The current roundtable will explore the burning issue of women in the military, and particularly women in the IDF. The scholars will discuss their recent books and reflect about each other’s writings.
In their book “Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel”, Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levy argue that women’s mandatory military service during an active ongoing violent conflict becomes an initiation process into gendered citizenship, where the women learn their marginal place in relation to the state. Based on analysis over 120 life stories and testimonies of young women from varied social backgrounds, the book argues that gendered encounters with the state during military service 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 concepts, the authors depict the intricate, non-deterministic relationships between citizenship, military service and multiple gendered experiences.
“Breaking the Binaries in Security Studies” by Harel-Shalev and Daphna-Tekoah focuses on women combatants. Their book introduces a theoretical framework in Critical Security Studies for understanding– by binary deconstructions of the terms used in these fields – the integration of women soldiers into combat roles. The book explores the voices and silences of women who served in combat roles in the IDF and offers insights into the larger issues of the links between war and gender, trauma and gender, and politics and gender. The book draws on Feminist theories in International Relations to introduce an interdisciplinary perspective that aims to lead scholars to consider why and how women’s experiences of combat should be incorporated into the analysis of violence, state violence, security and insecurity.
Each of the participants will focus on the other pair’s co-authored book and will analyze it in correspondence to her own co-authored book. This dialogue will allow us to develop a multidimensional joint analysis of the topic.