Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel

Gendered Encounters with the State

Edna Lomsky-Feder, Orna Sasson-Levy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351839792
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women's military service in Israel presents a compelling case study to explore the meaning of gendered citizenship. Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy compellingly argue that women's mandatory military service during an active ongoing violent conflict, occurring at a formative age, becomes an initiation process into gendered citizenship, where the women learn their marginal place in relation to the state. By analyzing the life stories and testimonies of young women from varied social backgrounds, the authors ask: How do young women soldiers manage their expectations vis-à-vis the hyper-masculine military institution? How do women experience their gendered citizenship as daily embodied and emotional practices in different military roles? How do women soldiers understand and cope with daily sexual harassment? And finally, how do women cope with the gendered silencing mechanisms of the violence of war and occupation, and what can women soldiers know about this violence when they choose to speak out?

The book offers a new conceptualization of citizenship as gendered encounters with the state. These encounters can be analyzed through three interrelated concepts: Multi-level contracts; Contrasting gendered experiences; Dis/acknowledging the military's (external and internal) violence. Applying these three thought-provoking concepts, the authors depict the intricate, non-deterministic relationships between citizenship, military service and multiple gendered experiences.

1Theorizing women’s encounters with the state

Imagine Tali, a 17-year-old Israeli high school student, who loves pop music (especially Beyoncé and Rihanna), chats with friends on Snapchat and on her cellphone, and is busy studying for her final exams. But during her last years of high school, while her American and European peers are preoccupied with college applications, Tali prepares for her mandatory military service. She reports to the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) recruitment center for preliminary assessment exams, completes a series of occupational exams, and, finally, weighs her assignment options. Upon graduating 12th grade, she is conscripted by law. She may be satisfied, having landed a position she aspired to, or she might be deeply disappointed, having been assigned a role which, to her mind, is not prestigious or challenging enough. She might serve in a traditionally feminine role (as secretary or welfare non-commissioned officer [NCO]) and be surrounded mostly by women, or she may serve in a so-called “masculine role” (such as infantry instructor, border patrol soldier, or pilot) and spend her military service mostly with men. Either way, as a soldier, she will be subjected to, or witness, some form of the military’s violence. Such experiences are a key part of the normative life narrative of most Jewish women in Israel, where military service is considered a defining life experience, a marker of adulthood, and a major step in negotiating citizenship.

The military is one of the main arenas for civic participation, since it is the institution most closely identified with the state, both in its ideologies and its practices (Enloe 1988). Thus we can conceptualize the military as a “contact zone” (Linke 2006) where the citizen and the state meet. The encounters with the state via the military are especially significant in light of the increasing elusiveness of state apparatuses in late modernity (Eckert 2011). In the current era, we are not always aware of state laws and state institutions and how they regulate our daily life. However, men and women who serve in the military know very well that it is a state institution (unlike schools or hospitals for example, where the state is not present, or its presence is less visible), and they are explicitly aware of the link between military service, constructions of citizenship, and national belonging. The encounters with the state are always shaped by gender ideologies and interests, which are especially pronounced in the military, a hyper-masculine organization. Thus, military service constructs a tight and conspicuous link between citizenship and gender. For young women such as Tali, military service can be seen as a gendered rite of passage through which they learn to become gendered citizens. Hence, we analyze military service as a citizenship-conferring institution and focus on how women experience “the actual spaces in which citizenship is expressed” (Jones and Gaventa 2002, 19).

Though more and more women serve in Western militaries and their service involves multiple and even contrasting ramifications, most of the literature on the militarization of women’s lives focuses on women as victims of the military’s violence; as mothers, caretakers and spouses; as refugees; and as victims of rape or sexual assault, as well as on the increase in domestic violence and the trafficking of women in war zones (Kaiser 2016, Rehn and Sirleaf 2002). Other literature highlights the prominent role of women in anti-war and peace movements (Cockburn 2007, Helman 1999a, Rowe 2016). These two bodies of knowledge share a common perception that women are not agents of military violence.

Against this backdrop, our book queries the impact of the militarization of women who serve in state militaries, women who could be viewed both as agents of militarization and its victims at the same time. Only recently have feminist scholars turned their critical gaze upon women who are soldiers, and they focus mainly on women who take part in non-state armed forces as guerrilla warriors, freedom fighters and/or terrorists (Alison 2009, MacKenzie 2012, Parashar 2014, Sjoberg and Gentry 2007, Viterna 2013). These scholars deconstruct the dichotomy between men-victimizers and women-victims, but they hardly analyze women’s military participation as agents of the nation state.

Our research joins the scholars who examine the meaning of women’s military service in Western state armed forces. The literature in the field concentrates on four subjects. The first is the human power policies regarding women’s integration into Western militaries and their consequences (see e.g., Basham 2013, Heinecken 2016, Kümmel 2002a, Kümmel 2002b, Woodward and Winter 2006). Helena Carrieras (2006) and Lana Obradovic (2014) offer a comparative approach to understanding the integration of women in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military forces, and consider the national, regional and international factors influencing decisions about women’s participation in the military. A second dominant body of research looks at cultural discourses regarding women as agents of organized violence, deconstructing the taken-for-granted connection between women, care, and empathy (Parashar 2012, Penttinen 2011, Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). The third subject that occupies many scholars is the experiences and consequences of sexual harassment in the military as a distinctive experience of women soldiers (Basham 2009, Butler and Schmidtke 2010, Harris and Firestone 2010, Hillman 2009, Jeffreys 2007, Quinn 2002). Sexual harassment is also one of the major issues in the study of women war veterans (e.g., Street, Vogt and Dutra 2009), which brings us to the fourth field of study, which examines how US military women have affected and been affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eager (Eager 2014) examines the experience of women service personnel in these wars, focusing on the impact of combat experience, such as homelessness and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), on women war veterans (see also, Yuhl 2016). In particular, Eager looks at the new phenomenon of women casualties of war, analyzing their life stories and thus giving voice to the voiceless.

Similarly to some of the above-mentioned works, our research focuses on women’s gendered, embodied and emotional military experience. However, we examine these experiences through the prism of encounters with the state and propose to analyze the women’s military experiences as an initiation to gendered citizenship.

Hence, the purpose of our book is to explore women’s understanding of citizenship via the varied and shifting meanings they ascribe to their military service. It is important to note, at this early stage, that women do not constitute a homogeneous group: Their encounters with the state are always shaped by the intersection of gender, class, and ethnicity, and their specific role in the military. Thus, women offer various and even contrasting narratives describing their pathway into gendered citizenship.

We elicit these narratives by analyzing the life stories and testimonies of over 120 young (27–40) Israeli women of varying social backgrounds who served in various military roles. Based on the women’s rich and vivid retrospective stories, we focus on three questions:

1How do young women of different intersectional groups manage their expectations vis-à-vis the state? In more detail, we will ask what the interpretive schemas are that shape the expectations of women regarding military service, how these expectations are translated into (formal and non-formal) contracts with the military organization, and how the women learn to negotiate with the state over the boundaries of their contracts.

2How do women experience their citizenship as daily embodied and emotional practices in accordance with their military roles? We will explore the interpretation of these military experiences in contrasting gendered military environments.

3How do women experience and understand the power of the state through their encounter with the external violence (war and occupation) and the internal violence (sexual harassment) of the military? We will ask whether and when women can recognize military violence, and what options are available to them to cope with it morally and pragmatically.

Thus, in studying the link between citizenship, gender, and military service, we focus on a micro approach, which emerges from the participants’ point of view. In other words, we investigate women’s encounters with the state through an analysis of their daily experiences during military service.

Gendered citizenship

Nation states carry a masculine emblem, which originates, first and foremost, from their history: the vast majority of nation states emerged out of armed conflicts, whether civil wars or wars of independence against the yoke of colonialist conquerors (Nagel 1998). The struggle to achieve independence and autonomy was associated with the struggle to acquire masculine stature. As Cynthia Enloe showed, nation states have typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope (Enloe 2000a, 45). Indeed, all nationalist movements tend to embrace patriarchal tradition as a legitimating basis for nation-building (Nagel 1998). These traditions, real or invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012), maintain the entrenched nature of masculine privilege and the close connection between nationalism, masculinity, and war (Nagel 1998, Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989).

Even today, despite the growing challenges of global and transnational trends, the nation state maintains its power (Shachar 2007), its patriarchal regime continues to remain stable, and many states continue to promote militaristic ideologies (Kronsell and Svedberg 2011). Nevertheless, states are not homogenous, and their gender regimes are not static. Neo-liberal globalization processes changed the character of states, restricted their ability to set national boundaries (e.g., for currency, territory, and population), and reshaped their power vis-à-vis their citizens. Under the prevailing power of globalization, the state now serves market powers, which compete with the needs of the nation and its citizens. These processes of change did alter the gender regime in many societies, but at the same time, they did not reduce the gender inequality, particularly in the areas of employment and finance (Yuval-Davis 2011). Thus, state gender regimes go through both processes of change and continuity. Therefore, the state should not be viewed as a monolithic entity directed from above. Rather, contemporary scholars call for an analysis that will “uncover how states are differentiated entities, composed of multiple gender arrangements” (Haney 2000, 641). That being the case, questions about the boundaries of citizenship and, in particular, debates over women’s status as citizens continue to be acute in many current states.

Citizenship is the main institution that bonds the individual and the state. Ever since the French revolution, citizenship has been associated with the fight to break down barriers of legal inequality (Shachar 2007, 367). Yet, the two dominant discourses of citizenship—the liberal and the republican discourses—construct gendered hierarchies while shaping gendered subjectivities.

The liberal perception of citizenship has been defined as “a bundle of entitlements and obligations which constitutes individuals as fully-fledged members of a socio-political community, providing them with access to scarce resources” (Turner and Hamilton 1994, 1). This liberal conception of citizenship, which (supposedly) grants equal rights to all those who enjoy full membership in the community (Marshall 1950), is determined according to formal criteria, either according to origin (jus sanguine) or place of birth (jus soli). The citizen, according to the liberal discourse, is a passive bearer of rights, which he is entitled to regardless of his participation in state institutions, including military service. Thus, this is the most inclusive and egalitarian discourse of citizenship, yet the liberal approach is gender and race blind and constructs civil rights in accordance with a white-man model of citizen. In this, it reproduces gendered hierarchies. Even today, women are denied some of the basic civil rights accorded to men, such as the right to protection and control of one’s body, sexuality, and reproduction (MacKinnon 1979); the right to equal pay and welfare payments that depend on full-time work and income; and the right to equal political representation (Walby 1994).

Against this liberal discourse, the republican perception of citizenship envisages the state as a moral community with a shared purpose that supersedes the individual (Shafir 1998). Accordingly, citizenship is defined by an individual’s participation and contribution to the “common good” of the community, as is the level of civil rights that he or she enjoys. More often than not, the individual’s participation is valued mostly when he contributes to state security through military service. This is especially true in militaristic societies such as Israel, where military service is seen as the incarnation of citizenship, since it allows the individual (mostly men) to prove his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the country (Sasson-Levy 2002). In such societies, military service, which delineates the boundaries of the political collective, is perceived as the fundamental expression of the individual’s commitment to the state, and civic virtue is constructed in terms of military virtue (Helman 1997). Hence, the citizen-soldier ideal of the civic republican tradition fuses military service and participatory citizenship (Snyder 1999, 2).

This militarization of citizenship has clear gendered consequences, as it creates a hierarchical gendered structure of belonging to the state (Snyder 1999). The gendered hierarchy of republican citizenship was preserved by banning women from expressing their commitment to the state through “performance on the battlefield” (Pateman 1989, 11). This exclusion was justified, as Carol Pateman has shown, by patriarchal perceptions of women’s bodies and sexualities (such as women’s monthly period, fear of rape, and physical capabilities). Based on their embodiment and sexuality, women were not perceived as men’s partners in the ultimate obligation to the state, and therefore were not entitled to the same rights and privileges.

In this argument, Pateman (1989) revealed the hidden link between the private gendered body and public perceptions of citizenship and deconstructed the ostensibly universal and neutral image of the citizen. Women, she argued, are “incorporated into public life … as ‘women,’ that is, as beings whose sexual embodiment prevents them from enjoying the same political standing as men” (Pateman 1989, 4). Thus despite citizenship’s claim to universalism, it was drawn up according to a quintessentially male template, so that women’s exclusion was integral to the theory and the practice of citizenship (Lister 2001).

We learn from Pateman’s analysis that the military’s gendered ideology and policy constructs unequal citizenship. However, in this book, we wish to go beyond the policy and learn about women’s multiple embodied military experiences in order to understand how these experiences shape women’s gendered citizenship.

By emphasizing practices and meanings, we follow critical scholars who have argued that citizenship is not merely a legal entity but also comprises political, economic, and cultural practices (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). New approaches call for “a sociologically informed definition of citizenship in whichthe emphasis is less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings and identities” (Isin and Turner 2002, 4). Thus, they call for analyzing citizenship as a “lived experience” from the perspective of the embodied citizen (Kabeer 2005). This perspective expands the meaning of the concept of citizenship, as it examines the link between rights and obligations from the point of view of the subject citizen, who acts in various sites of daily life wherein citizenship is defined and redefined again and again (Jones and Gaventa 2002, Lister 2007, Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2008, Ong 1996, Plummer 2001, Roseneil 2013). The analysis of citizenship as a “lived experience,” which highlights a grounded understanding of citizenship as everyday embodied practices, cannot ignore seeing the citizen as always already gendered (see e.g., Kershaw 2005).

Based on these approaches, we question how women understand and negotiate rights, responsibilities, belonging, and participation (Lister 2007) in everyday life during their military service. By looking at daily gendered practices of women soldiers from various social groups who served in diverse military roles, we examine citizenship as a lived experience that places the agent in the center through the lens of difference and diversity.

The military as an extreme case of a gendered state institution

Militaries are perceived as masculine institutions not only because they are comprised mostly of men but also because they constitute a major arena for the construction of masculine identities, men’s domination, and women’s exclusion (Higate 2003, Hutchings 2008). Though we agree that militaries are hyper-masculine organizations, we cannot ignore that today’s militaries’ gender regimes are not as coherent as in the past. Thus, we adopt Joan Acker’s (2006) term of “inequali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theorizing women’s encounters with the state
• 2 Setting the stage
• 3 Serving the army as secretaries: Intersectionality and multi-level contracts
• 4 Contrasting gendered experiences: Redoing and undoing gender
• 5 Contrasting gendered experiences: Crossing boundaries
• 6 Dis/acknowledging sexual harassment: Gray areas of violence
• 7 Dis/acknowledging military violence: Women breaking the silence of occupation
• 8 Gendered citizenship and military service: A comparative perspective
• Bibliography
• Index