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 schemes to achieve tangible economic results for women in poverty; much has also been written about the irony of channeling development funds to educate women instead of improving infrastructure, or about the cynical upshot of using “empowerment” to attach poor women to multinational financial corporations. The present ethnography lends support to this criticism but also complicates it. Careful analysis of the ways women respond to and appropriate the empowerment language that they encounter in the workshops rules out any one-dimensional conclusion. It shows instead that despite the very partial economic results that the projects yield—often no significant ones at all, women express high levels of satisfaction with their participation. The workshops, it appears, give them some valuable cultural capital and opportunities for self-growth, intellectual engagement, social networking, and leisure activity. In particular, they provide a protected setting in which to experiment with cultural performances of self, which have become hugely popular, but also increasingly pertinent for a variety of workforce environments.
Participants appear very comfortable with the emotional discourse offered in the empowerment workshops. Inspired by the style of the group-discussion moderators, who encourage reflexivity and emotional self-exploration, they incline heavily to a vocabulary of love, care, and giving when talking about their work experiences and aspirations. At the same time, many—particularly among the Jewish participants—tend to avoid talking about the practicalities of earning money or about discordances related to work. In Chapter 4, in attempting to analyze this disproportionate emphasis on the affectionate aspects of work and a certain disregard for its practical and aggressive aspects, I integrate two lines of scholarly literature: feminist writings about the gender contract—the cultural expectation that women should prioritize unpaid care work without withdrawing from the waged workforce altogether, and the anthropology and sociology of emotions. The analysis, not surprisingly perhaps, allows potentially conflicting interpretations. In some important respects the women’s discourse sounds self-defeating: the overt goal of the workshops is to help them increase their income; their culture accords general importance to their labor force participation, even as secondary breadwinners; and they themselves are eager to be gainfully employed. So in a sense, their inclination to talk about their work as a form of emotional altruism implicitly above material calculations reinforces the prevalent argument that empowerment schemes deceive women into believing that if only they learned to talk and walk middle class—like wives who are supported and therefore work primarily for fun, not as an economic imperative—they would actually become middle class. However, from a careful reading of the women’s discourse during the workshops I also suggest that their enthusiastic immersion in emotional talk has an intrinsic value that cannot be dismissed merely because it is uncritical or nonpractical. The discourse, I argue, gives the workshop participants a ready opportunity to practice a popular cultural style that is symbolically beyond their reach. It also charges them with affective energy and a sense of togetherness, offering some relief from their tiresome and mostly lonely daily struggles.
Numerous scholars to date have addressed the spectacular expansion of the psychotherapeutic domain since the middle of the twentieth century, and its infiltration into practically every aspect of social and cultural life. Philip Rieff (1966), already in the 1960s, linked it to the demise of the tyranny of the primary group. He commented that as people became increasingly crowded together in cities they learned to live more distantly from one another by maintaining strategically varied and numerous contacts. This move away from the cloying warmth of family and a small, face-to-face community meant a gradual reversal of the orientation of the self. Whereas in the former way of life the self was directed outward to communal purposes in which alone it could be realized and satisfied, it now had to redirect inward, yet without becoming lost in anomy. Psychotherapy offered just the right language and institutional setting for this.
Nikolas Rose (1990), in his exploration of the formation of modern governmentality, pointed out the role of the psychological sciences in producing knowledge about human subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and in shaping the self as a private entity, which is perpetually engaged in self-regulation. Similarly, Philip Cushman (1995) in his cultural history of psychotherapy in the United States traced the manifold ways in which the ideology of self-contained individualism or the valuing of inner feelings operate as technologies of self. Despite its explicit claim to objectivity, he argued, psychotherapy was inevitably involved in the exercise of power and in reproducing the existing social order.
Arlie R. Hochschild (1983) looked at the commodification of emotions in the workforce, as job descriptions require employees to exercise emotions in selective and highly controlled ways; she likewise looked at the commercialization of intimate lives, for example, in the self-help book industry, and the recasting of therapeutic language in a spirit of instrumental consumption (Hochschild 2003). Following Hochschild’s groundbreaking work, a substantial body of studies now documents the growing demands on employees’ emotional labor across a whole range of service professions: preparing and serving food; responding at call centers, rape-crisis and trauma hotlines, or sex lines; working in the global care chain that sends people from poor countries to nurse and serve others in rich countries, and many more.
In many cultures, including in Israel, emotions and economic activity are imagined as separate and even hostile spheres, so their merger assumes a form of symbolic defilement. But in practice, as Viviana Zelizer shows for the United States, this intersection is essential for the maintenance of social relations: “money cohabits regularly with intimacy, and even sustains it” (2005: 28). Along similar lines, but with greater focus on the working of capitalism as a system, Eva Illouz (2007) looks at how the integration of psychotherapeutic narratives into the market creates commodified forms of selfhood. A wide variety of talk shows, self-help books, well-being workshops, meditation and purification retreats, dating websites, co-counseling circles, and related opportunities for self-modification flood the marketplace, drawing people to reinvent themselves through a supply of ever-cheaper and more accessible tools. Intriguingly, this method works by appearing to lift people above material consumption, which is deemed necessary for a truly authentic engagement. This consumption is commonly imagined as antithetic to the more traditional kind, where material goods are flaunted as status symbols. Ostensibly independent of economic means, it draws on emotional competence, namely, the capacity to talk reflexively about the self
