Editorial
Delila Amir - Guest Editor
Articles
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 ”artifcial“. Te female body thus objectifed is exposed to a discourse which generates control and discipline mechanisms. In this context body images described by women have a great importance. Tis research is based on interviews with Israeli women undergoing IVF. Te fndings 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.
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.
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.
על: אינטימיות קרה: עלייתו של הקפיטליזם הרגשי / מאת אווה אילוז
יהודה שנהב
עמודים: 241-244
על: דורות, מרחבים, זהויות: מבטים עכשוויים על חברה ותרבות בישראל / בעריכת חנה הרצוג, טל כוכבי ושמשון צלניקר
ורד ויניצקי-סרוסי
עמודים: 245-247
על: עובדים וזרים / מאת אדריאנה קמפ ורבקה רייכמן
שרה הלמן
עמודים: 248-250
על: קשת של דעות: סדר יום מזרחי לחברה בישראל / בעריכת יוסי יונה, יונית נעמן ודוד מחלב
סמדר שרון
עמודים: 251-254
על: לאחותי, פוליטיקה פמיניסטית מזרחית / בעריכת שלומית ליר
דלית באום
עמודים: 255-257
על: פערי אזרחות: הגירה, פריון וזהות בישראל / בעריכת יוסי יונה ואדריאנה קמפ
סלביה פוגל-ביזאוי
עמודים: 258-261
על: Welfare to Work: Conditional Rights in Social Policy / by Amir Paz-Fuchs
אברהם דורון
עמודים: 262-264
על: הורות במשפט: מאחורי הקלעים של עיצוב הסדרי משמורת וראייה בגירושים / מאת דפנה הקר
רות כץ
עמודים: 265-266
על: קולות הקוראים: מעשה הקריאה בסביבת התקשורת הרב ערוצית / מאת חנה אדוני והלל נוסק
יעל דר
עמודים: 267-270
על: הו, איזו מלחמה מענגת! אוהדי כדורגל ישראלים / מאת אמיר בן-פורת
ליאור גלרנטר
עמודים: 271-273
על: אור וים הקיפוה / מאת ענת הלמן
תמר ברגר
עמודים: 274-276
על: נשים בשוליים: מגדר ולאומיות בתל אביב המנדטורית / מאת דבורה ברנשטיין
תמי רזי
עמודים: 277-279
