Single Mothers, Bureaucratic Torture, and the Neoliberal Welfare State
Smadar Lavie Event. A collaborative seminar between Creative Ethnography Research Group in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies, KU (all invited).
Bureaucracy runs the lives of mothers of modest means. It brings up a whole host of medical or epidemiological problems, because it has a cumulative effect on mothers' bodies in the Global South or when they migrate north. For a woman to reclaim her rights through bureaucracy, at times she needs to volunteer her body as a sexual tool. The clerks are often male, and the clients are impoverished, disempowered women. Bureaucracy is a topic that has been neglected by feminists because it is not as reassuring as agency and resistance studies.
Time: November 25th, 2022, Friday 1-3 pm,
Place: Room: 33.1.18, The Faculty of Social Sciences, Oster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen K
In my presentation I will focus on the phenomenological embodiments of Mizrahi single mothers' untold
entanglements in Israel's welfare bureaucracies. While Jews of non-European origins are the demographic majority of Israel and therefore are subject to structural and day-to-day racism, Israel's elaborate welfare bureaucracy conceives of itself as race-neutral. So the mothers' entanglements in the welfare system's webs rarely depart from their pre-discursive state to become discourse leading to mimetic redemption and agential action.
Postcolonial or decolonial ethnographies stress thinking in hybridities and multiplicities—the intersection of race, gender, sex, class, and religion into the agency of identity politics. But Israel's bureaucratic regime is based on the essentialist sanctity of the state, and therefore Mizrahi single mothers cannot enact intersectionality. Contrarily, they must align with the monothetic logic of an ethno-religious state bureaucracy to survive the welfare system they and their children depend on. The mothers deny the interplay between the traumas of theirs and their parents' orchestrated migration-dislocation-de-Arabization and the expulsion of the Palestinians in order to make room for the Israeli state. Instead, they brandish right-wing ultranationalist politics. Yet the bureaucratic torture they live through haunts them and is transmitted from one generation the next.
For any further information please contact: · Anja Simonsen, Department of Anthropology, anja.simonsen@anthro.ku.dk
· Atreyee Sen, Department of Anthropology, atreyee.sen@anthro.ku.dk · Liora Sion, Department of CrossCultural and Regional Studies, liorasion@hum.ku.dk