|
" National discord: Language, sexuality and the politics of belonging in Israel "
Erez Levon
R. Blake
| Document Type
|
:
|
Latin Dissertation
|
| Language of Document
|
:
|
English
|
| Record Number
|
:
|
52354
|
| Doc. No
|
:
|
TL22308
|
| Call number
|
:
|
3310543
|
| Main Entry
|
:
|
Erez Levon
|
| Title & Author
|
:
|
National discord: Language, sexuality and the politics of belonging in Israel\ Erez Levon
|
| College
|
:
|
New York University
|
| Date
|
:
|
2008
|
| Degree
|
:
|
Ph.D.
|
| student score
|
:
|
2008
|
| Page No
|
:
|
302
|
| Abstract
|
:
|
Despite significant legal enfranchisements over the past 20 years, gays and lesbians in Israel remain largely marginalized and excluded from Israeli society. My dissertation explores how gay and lesbian Israelis understand and negotiate this exclusion, and maps out the ways in which they construct identities for themselves in practice that seek to overcome it. Based on a detailed ethnography of gender and sexuality, I trace the historical and ideological roots of a perceived incompatibility between gay or lesbian identity, on one hand, and the values that normatively define belonging in Israeli society, on the other. Reflecting the desire of early Zionist leaders to escape what they viewed as the physical and moral degeneration of Jews in Europe, these values are grounded in a powerful discourse of the traditional (Jewish) family and serve to link a heteronormative conceptualization of gender and gender-appropriate behavior to what it means to "be Israeli." Gays and lesbians exist outside of and in conflict with this discourse, and a crucial component of the construction and performance of a gay or lesbian subjectivity in Israel involves reconciling this sexual/national tension. The data is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, where I spent 12 months observing numerous gay and lesbian activist associations ranging across the Israeli political spectrum. Linguistic analyses, which focus on certain prosodic characteristics and are based on over 100 hours of recorded interviews (in Hebrew) with group members, expose significant differences in how members of the various groups conceive of and construct their sexual subjectivities through language. These differences, moreover, are shown to correspond to the groups' distinct positions within Israeli politics more generally. My results underscore the inextricability of sexuality from individuals' other national and cultural identifications. Analyses reveal a diversity of attitudes, beliefs and linguistic practices among Israeli gays and lesbians. This finding challenges the assumption that sexuality per se is an adequate or useful heuristic for linguistic, or other, research, and instead promotes a program of study that delves into the intricacies and contradictions inherent in all processes of sexual subject formation.
|
| Subject
|
:
|
Social sciences; Language, literature and linguistics; Belonging; Gay and lesbian; Israel; Language variation; Prosody; Sexuality; Sociolinguistics; Linguistics; Cultural anthropology; Gender; 0733:Gender; 0326:Cultural anthropology; 0290:Linguistics
|
| Added Entry
|
:
|
R. Blake
|
| Added Entry
|
:
|
New York University
|
| |