Beautiful Israeli Girls and Women: A Class Perspective

The proposed paper addresses the role of women`s physical beauty and aesthetic labour in class-making processes. Most sociologies of beauty employ constructionist perspectives, scaffolding the effects of oppressive gender/racial/classed ideologies on bodies. This research approaches the body also via a new-materialist interest in embodiments and affects. Still, it remains less clear how beauty makes class under different socio-economic circumstances.

Based on textual and semiotic analysis of Israel popular culture artifacts, mostly lifestyle magazines, I shall discuss three crucial moments whereby beauty has shaped class: 1) The nation-building early 1960s, when women were expected to represent the nation, that is, to embody and perform a not-yet-formed distinctive local-national Israeli style. This, when Americanization was first seen as threatening the national-cultural identity. I shall argue that this gendered middle-class task was imagined as located in the sphere of reproduction and as an auxiliary to the state-made capitalism of the era. 2) The privatization 1980s, when women were expected to act as fashionable, American-style, full-fledged consumers working on their bodies as self-projects. It will be also shown how `ethnic` forms of beauty gained recognition, only to be coopted later. Arguably, the active economic role of women grew as consumers, yet their activity remained mostly as legitimizing the realignment of the class structure. 3) The self-branding present, as women`s beauty work is culturally-coded as a mechanism generating self-appreciation, confidence and libidinality (and not just affecting others). Paradoxically, the more beauty is a self-oriented – the more is enters the sphere of production.