEWISH WOMEN’S STUDIES STUDENTS IN ISRAEL

This article examines the intersection of gender and national identity in an Israeli university, focusing on the Womens Studies classroom. Taking into consideration the overshadowing effect of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we wondered how exposure to Womens Studies’ egalitarian ethos and studying in a mixed Palestinian–Jewish classroom affects the feminist solidarity and national identity of young women students. In-depth interviews with eleven Palestinian and twelve Jewish Womens Studies’ graduates indicate that solidarity between women of the two groups is built around womens issues, such as equal employment opportunities and reforms in the educational system. Considering the solidarity built around womens, as opposed to feminist, issues, it seems that national differences override the potential for a feminist solidarity.

Staging Peace Through a Gendered Demonstration: Women in Black in Haifa, Israel

Israeli Women in Black was founded twenty years ago to demonstrate for peace and against the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Their political activism involves three spatial processes: outing their protest by taking to the streets, locating their protest through strategic siting, and performing their politics, thus redefining the places they occupy. The Haifa chapter has relocated its demonstrations several times in response to political opposition. Observations and interviews support our analysis of the geographical implications of their unique method of demonstration, their locational choices, and the tension between their femininity and activism played out against the city dynamic.

What a Difference a Place Makes: The Reflexive (Mis) management of a City’s Pasts

In this article the authors use the concept of “place memory” to contemplate how the temporal qualities of places inflect the activities carried out in them by considering how one group, the Haifa chapter of Women in Black (WiB) in Israel, makes conscious and unconscious use of the possible readings of an “ordinary” place and its history. The authors demonstrate the argument by analyzing the group’s peregrinations over the past twenty years. After pointing to some scholarly insights regarding the use of place by protest movements and a brief introduction to the city of Haifa and WiB and its members, the authors move through the various sites where the movement held its vigils; they close by considering how the pasts of a place permeate the present and, in so doing, disrupt any possible unilinear reading of a place and open it up to multilinear and nonlinear readings.

The site of silence: Performing the economy of (non-)memory in Israel

In this study we seek to understand the gendered dynamics of bearing witness, remembering, and mourning in contemporary Israeli society by examining the performative practices of one protest movement, Women in Black (WiB). Our focus is on the Haifa chapter of the movement, whose vigils we observed over a seven-year period. After a brief overview of the literature regarding national remembering and commemoration in Israel, the formation of WiB and its place in Israeli political life and discourse, we move to our analysis of the vigil. We argue that by analyzing WiBs vigil as a performance, we are able to complicate the discussion concerning women, performance and remembrance in general and in Israel in particular. We find that through their performance WiB disrupts the current “economy of memory” in Israel; by remembering and performing that which many would like to remain forgotten – the occupation which followed the 1967 War and its consequences – it engages in a project of “transformative remembering,” which disturbs its audiences equanimity and forces it to review its past.

Double Exposures: Twin Sisters' Autobiographies and the Experience of Twinship

The article considers how twins discursively negotiated and performed their twinship over the twentieth century through an examination of the jointly written narratives of self of three sets of identical, female, American twins. These years witnessed a shift in the academic, medical, and lay attitudes toward twins—a historical and social shift that I argue is reflected in their narratives and in their perceptions of self. Taken together these three joint autobiographies suggest that researchers’ findings regarding the movement of twins along a scale from compliance to contestation to denial is also a temporal movement, reflecting a gradual shift in social and gender expectations regarding twinship. The article sheds light on the history of the lived experience of twinship, in particular that of female twins, and reflects on a more general historical evolution of twentieth-century women’s performance of their individuality. After an introduction to the six women and their narratives of self, I turn to outline how each set of twins presented their twinship and individuality in their narrative. I conclude by considering some aspects concerning the historicity and gendering of twinship.