Orly Benjamin | Bar-Ilan University (original) (raw)
Papers by Orly Benjamin
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society
Feminists’ scholarship and critique of gender climate injustice have exposed just how scarce the ... more Feminists’ scholarship and critique of gender climate injustice have exposed just how scarce the practical efforts to correct it are. The challenge of generating incentives designed to encourage urban planning that accounts for expected intersectional vulnerabilities during climate disasters reflects a gap in knowledge: how does professionals’ awareness of intensified vulnerabilities inform climate adaptation plans (CAPs)? We propose an intersectional critical feminist perspective evaluating recognition, dialog, and budgeting that decodes the social process by which professionals’ knowledge of intersectional vulnerabilities is lost before informing CAPs. Based on an empirical investigation of the increasing gender awareness among administrators who accumulate knowledge about women’s vulnerabilities, our analysis contributes an explanation of the marginalization of gender mainstreaming toolkits in urban CAPs. We show that even in municipalities characterized by increasing levels of r...
GENDER – Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft, Jun 19, 2013
Human Organization, Sep 1, 2010
Journal of Business Ethics, May 25, 2014
Community, Work & Family, Jan 4, 2018
Womens Studies International Forum, Nov 1, 2002
Sexualities, Oct 1, 2010
Previous studies on women’s experiences with sexually explicit material used by their long-term p... more Previous studies on women’s experiences with sexually explicit material used by their long-term partners indicate that women’s responses were complex. Neutrality and acceptance were the dominant responses even though some women continued to report negative emotions and experiences. This complexity has not yet been explored from the perspective of maintaining intimacy and the meanings of togetherness. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with 20 Israeli Jewish women, we identified a process in women who expect to have passionate and sexually active relationships. Apparently, embracing pornography and using it as a guiding resource for developing couples’ sexuality is characteristic of women for whom togetherness implies the need to nurture mutual passion. We also examine how pornographic images of intimacy in heterosexual relationships can lead to the development of alienated and hierarchical sexuality in the lives of married women who feel entitled to fulfill their sexuality.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, Jun 29, 2021
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, Jun 4, 2007
ABSTRACT We live in a time of powerful forces that operate to isolate us—to disconnect us from ea... more ABSTRACT We live in a time of powerful forces that operate to isolate us—to disconnect us from each other, from women who struggled against injustice and oppression in the past and those who are still engaged in the very same struggles. Powerful disputations disconnect us from feminist women who are resisting power structures around us, and from women who took part in feminist endeavors over the years. Our separate struggles for success in careers, intimate relationships and inner growth, and for our own economic survival, often expose us to individualist ideologies and practices that help us forget the enormous amount of human effort invested in our current understanding of women's lives. Hannah Safran's book, Don't Wanna Be Nice Girls: The Struggle for Suffrage and the New Feminism in Israel, is an attempt to challenge these forces and connect us to significant feminist projects that took place in Israel—projects that we didn't know of, or knew of but have forgotten. This sense of connection to Israeli feminists in the 1920s and 1970s generates an exciting journey of encounter with their courage and persistence, but at the same time a terribly sad one. Safran's account of the complex feminist struggle to enhance the legitimacy of the movement and its cause in the wider society is both optimistic and pessimistic: Wonderful women devoted the best of their resources to improving Israeli society, yet so very little was achieved. In many ways, things are now worse. Even more devastating is the issue of relationships among feminist women, which are portrayed in this historical account as vicious Women in Israel, who shared the goal of improving women's lives, had great difficulties cooperating with each other. Each felt that the other threatened her and the women's movement as a whole. Safran, who touches delicately on these internal conflicts in an effort not to rekindle them, connects us, too, with this basic difficulty in Israeli women's activism. We have beautiful ideas of a nurturing femininity, of self in relation and care for others, but the women around us often and terribly easily become those against whom we fight. Current theoretical discussions of globalization, gender and the women's movement ask important questions about the way feminist ideas have traveled around the world and the processes by which the ideas of the international women's movement have been localized. For example, Susan Stanford Friedman writes: The notion that a given social order privileges the masculine does not, I believe, have a single origin. Nor does the advocacy of gender equity. Rather, these constitutive components of locational feminism have emerged differently in particular times and places and have travelled from one culture to another, producing hybridic cultural formations of indigenous feminism influenced by other travelling forms of feminism. Friedman's argument is important, because it allows for multiple directions of development and for recognition of various sources and forces that may have contributed to the process of localization. Safran, however, appears to promote a different line of argument. Throughout the book, she attempts to convince readers that the roots of Israeli feminism are American. To be sure, she mentions the east European background of many feminist leaders in the 1920sand describes European developments from which they drew support, particularly in the Zionist movement. Nevertheless, she systematically returns to underscore the American connections of feminists in Eretz Israel and the State of Israel, both in the 1920s and in the 1970s. This line of argument traps itself into generating an implicit hierarchy between those feminists whose biographies fit into the "American connection" and those who do not, who are somewhat excluded. Furthermore, Safran's historical account focuses on three feminist groups in Israel's three largest cities who, by naming themselves feminists, differentiated themselves from other, more traditional forms of feminist activism. As a result, women who actively promoted women's issues elsewhere, in different groups or by different means, are hardly mentioned. In the last chapter, Safran goes back to list many of these exclusions and justify them, but these justifications do not undermine the power of the exclusion. The connection thus generated with the more American-influenced feminists, framed...
Violence Against Women, Jul 16, 2020
Community, Work & Family, Aug 1, 2001
Abstract The view that physical education (PE) positively affects students’ perception of their o... more Abstract The view that physical education (PE) positively affects students’ perception of their own body efficacy and self-esteem is not often seen as related to issues of gender equality. Nevertheless, PE classes leave many girls with a negative physical experience, of weakness, clumsiness and heaviness. Although the ways in which the beauty myth undermines girls’ self-esteem and body image are quite known, until recently researchers in the field of PE have not focused on the possibility that PE teachers also play a role in disciplining girls’ bodies and subjectivities. Consequently, studies in this area tend to marginalize the covert exclusionary mechanism potentially exerted on girls who find their bodies unsuitable for PE. This study is the first to examine PE in Israel from a gender perspective. Some PE teachers in Israel are already aware to a certain extent of their educational role in legitimizing diversity in girls’ body shapes. How then do PE teachers negotiate this awareness with regard to the dominant discourses related to girls’ bodies? To explore this question, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 PE teachers. The analysis revealed two key features of PE teachers’ talk about girls’ bodies: acceptance of body shape diversity, and awareness of girls’ issues about their bodies. Our findings suggest that these progressive aspects of teachers’ perspectives on girls’ bodies are negotiated against older forms of girls’ body disciplining.
This chapter introduces the voice of the administrators and reveals the rhetoric of dialogue and ... more This chapter introduces the voice of the administrators and reveals the rhetoric of dialogue and consensus they use, contrasting it with the voice of OS admins and their point of view on the process. The erasure of occupational voices emerged as a mechanism to effectively reproduce low-quality jobs and intensify job insecurity for those in the caring and service occupations. In addition to avoiding actual control over service deliverers’ employment practices, and on top of standardized tables that flatten rewards and trim job sizes, budgeting ceilings also contributed to the deterioration in job quality. It emerged that budgeting administrators are more interested in generating services on the level of lip service; namely, taking pride in having an operating service, rather than actually taking an interest in the interpersonal processes in these services.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, Nov 26, 2020
International Sociology, Dec 8, 2017
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society
Feminists’ scholarship and critique of gender climate injustice have exposed just how scarce the ... more Feminists’ scholarship and critique of gender climate injustice have exposed just how scarce the practical efforts to correct it are. The challenge of generating incentives designed to encourage urban planning that accounts for expected intersectional vulnerabilities during climate disasters reflects a gap in knowledge: how does professionals’ awareness of intensified vulnerabilities inform climate adaptation plans (CAPs)? We propose an intersectional critical feminist perspective evaluating recognition, dialog, and budgeting that decodes the social process by which professionals’ knowledge of intersectional vulnerabilities is lost before informing CAPs. Based on an empirical investigation of the increasing gender awareness among administrators who accumulate knowledge about women’s vulnerabilities, our analysis contributes an explanation of the marginalization of gender mainstreaming toolkits in urban CAPs. We show that even in municipalities characterized by increasing levels of r...
GENDER – Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft, Jun 19, 2013
Human Organization, Sep 1, 2010
Journal of Business Ethics, May 25, 2014
Community, Work & Family, Jan 4, 2018
Womens Studies International Forum, Nov 1, 2002
Sexualities, Oct 1, 2010
Previous studies on women’s experiences with sexually explicit material used by their long-term p... more Previous studies on women’s experiences with sexually explicit material used by their long-term partners indicate that women’s responses were complex. Neutrality and acceptance were the dominant responses even though some women continued to report negative emotions and experiences. This complexity has not yet been explored from the perspective of maintaining intimacy and the meanings of togetherness. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with 20 Israeli Jewish women, we identified a process in women who expect to have passionate and sexually active relationships. Apparently, embracing pornography and using it as a guiding resource for developing couples’ sexuality is characteristic of women for whom togetherness implies the need to nurture mutual passion. We also examine how pornographic images of intimacy in heterosexual relationships can lead to the development of alienated and hierarchical sexuality in the lives of married women who feel entitled to fulfill their sexuality.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, Jun 29, 2021
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, Jun 4, 2007
ABSTRACT We live in a time of powerful forces that operate to isolate us—to disconnect us from ea... more ABSTRACT We live in a time of powerful forces that operate to isolate us—to disconnect us from each other, from women who struggled against injustice and oppression in the past and those who are still engaged in the very same struggles. Powerful disputations disconnect us from feminist women who are resisting power structures around us, and from women who took part in feminist endeavors over the years. Our separate struggles for success in careers, intimate relationships and inner growth, and for our own economic survival, often expose us to individualist ideologies and practices that help us forget the enormous amount of human effort invested in our current understanding of women's lives. Hannah Safran's book, Don't Wanna Be Nice Girls: The Struggle for Suffrage and the New Feminism in Israel, is an attempt to challenge these forces and connect us to significant feminist projects that took place in Israel—projects that we didn't know of, or knew of but have forgotten. This sense of connection to Israeli feminists in the 1920s and 1970s generates an exciting journey of encounter with their courage and persistence, but at the same time a terribly sad one. Safran's account of the complex feminist struggle to enhance the legitimacy of the movement and its cause in the wider society is both optimistic and pessimistic: Wonderful women devoted the best of their resources to improving Israeli society, yet so very little was achieved. In many ways, things are now worse. Even more devastating is the issue of relationships among feminist women, which are portrayed in this historical account as vicious Women in Israel, who shared the goal of improving women's lives, had great difficulties cooperating with each other. Each felt that the other threatened her and the women's movement as a whole. Safran, who touches delicately on these internal conflicts in an effort not to rekindle them, connects us, too, with this basic difficulty in Israeli women's activism. We have beautiful ideas of a nurturing femininity, of self in relation and care for others, but the women around us often and terribly easily become those against whom we fight. Current theoretical discussions of globalization, gender and the women's movement ask important questions about the way feminist ideas have traveled around the world and the processes by which the ideas of the international women's movement have been localized. For example, Susan Stanford Friedman writes: The notion that a given social order privileges the masculine does not, I believe, have a single origin. Nor does the advocacy of gender equity. Rather, these constitutive components of locational feminism have emerged differently in particular times and places and have travelled from one culture to another, producing hybridic cultural formations of indigenous feminism influenced by other travelling forms of feminism. Friedman's argument is important, because it allows for multiple directions of development and for recognition of various sources and forces that may have contributed to the process of localization. Safran, however, appears to promote a different line of argument. Throughout the book, she attempts to convince readers that the roots of Israeli feminism are American. To be sure, she mentions the east European background of many feminist leaders in the 1920sand describes European developments from which they drew support, particularly in the Zionist movement. Nevertheless, she systematically returns to underscore the American connections of feminists in Eretz Israel and the State of Israel, both in the 1920s and in the 1970s. This line of argument traps itself into generating an implicit hierarchy between those feminists whose biographies fit into the "American connection" and those who do not, who are somewhat excluded. Furthermore, Safran's historical account focuses on three feminist groups in Israel's three largest cities who, by naming themselves feminists, differentiated themselves from other, more traditional forms of feminist activism. As a result, women who actively promoted women's issues elsewhere, in different groups or by different means, are hardly mentioned. In the last chapter, Safran goes back to list many of these exclusions and justify them, but these justifications do not undermine the power of the exclusion. The connection thus generated with the more American-influenced feminists, framed...
Violence Against Women, Jul 16, 2020
Community, Work & Family, Aug 1, 2001
Abstract The view that physical education (PE) positively affects students’ perception of their o... more Abstract The view that physical education (PE) positively affects students’ perception of their own body efficacy and self-esteem is not often seen as related to issues of gender equality. Nevertheless, PE classes leave many girls with a negative physical experience, of weakness, clumsiness and heaviness. Although the ways in which the beauty myth undermines girls’ self-esteem and body image are quite known, until recently researchers in the field of PE have not focused on the possibility that PE teachers also play a role in disciplining girls’ bodies and subjectivities. Consequently, studies in this area tend to marginalize the covert exclusionary mechanism potentially exerted on girls who find their bodies unsuitable for PE. This study is the first to examine PE in Israel from a gender perspective. Some PE teachers in Israel are already aware to a certain extent of their educational role in legitimizing diversity in girls’ body shapes. How then do PE teachers negotiate this awareness with regard to the dominant discourses related to girls’ bodies? To explore this question, we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 PE teachers. The analysis revealed two key features of PE teachers’ talk about girls’ bodies: acceptance of body shape diversity, and awareness of girls’ issues about their bodies. Our findings suggest that these progressive aspects of teachers’ perspectives on girls’ bodies are negotiated against older forms of girls’ body disciplining.
This chapter introduces the voice of the administrators and reveals the rhetoric of dialogue and ... more This chapter introduces the voice of the administrators and reveals the rhetoric of dialogue and consensus they use, contrasting it with the voice of OS admins and their point of view on the process. The erasure of occupational voices emerged as a mechanism to effectively reproduce low-quality jobs and intensify job insecurity for those in the caring and service occupations. In addition to avoiding actual control over service deliverers’ employment practices, and on top of standardized tables that flatten rewards and trim job sizes, budgeting ceilings also contributed to the deterioration in job quality. It emerged that budgeting administrators are more interested in generating services on the level of lip service; namely, taking pride in having an operating service, rather than actually taking an interest in the interpersonal processes in these services.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, Nov 26, 2020
International Sociology, Dec 8, 2017
Feminism Family and Identity: Women's Marital Name demonstrates an analysis of the micro-macro as... more Feminism Family and Identity: Women's Marital Name demonstrates an analysis of the micro-macro aspects of women's choices concerning feminist practices. Drawing on interviews with more than forty women it introduces the notion of 'ambivalent belonging' as a reflexive form of femininity emerging from the application of feminist frameworks. These include, Sara Mills' 'community of practice'; Bronwyn Davies' 'positioning' and Michelle Lazar 'ambivalence' in feminist discourse analysis.
Here's what others have said of the book:
“Using feminist theory and first-hand sociological research, Rom and Benjamin have produced a fascinating insight into a rarely studied but widespread sociocultural practice. They investigate when and why women do and do not change their names on marriage and come up with data on identity, family, and ethnicity that will surprise and inform you. You’ll look at your society’s wedding announcements with new eyes.” --Judith Lorber, Professor Emerita, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and author of Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Feminist Change and Paradoxes of Gender
“As Rom and Benjamin remind us, because most countries’ family naming practices diminish women’s identity, the international feminist movement fought hard and succeeded legally to give women more naming choices upon marriage. Strangely, however, women have not embraced this freedom. In this tightly argued and intriguing study of married women’s name choices in Israel, these creative scholars explain why pre-feminist practices persist and what impact conservative name choice has on gendered power relations in society.” –Shulamit Reinharz, Jacob S. Potofsky Professor of Sociology, Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Director of the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University
“This is a book providing readers with much knowledge about naming practices in society and their roles in defining self, identity, biography, and history. More importantly, it is a book about the power of naming and how conflicts about names among women and men have much to do with processes of subjugation as well as of liberation. With a point of departure in what the authors call “the cultural loading of the name,” the book provides a multifaceted account of how women and men use different strategies in struggling to define themselves and their identities in contemporary Israeli society.” --Irene Levin, Professor, Oslo University College, Norway
מחקר זה בחן כיצד מעוצבים החוזים בין גופי המגזר הציבורי וספקי השירותים בתחומי הבריאות, החינוך והרו... more מחקר זה בחן כיצד מעוצבים החוזים בין גופי המגזר הציבורי וספקי השירותים בתחומי הבריאות, החינוך והרווחה וכיצד מעוצבים בתוך כך תנאי העסקה של העובדים זאת גם במטרה להבהיר מה עולה בגורלם של תנאי ההעסקה הנקבעים בחוזה, לאורך תקופת קיום החוזה ובאיזו מידה מופעלים מנגנוני פיקוח על התנאים שנקבעו בהם. ההתמודדות עם סוגיות אלו מאירה את מאבק הכוח המתקיים בתוך משרדי הממשלה בין אלו המחזיקים בידע מקצועי ומחויבים להעלאת איכות השירותים ורמתם המקצועית לבין קני מידה המתבססים על מחויבות ניהולית והפחתת עלויות. לצורך איסוף ידע המחקר התבסס על גישת האתנוגרפיה המוסדית המכוונת למיפוי הדרגתי של למידה מבעלי תפקידים באופן המאיר את התהליכים המתנהלים במרחב המוסדי תוך ניסיון להבין כיצד עובר המידע בין שלבים שונים של ההליך.
