Two other common expressions that I use regularly in the book, and which are less specifically Israeli, are “global” and “low-income women.” By “global” I mean ideas, practices, and connections that extend beyond the political and symbolic borders of the state, and which are relevant in multiple cultural settings simultaneously. “Low-income” serves to describe the class situation of the women who are the addresses or clients of social economy projects. As is often the case with class terminology, this term is somewhat vague. As shown throughout the book, the implications of family income levels on people’s quality of life, opportunities, and overall well-being are much too complex to be captured in a single term. Rather, “low-income women” is a minimalist expression that represents the official criterion for being included in the projects; I use thicker ethnographic descriptions to relate the complex realities of these women’s lives.
Disguising the Identity of Research Participants
Throughout this book the three organizations that I researched extensively are given their real names—the Microentrepreneurship Study, the Bedouin Village Study, and Atida (both operated by the same organization)—and so are the Mahut Center Study and the Van Leer Research Group Survey. Also appearing under their real names are the various research assistants and colleagues with whom I collaborated. The identities of the different participants whom I met through the interviews and observations are disguised. My choice of pseudonyms was guided by the principle of concealing individuals’ identities but keeping the ethnic or national markers of their names when such existed. In Israel, Jews and Palestinians can readily discern Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Arab names. Palestinians can usually also tell Christian, Muslim, and Bedouin names. Yet many Jewish names are Hebraized in ways that make their original ethnic identities untraceable. I, for example, only became Sa’ar at the age of twenty, when our family decided to Hebraize our original surname Sircovich. In contrast to this Eastern European name, Sa’ar is distinctly Hebrew (it means “storm”) and ethnically neutral. So Jewish surnames in Israel may or may not be ethnically marked. First names on the other hand are mostly unmarked, except for those of people who immigrated to Israel as adults and kept their original names; this is characteristic of people who are now old or who arrived over the past twenty years, when the trend of Hebraizing names began to subside.7 In choosing pseudonyms I have tried to keep these identifying/blurring markers as close as possible to the original.
Arguments
The Israeli field of social economy, like community economic development more generally, is a meeting place where actors from diverse subject positions come together in an effort to mitigate the rapacious effects of capitalism, yet without attempting to replace it altogether. These cross-sectorial partnerships yield a hybrid discourse on economic justice, social solidarity, and civic inclusion. I use the concept of economic citizenship to examine how these ideas form in a particular setting, at a particular moment in time. The notion that economic self-sufficiency is central to the fulfillment of civic entitlement originates in diverse—and very distinct—discursive fields. It means different things when spoken by grassroots feminist activists, who demand recognition of women’s invisible economic contribution and claim the right of low-income women to be gainfully employed; by business philanthropists who promote corporate responsibility; by developers who aim to maximize the social capital of the poor; or by conservative politicians who opt to measure civic entitlement by the perceived fiscal productivity of individuals. On the ground, however, the notion of economic citizenship allows genuine dialogues that bridge these seemingly vast ideological distances. Besides travelling across social sectors, the idea of economic citizenship also travels across cultures. In the particular example of Israel, its localization entails an accommodation of seemingly incompatible emphases on the rights and duties of individuals to earn money, and on collective belonging and making a heroic contribution to the nation. Yet while it may sound idiosyncratic to local ears, the idea of economic citizenship begins to make sense as actors go hands-on into concrete economic empowerment projects. So it happens that alongside—not instead of—the loud narratives of essential differences and ethnonational exclusion emerge narratives of inclusion that appear to open up unfamiliar spaces for diversity. As members of the mainstream sectors of society make active attempts to reach out to those who until recently were seen merely as welfare subjects, if not outright hostile elements—passive, needy, abject—they refashion them as “self-entrepreneurs,” hence active partners in the resurrection of a stronger civil society.
The grounded experiences of these newly admitted partners—low-income women of diverse ethnic, national, and linguistic backgrounds—reveal the role of gender in the adoption of the idea of economic citizenship. The ethnography shows that in handling the pressures to increase their income and become self-supportive, women are guided by the cultural schema of the gender contract, which expects them to participate in the workforce and earn money, but still keep domestic care work as their first priority and not become primary breadwinners. Of course the schema varies among different groups of low-income women, according to the particular gender regimes that dominate their lives. It depends on whether the organization of women’s work is primarily domestic centered or public centered, on whether the available substitutes that allow them to seek out a paid job are primarily state based or market based, or on the implications for their lives of gender-specific legislation (issues of personal status, taxation, or employment contracts). In all the existing versions gender, as a structural and symbolic mechanism of distinction and domination, affects the degree to which women can actually respond to the discourse of economic self-sufficiency.
Lastly, analysis of the actual language that actors in the field use to make practical sense of economic citizenship shows the embedment of this idea in consumer capitalism. The ways participants talk about acquiring productive skills (learning to earn more money) are inextricably bound up with consumption practices. More specifically, they are drenched in the lingo of emotional capitalism. Here again the gender contract emerges as a constitutive framework, particularly in the tendency of participants in economic empowerment projects to make extensive use of a terminology of love when talking about work and about the task of becoming economically independent. The ethnography explores the manifold contradictions of this discourse: its apparently self-defeating effects for women whose care work is devalued to begin with; its seemingly unsophisticated ring as compared with emotional narratives of more successful economic actors; or the glaring disproportion of effusive love-care terminology as against deliberate avoidance of mentioning self-interest or commercial worth. At the same time, I point out the qualities of this discourse, which cannot be reduced to its “utility value.” By using a terminology of love and care to talk about work, low-income women engage in an energetic recharging that makes them feel less alone in their daily struggles, gives them emotional relief and a sense of inherent worth, and allows them to experiment with middle-class cultural style, a not insignificant asset in and of itself. On a more theoretical level, in their persistent invocations of care in a discursive environment replete with tropes of success, individuality, and self-interest, the women are not simply being silly. Rather, the somewhat uncanny ring of their love-work talk brings the discourse of economic citizenship to bear on an aspect of attachment, in the universalistic, humane sense of the obligation to give personal support and to contain vulnerabilities, an aspect that it mostly tends to eclipse. As such, it therefore presents, if not in so many words, the visceral and awkward aspects of civil participation that the abstract, legalistic articulations of economic citizenship generally leave untouched.
Notes
1. For readers’ convenience, I use a different font to distinguish the ethnographic sections from the main analytical text.