Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel

209 Pages·2010·2.261 MB·

by  Erez Levon (auth.)

Language and the Politics of Sexuality
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Language and the Politics
of Sexuality
Lesbians and Gays in Israel
Erez Levon
Queen Mary, University of London, UK
© Erez Levon 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-22796-5
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries
ISBN 978-1-349-30986-3 ISBN 978-0-230-28131-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230281318
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vi
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Translations and Transcriptions ix
1 Introduction 1
The social and the individual 10
Israel 19
Outline of the book 25
2 Israel, Zionism and Sexual Subjectivity 27
Citizenship in Israel: Rights and recognition 28
The politics of belonging in Israel 42
Conclusion 58
3 Language and Mechanisms of Identification 60
Perspectives on language and sexuality 61
Investigating disjunction 71
Conclusion 90
4 The Politics of Prosody 91
Ideologies of gender 94
Speaking sexuality 124
5 Discourses of Sexuality 130
The voice of others: Oxtchit and Israeli gay men 131
We vs. they: Gender morphology and Israeli lesbians 143
Conclusion 158
6 Conclusion 160
Getting “beyond identity”: Language and identifications 160
Language, sexuality and social justice in Israel 166
Notes 173
References 183
Index 196
v
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
4.1 Average mean pitch for Mainstream men 96
4.2 Average mean pitch for Mainstream women 102
4.3 Average mean pitch for Community Center men 107
4.4 Average mean pitch for Community Center women 109
4.5 Average mean pitch for Radical men 113
4.6 Average mean pitch for Radical women 117
Tables
3.1 Informant population (by activist grouping) 76
5.1 A lexicon of oxtchit 135
5.2 Gender morphology variation overall 147
5.3 Gender morphology variation by Word Type 148
5.4 Gender morphology variation by Gender Precedence 148
5.5 Gender morphology variation by Group Membership 148
5.6 Gender morphology variation by Referent 149
5.7 Gender morphology variation by Group and Referent 149
vi
Acknowledgments
The research for this book took shape over a number of years in a variety
of settings. And while I cannot thank each and every person who has
helped me along the way, I would like to single out certain organiza-
tions and individuals without whom the writing of this book would
have been impossible. My thanks, however, do not mean that they
are in any way responsible for any errors or shortcomings in the book,
which are, of course, my own.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my informants in Israel for
giving me privileged access to their lives. Each and every one of them
welcomed me into their worlds, spent months introducing me to their
friends, families and communities, and had the courage to talk to me
about some of the most personal aspects of who they were. Their kind-
ness demonstrates that nothing is ever as simple as it seems and that
behind all the newspaper headlines and political intrigues, there are
also real people who wake up every morning and have to figure out
how to live their lives against the backdrop of a conflict that has gone
on for much too long.
The dissertation that this book grew out of was supervised by Renée
Blake, Greg Guy and John Singler of the Linguistics Department at
New York University, as well as Don Kulick of the Department of
Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago,
and Rudi Gaudio of the Department of Anthropology at Purchase
College. I would like to thank each of them for their unending gen-
erosity and inspiration. Special thanks also to a number of colleagues
who have provided support and comments on this work at various
stages of its development over the years, including Laura Ahearn,
Allan Bell, Dave Britain, Jenny Cheshire, Nikolas Coupland, Jennifer
Davis, Penny Eckert, Kira Hall, Uri Horesh, Norma Mendoza-Denton,
Miriam Meyerhoff, Leigh Oakes, Joshua Raclaw, Devyani Sharma, Keith
Walters and Lal Zimman. I would also like to extend my gratitude to
Aeyal Gross, Elana Shohamy and Yuval Yonay for their time and assist-
ance during my fieldwork in Israel, as well as to Esther Benbassa for
guiding me through the world of Jewish historiography. I gratefully
acknowledge the support this project received from the Social Science
Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship
vii
viii Acknowledgments
(with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and the
Torch Fellowship Program at New York University.
To Priyanka Gibbons, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, and Melanie
Blair, her assistant, thanks for your support and encouragement in the
production of this book. To my friends, family and especially to Sylvain,
thanks for everything else. I could not have done it without you.
Note on Translations and
Transcriptions
All English translations of spoken or written texts in Hebrew are my
own. In translating excerpts of interviews from Hebrew to English, I
strive to maintain the character of the original Hebrew speech. As such,
Hebrew idiomatic phrases and slang expression are replaced by English
equivalents, unless specifically noted.
To make the text as readable and accessible as possible, I do not employ
standard phonetic transcriptions. Instead, Hebrew words are transcribed
following a reduced version of the transcription conventions developed
by the Israeli Academy of the Hebrew Language. Transcriptions reflect
a simplification of standard pronunciations of casually spoken Hebrew,
where certain Hebrew phonemic contrasts are not reflected in their
Romanized transcription.
For all Hebrew phonemes that have a direct correlate in standard, written
English, normal English spelling is used. For those Hebrew phonemes
that have no correlate in English, the following conventions are used:
IPA [ ] Not transcribed
IPA [ ] or [x] h (word-initially), ch (otherwise)
IPA [x] h (word-initially), ch (otherwise)
IPA [ ] or [ ] Not transcribed
IPA [q] or [k] k
IPA [ ] r
There is one lexical exception, and that is for the Hebrew word
[IPA: oxta], which I transcribe as oxtcha. Transcriptions of all Hebrew
words appear in italics. English translations of Hebrew words appear
enclosed in single quotation marks and are proceeded by the annota-
tion “Heb.”
ix