Economic Citizenship. Amalia Sa’ar

Not diminishing the importance of collective affiliation, this idea nevertheless expands and reorients the definition of worthy citizens to include subjects who have been outside the traditional consensus. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the complex implications of this most recent addition to the discourses of Israeli citizenship, with particular attention to their effects on women at the outer edges of a polarizing political economy. Emphatically, the focus on economic citizenship that emerges in the field is pragmatic before it is ideological. It evolves through practice, although eventually it does acquire a moral wrap as well. Accordingly, the discussion of economic citizenship in Chapter 5 draws on the four preceding ethnographic chapters that provide the situated context of its evolution: Chapter 1 on the field of social economy, and chapters 2 through 4 on the women who enroll in the projects. The vulnerabilities and the agency of these women, and of those who seek to empower them, provide a lens to view the pragmatic significance of economic citizenship.

      Intersectionality

      Throughout this study I am guided by the perspective of intersectionality. By now widely accepted among feminist scholars (e.g., McCall 2005; Yuval-Davis 2006; Davis 2008; Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012), this perspective refers to the intersections of gender and other mechanisms of distinction and domination, primarily class, ethnicity, race, and heteronormativity. This theoretical approach to the study of inequalities sees patriarchy as a power structure in dynamic interaction with other power structures, which are historically and culturally contingent. Like many components of feminist scholarship, the contemporary focus on intersections begins in feminist political practice, which is grounded in the real-life experiences and the struggles for justice of minority women. As the black lesbian activists of the Combahee River Collective put it in their famous 1979 statement, “The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (Combahee River Collective 1983, 272).

Also in the background of intersectionality is a long-standing debate between Marxist and radical feminists on the order of analytical priority between patriarchy and capitalism: is gender akin to class? Do men as a group dominate women as a group? Are wives and husbands distinct classes? Is the domestic mode of production analytically and substantially distinct from the capitalist mode of production? How should we conceptualize the relation of capitalism to patriarchy—are they two autonomous, if interconnected systems? Are they entirely fused? Or are they initially distinct? And what is the role of the state in the perpetuation of women’s subjugation? Is the state capitalist and patriarchal? Or is it only the former?² The introduction of intersectionality, which was suggested in the late 1980s (e.g., Crenshaw 1989) and which became increasingly popular in the following decade or two, marked a development in this discourse. It complicated the gender/class debate by highlighting much more the component of race (later also ethnicity and sexuality), thus pushing it beyond the either/or binary. It also challenged scholars writing about the multiple oppressions of minority women to move beyond a simple additive approach (see Yuval-Davis 2006). To refer to gender, class, ethnicity, race, and sexuality as intersecting means not only that women are oppressed three or four times more harshly if they are also of minority background, lower class, or lesbians: it means also that as social analysts we are challenged to tease out the effects of the interaction among various mechanisms of exclusion and domination. While poor Palestinian Israeli women are most likely vulnerable in many more ways than middle-class, educated, Jewish-Ashkenazi Israeli women, the effects of the multiple intersections are ultimately qualitative, not quantitative. Sometimes they may actually imply a complex of disadvantages and prerogatives.

      A third inspiration of intersectionailty, which is directly connected to the first mentioned above (the experiences and struggles of minority women), is the politics of identity. The calls from the margins of the feminist movement, which eventually reached the center and changed the way we now look at gender in academia too, were fueled by a quest for inclusion of women who had been active in all the major social-change projects, but felt that their own pressing concerns continued to be overlooked even within these radical settings. In the United States these, among others, were the civil rights, the Black Panther, and the feminist movements; in Israel the struggles for Mizrahi and the Palestinian rights, and again the feminist movement. These women therefore wished to find and articulate their unique voices and make them the central energetic source of their activism. To cite the statement of the Combahee River Collective again, “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics comes directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1983, 275). Identity politics has changed and evolved since the1980s. In some important respects it has come under attack, at least by younger members of the feminist movement who are preoccupied with the right to individual self-expression and resent being “locked in a box” as it were, even in the cause of naming hidden oppressions (Sa’ar and Gooldin 2009). But the focus on the intersections of multiple oppressions still remains highly relevant to feminist analysis.

      The heterogeneity of the women who participate in the Israeli social economy projects is a distinct characteristic of this field. Chapter 2 presents an elaborate description of women’s vulnerabilities, which shows up their diverse backgrounds. I dedicate specific sections to the situation of Palestinian, ultra-Orthodox, and new immigrant women, and of single mothers. These titles, of course, do not exhaust all the relevant social locations, and in fact more locations—Mizrahi Jews, Bedouins, Christians, non-Jewish new immigrants, or middle-aged women—are introduced through the ethnographic examples and the discussion of welfare and workforce conditions. The interactions of ethnicity, national affiliation, class, or family status evince significant distinctions among these subgroups, in access to state subsidies, in chances of upward mobility, in internalized sense of belonging or disregard, or in fact in whether women who are objectively poor actually feel poor. They also show how the polarizing effects of economic liberalization and the restructuring of the job market are ultimately correlated with majority/minority status, and how female gender works to the disadvantage of the latter.

      Before closing the theme of complex inequalities I note two social identities that are not included in this book. One is sexuality. During fieldwork I encountered participants with lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise queer identities, but the topic did not arise as “an issue” in local discourse; after some deliberation I too decided not to pursue it, because of the complexity of the analysis already. The second topic is noncitizen status. As I explain at some length in Chapter 1, the presence of migrant workers, refugees, and commuters from the Palestine Authority is an important catalyst in the progressive polarization of the Israeli workforce, with direct implications for women in peripheral groups. My decision not to include these people in the analysis stems from their not being the regular target groups of local social economy projects, with minor exceptions.

      Empowerment as Enchantment

      Of the various terms that circulate in the Israeli field of social economy, as in CED more generally, empowerment is probably the most emblematic of the type of cultural production that occurs in it—hybrid, and at once co-opting radical ideas and opening spaces for them within the mainstream. As I show ethnographically in Chapter 3, empowerment, which is used concurrently in social economy and in several interfacing fields, operates as a lingua franca that facilitates communication across seemingly incompatible ideological settings. Used simultaneously in radical, liberal, and conservative circles, empowerment seems to mean different or even contradictory things, a quality that makes it liable to strategic interpretations by actors aiming to make the most of their opportunities and resources.

      Much has been written about the failure of empowerment