on to the women on her other side. “It’s a joke. …” I could see the nods from the corner of my eye.1
This book tells the story of economic empowerment projects for low-income women in Israel and dwells on the manifold paradoxes that they engender. I portray the institutional context, called “social economy,” in which such projects are operated, and describe how the women at the receiving end accommodate the new expectation that they should become economically independent with existing cultural scripts of feminine propriety. As the opening anecdote conveys, the projects are saturated with a New Age lingo of love and money, itself the upshot of emotional capitalism, which collapses together work, care, entitlement, and the very notion of self, in an ever-expanding imaginary shopping mall where “everything,” from moral value to utility value to personhood, is marketable.
On a broader level, this is a book about neoliberalism and its localization in a particular cultural context. The Israeli social economy field features collaborations between business tycoons, social services professionals, state functionaries, grassroots activists, and women from disempowered backgrounds, who together create a discourse full of contradictions. On the one hand, economic empowerment projects are replete with talk about individual self-sufficiency and open opportunities; they urge low-income women to abandon the positon of needy, passive recipients of public support and see themselves, instead, as agents of change and the key to their own failure or success. On the other hand, many actors in the field are long-time social-change activists who are deeply committed to feminism and minority rights. Hence, involvement in social economy projects typically entails a complex and somewhat inner contradictory process of gender and ethnic consciousness-raising alongside a depoliticizing approach to economic disadvantage. As noted, this odd-mixture of ideas and perspectives is typically packaged in a hyperemotional language of love, care, and self-fulfillment; it is also inadvertently entrapped in the neoliberal belief that the market is an obvious regulator of morality and identity. All this makes social economy a distinct arena of neoliberal cultural production. In exploring it, I dwell on the fallacies—the fact that most of the women do not become less poor as a result of their enrollment in the projects or that the flow of capital into the field does nothing to mitigate the polarized structure of social inequalities—as well as the unintended consequences—the subtle but meaningful benefits that the women draw from the projects, or the infiltration of a language of universal care and solidarity into the core of a capitalist-patriarchal-nationalist order.
I use two main analytical concepts: economic citizenship and gender contracts. The first connotes the idea that civil entitlement should be somehow conditioned on individual economic productivity. The second represents a generic cultural script regarding the appropriate balance between care and cash work in normative femininity and masculinity. These are two generic cultural schemas that bind together morality, belonging, gender, and economic productivity. Arguably, they are too crude for a satisfactory grounded analysis, as their practical implications differ vastly across and even within cultural settings. At the same time, their analytical value lies precisely in their generality. The ethnography looks at the local adaptations of these general schemas. I explore how they travel globally and how they adapt to specific subsettings within a single political entity: How does the idea of measuring civil entitlement by individual economic productivity make sense in a locale dominated by collective, ethno-national sentiments? And what specific tokens does it assume for Jews and for Palestinians? How does the preoccupation with the economic productivity of women, and minority women at that, fit in with a cultural atmosphere of enduring racist and patriarchal attitudes? And how does the idea that normative women should work for cash and even become economically independent adapt across social classes, national collectivities, and gender regimes?
Thematic Concerns
Community Economic Development
For several decades now, but mainly in the past twenty-odd years, approaches to reduce poverty in postindustrial countries have come strongly to focus on local communities. At the background are several historical processes: social movements, such as the civil rights and the feminist movements that fostered community-based agency already in the 1960s and 1970s; global processes of economic restructuring, which generated substantial pressures to reduce government bureaucracies and privatize welfare; and neoliberal beliefs in the market’s capacity to self-regulate and achieve optimal results in all spheres of human activity, including the handling of poverty and social inequalities. The incorporation of these processes into contemporary schemes of community economic development (CED) has meant, among other things, moderating the old socialist conviction that capitalist profit accumulation is the prime generator of class inequalities and social injustice. Gradually, the view that the main engine of economic growth is not labor and direct production but profits made in the business and financial sectors has become common wisdom beyond the circles of hard-core capitalists. Growing numbers of actors in progressive grassroots and academic circles have shifted their efforts from struggles to limit and regulate such profits by supporting strong state interventions and unionized work to becoming partners in programs to channel them directly from corporations “back to the community.” Usually the streaming of funds has also entailed inculcation of the ethos of profit making, thus opening the door wide to the involvement of corporations in poverty reduction schemes, not just as financial benefactors but as ethical and cultural leaders.
As mentioned, and as will be shown ethnographically in Chapter 1, the cross-sectorial collaborations of businesses, government, and civil society organizations, which occur as part of CED schemes, have complex social effects. They tend to tame and some say coopt radical worldviews, but encounters on the ground yield refreshing interchanges among actors from very different social locations. These encounters facilitate the mainstreaming of critical and feminist outlooks, and legitimize minority claims for inclusion, by reframing arguments for women’s and minorities’ rights as “diversity” rather than as political radicalism. But at the same time they propagate neoliberal tenets, primarily that individual self-fulfillment is the key to social and economic success, into grassroots milieus that have traditionally focused on structural violence and political oppression.
These general characteristics of community economic development are to be found in the Israeli social economy as well, albeit with specific implications that are discussed at length in Chapter 1. Three themes in particular inform the ideological bridging in Israeli social economy: the national division between the dominant Jewish majority and the subordinate Palestinian minority, the intra-Jewish cleavage between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, and the contradictory singling out of women as problem subjects and agents of change. Economic empowerment initiatives throughout the country, with their mission of reaching out to groups on the margins, operate precisely where the tensions surrounding ethnicity, nationality, and gender are the greatest: at their intersection with the lower-class and social periphery. These projects bring together, in pragmatic day-to-day operations, lower-class women from any number of subgroups: old-time Mizrahim, more recent Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Ethiopia, Palestinian-Israelis of various religions and lifestyles, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish women. They likewise assemble social activists from these different groups together with professionals, scholars, state officials, and donors.
In more than one respect, the encounters created in the field are very untraditional, and therefore challenge their participants to address issues that are difficult to talk about. The long-lasting discrimination against Mizrahim, which official discourses tend to downplay by treating it as a thing of the past, or the subordination of the Palestinian citizens, which Jewish Israelis generally prefer to overlook in the name of national security, are made acutely present in the projects. To accommodate these and related tensions, a certain semantic labor attempts to depoliticize them without denying them. Notable expressions here, which I analyze in some detail, are the familiar Israeli trope of “the social,” which indicates that a certain topic is not political and therefore presumably less explosive than it may appear;
