resistance at the limits: feminist activism and conscientious objection in Israel

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.     

Depoliticising the personal : A feminist slogan in feminist therapy

One of the great insights of second wave feminism was the recognition that “the personal is political.” Many feminist psychologists (both practitioners and researchers) claim a strong commitment to this slogan and attempt to implement it through their theory and practice. This article explores four interpretations of “the personal is political” in feminist psychological writing. It is argued that far from achieving radical feminist goals, psychological interpretations serve: (1) to personalise the political, translating social, economic, and ecological concerns into individual psychological matters; (2) to foster revolution “from within” at the expense of political change in the outside world; (3) that insofar as it aims uncritically to “validate women's experience,” it ignores the social and political factors which shape experience; and (4) that the concept of “empowerment” depends upon a radical split between the “personal” and the “political”. In sum, it is concluded that femenist acknowledgement that the personal really is political means rejecting psychology.     

The Cloud - Lecturing on feminist research

Lecturers in feminist theory come face to face with the gender order when giving a lecture, which is expressed by preconceptions about feminism. A model, the Cloud, is presented in this article which can be used to improve teaching and increase the chances of constructive dialogue. By bringing preconceptions into the open and analysing them, these ideas can be made to illuminate the presentation, not to hinder it. As a general model the Cloud is a tool that will help us to articulate common beliefs about phenomena to make way for knowledge based on research.     

Elena Poniatowska: The feminist origins of commitment

Elena Poniatowska is a well-known, living Mexican woman writer who portrays the reality of the marginal, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. There is therefore an irony at the centre of her ‘popularity’ for many of the men who have reviewed her books have not recognised the reality she presents: they have imposed their own male reality on her work — and praised it. By such means is her reality negated and made invisible while it is simultaneously appropriated.     

The public and the private in architecture: A feminist critique

Hanna Arendt's discussion of public and private derives more or less intact from Aristotle and forms a principal philosophical basis for mainstream architectural theory exemplified in the writings of Kenneth Frampton. An eminent architectural historian, teacher, and critic, Frampton proposes that the discipline of architecture is in crisis today because of an unprecedented enphasis on ‘the life-bound values of animal laborans,’ and because ‘it is largely divested of culturally valid institutions for its embodiment,’ which institutions, he suggests, find their archetypes in the agora of the ancient polis. The author criticizes Frampton's position from the perspective of feminist philosophy, based on Elshtain and Pitkin, and advocates some reformulation of the traditional hierarchical relationship between the two domains. The last section of the article locates architectural work within this feminist perspective: in programme, precedents, and formal expression. ‘The Ethical Polity’ provides a potential vehicle for architectural exploration predicated on the restructuring of public and private.     

Psychological variables in student activism: The radical triad and some religious differences

Thirty-six male students, drawn from a sample of 1195, were interviewed to obtain a personal history. A battery of projective psychological tests (Rorschach and TATs) were also administered to them. The students were divided into four groups of nine each, Jewish radicals (JR), Christian radicals (CR), Jewish moderates (JM), and Christian moderates (CM), to test the significance of religious background as it related to political outlook. Eight significant psychological variables were found and defined. No differences were found between JMs and CMs. Radicals differed from moderates on three variables: negative identity, masochistic surrender, and treating people as concepts. In addition, JR subjects demonstrated consistently a wandering fantasy, flight from the mother, the mother as salient, and machismo as psychological variables. CRs were not characterized by any of these variables. As with both groups of moderates, the father of the CRs was psychologically salient, but unlike the moderates, CTs perceived their fathers as flawed. The possible dynamic meaning of these configurations is discussed, as are their possible relationship to radical behavior and radical political ideology.This study was supported by grants from the American Jewish Committee and The National Science Foundation (GS35307A).Director of Resident Education, McLean Hospital. M.D., Harvard Medical School; residency training at Boston Veteran's Administration Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital in psychiatry. Psychoanalytic training, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Major interest: depression.Director of Training for Psychology Interns. Ph.D., Brandeis, 1960; Master's degree, University of Illinois. Major interest: schizophrenia.Professor of Political Science, Smith College. Major interest: modern European history — applying psychoanalytic methods to historical and social problems like student activism.     

The mothers' international: The Women's Co-operative Guild and feminist pacifism

The Women's Co-operative Guild (now the Co-operative Women's Guild), founded in 1983 as an auxilliary of the English Consumer Co-operative Movement, became a strong feminist representative of married working-class women. Its ‘social’ feminism stressed women's maternal, domestic role, deriving from it a series of values seen as lacking in male-dominated public life. Politics was to be transformed by means of women's active involvement, including but extending past their acquisition and use of the vote. The ‘female’ values were nurturant and cooperative; internationally, they focussed on international organization and peace. The Consumer Co-operative Movement provided a reformist ideology supportive of women's activism and pacifism, but the Movement itself as an organization was increasingly hostile to the Guild's feminism both within and outside the Movement. Although relatively uninfluential, the Guild thus embodies a tradition of feminist pacifism that is active and increasingly influential today.     

From heterosexual feminist to political lesbian: The painful transition

This paper is about the inseparability of the personal from the political from feminist research. It's personal because it comes from my own experience and it's political because it concerns the exercise of power. It is also a piece of research because I would argue that the social production of contradictions involved in living as a feminist is no less available as research when these contradictions come from our own personal experience. In other words my personal relationship with a man is, for me, just as valid a piece of research as going out into the ‘field’ armed with a tape recorder and interview schedule might be—indeed, were we as feminist social scientists to concentrate our energies more on the personal, we might go some way towards bridging the gap between feminist theory and feminist practice.