Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel: Women's Marital Names

Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel 9780230100152_01_prexx.indd i 3/29/2011 6:05:56 PM 9780230100152_01_prexx...

Author: Michal Rom | Orly Benjamin

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Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel

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Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel Women’s Marital Names Michal Rom and Orly Benjamin

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FEMINISM, FAMILY, AND IDENTITY IN ISRAEL

Copyright © Michal Rom and Orly Benjamin, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10015–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rom, Michal. Feminism, family, and identity in Israel : women’s marital names / Michal Rom and Orly Benjamin. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–10015–2 (hardback) ISBN-10: 0–230–10015–5 1. Feminism—Israel. 2. Names, Personal—Israel. I. Benjamin, Orly. II. Title. HQ1236.5.I75R66 2011 305.42095694—dc22

2010045300

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface Introduction

xiii 1

1

Local Context of Identity Formation

15

2

Naming Identities: Politics of Identity

29

3 Israeli Ambivalence and Gender Relations

49

4

57

The Appropriate Name

5 Getting More Out of It: Identity Positioning through the Name

91

6

Time and Space Dimensions of Self-Naming

121

7

Name in Relations

155

8 Discussion

185

Appendix 1: Personal Notes on Our Naming Stories

201

Appendix 2: Naming Practices and Research Methods

205

Notes

223

References

227

Index

243

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Figures and Tables

Figures 1.1 Registered changes in family names of women and men 1996–2010 A2.1 Collecting the data—flow of the respondent rates

23 212

Tables 7.1 Categories of couples’ negotiation 8.1 The cultural loading of the family name in the Israeli context A2.1 Distribution of naming practices among the research population willing to be interviewed and eligible according to reflexive and demographic criteria (n = 259) A2.2 Naming practices of participants in the study

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159 187

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Acknowledgments

The Gender Studies program at Bar-Ilan University was founded in 2000 by the late Professor Dafna Izraeli. We commemorate with love her support and intense questioning allowing both of us to develop our careers, and this project to take its place among the plethora of products facilitated by the program during a passionate decade. Dafna managed to create a unique space, where feminists support each other, even at times of disagreement. Professor Tova Cohen, the current chair of the program, excels in further turning the program into a unique opportunity for growth and inspiration, and we are grateful to her for that. Professor Haim Hazan provided intellectual guidance at the early stages of the project, and we thank him for his horizon-extending words. Professor Judith Lorber generously granted her professional guidance and precious encouragement, enabling us to embark on the project of writing this book. We are deeply indebted to her, as otherwise we would still be contemplating issues of when and how. Professor Muhammad Amara, a great enthusiast for feminist lingual research, provided a launching base for defining the field as appropriate and legitimate for research. Writing a paper under his supervision, paved the road for developing this endeavor. Dr. Ursula Wokoeck provided both lingual editing for the entire manuscript and scientific editing in various parts of it. There are not enough words to describe her dedication and invaluable contribution, always remaining sensitive to our search of the right articulation. Nevertheless, we take full responsibility for any imperfections that may exist. We are also deeply grateful to Dr. Omi Morgenstern-Leissner for her constructive comments. Dr. Elisheva Baumgerten, head of the Fanya Gottesfeld Heler Center for the Study of Women in Judaism, and Professor Adrian Zeiderman from the Schnitzer Foundation for Research on Israeli Economy and Society, both at Bar-Ilan University,

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Acknowledgments

granted us financial support. We are deeply grateful for these acts of recognition. Earlier on in the project, the data collection and preliminary analysis was supported by a generous grant from the doctoral fellowship of the excellence program awarded to Michal. It supported her advanced degree studies and research at Bar-Ilan University, which was the starting point for the work presented in this book. Fourty-two women have taken their precious time, thought, and attention in order to contribute to our analysis. We appreciate their efforts and deeply thank them for their willingness to share their experiences, doubts, disappointments, and prides. We hope they will consider the analysis presented in this book as a fair representation of their feelings and preferences. We took various methodological and intellectual measures to make sure that our analysis will stay as close as possible to how they see their actions in this delicate area. Nevertheless, should any of these women feel unsatisfied, we sincerely apologize. We believe that through talking to us, each of them has made a significant contribution to the un-silencing of the issue of women’s marital names and to the current theoretical understandings of agency and belonging in Israeli society. We are also deeply indebted to the Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewers, who gave us useful comments at the proposal stage. We thank the team at Palgrave Macmillan, particularly Julia Cohen, who guided us throughout the initial stages. Each of us also must thank her own sources of support: Michal wants to thank first and foremost Idan Grinbaum for his unconditional support and persistent collaboration. You are one of a kind and I am fortunate to have you with me in this life. My parents, Dorit and Martin Rom; my beloved children Itamar, Alma and Adam; and all the magnificent women, who surrounded me during the years this work evolved: Anat Fort, Shelly Gross, Hagar Agmon, Galia Schwartz, Iris Segev, Ruti Feuchtwanger, Amit Sendik, Anat Ben-Bassat, Helli Hillel and Shlomit Stern. Thank you all for being there for me and with me. This dream could never have been realized without your patience, curiosity, empathy and love. Orly wants to thank Ann Levi for her trust and a range of adored women, whose presence is always of enormous importance: Naomi Ori, Racheli Bar-Or, Bili Moscona-Lerman, Dorit Hershkovitz, Orna Sasson-Levi, Shlomit Simon, Delila Amir, Julia Brannen, Ruth Gaunt, Dina Heyman and Dorit Dvir. Finally, I’m definitely proud to be playing the game called “family life” with David and Tom, my beloved partner and son.

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The project presented in this book has stems from our commitment to reinforcing “feminism for everybody,” a feminism without divisive barriers, a feminism for men and women alike, a feminism salient to public policy and to diverse social struggles. We believe that women’s self-naming is significant both for mirroring the current power position of feminism in the public discourse and for reinforcing the feminist voice in our antifeminist times. Thus we hope that our book will contribute to maintaining and legitimizing a public discussion on self-naming. We hope that, as part of the local feminist movement, it will enhance women’s reflexivity on the issue and help to confine automatic conservative conduct. Most of all, we hope that the issue of the family name will increasingly become a family matter so that appropriate masculinity and femininity alike will include the reflexive consideration of the family name as an integral aspect of caring for children. Finally, we hope to see the emergence of a persistent public struggle for women’s right to self-naming.

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Preface

One of the less discussed achievements of the women’s movement in late modernity is the option to reject the patronymic naming system, that is, the convention of women replacing their own family names by their husbands’ names when they get married. In quite a few countries around the world, women nowadays are legally entitled to design a family name for themselves and sometimes for their families. A broad range of options is available to married women, be it because they have never been legally obliged to adopt their husbands’ names, or because legislation annulled previously existing mandatory regimes in this matter in the 1970s. Yet in most contemporary cultures with a patronymic tradition, only a minority of married women challenge the customary practice. Within this minority, some preserve their original family names, some hyphenate their own and their husbands’ family names, and some adopt new family names together with their spouses. The question arises, therefore, why women today keep practicing an outdated patriarchal custom despite a legal and cultural climate that supports a process of self-naming. This question may be seen as a specific articulation of a theoretically larger question regarding feminist consciousness among married women in late modernity. The fact that most women adhere to patronymy is even more astonishing, if one considers the relatively high visibility of alternative naming practices in the public sphere in most of these countries. Women politicians, scholars, writers, journalists, artists, actresses, and many others, who receive attention in the media, retain in various patterns their birth family names upon marriage. Hillary Rodham Clinton (married Bill Clinton), Cherry Booth Blair (married Tony Blair), Carla Brunei (married Nicolas Sarkozy), Nancy Davis (married Ronald Reagan), Yoko Ono (married John Lennon), Frieda Kahlo (married Diego Rivera), Georgia O’Keeffe (married Alfred Stiegliz), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (married Charles Walter Stetson),

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Amelia Earhart (married George Putnam), Helena Rubinstein (married Edward William Titus), Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (married Emanuel Ross), Lucille Ball (married Desi Arnaz), Catherine Zeta-Jones (married Michael Douglas), Sara Jessica Parker (married Matthew Broderick), Katie Holmes (married Tom Cruise), Angelina Jolie (married Brad Pitt),1 Uma Thurman, Geraldine Ferraro, Hannah Arendt, Nora Ephron, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chris Evert Lloyd, Portia Simpson Miller, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and many other women from varied fields in diverse places and various times. One thing all these women have in common is that they all adopt naming practices developed by feminists, who struggled for the right of a woman to name herself. If it was not for this struggle, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th United States secretary of state could have not kept her birth family name upon marriage. It was in 1975 when she married William Jefferson Clinton, the 3rd and announced she was keeping the name Rodham (without taking his family name) because “it showed that I was still me” (Bernstein, 2007:157). At that time, she had to face quite a bit of criticism from her surroundings. For a while, she managed to resist, but eventually in 1982, when her partner wanted to launch a campaign for returning to the governorship, she began calling herself Hillary Rodham Clinton “to give voters the image they wanted in a first lady” (Guernsey, 2009:41). Another American woman who asserted more vigorously the right to name herself is bell hooks, author, philosopher and professor of African and African American studies and English literature. She was born in 1952 as Gloria Watkins, but after publishing her first book And There We Wept (1978) under the pen name bell hooks, she decided to fully embrace it. It was her great grandmother’s name; therefore adopting it for herself “signifies her reclamation of her grandmother’s legacy of quick wit, a sharp tongue, willful defiance, courage and outspokenness, and serves as a strategy of empowerment” (Code, 2003:256). Another unique aspect of bell hooks’ assertion of her right to name herself is her determination to spell her name with no capital letters. The lower case, she explained on various occasions, serves to attribute importance to the content of her scholarship rather than to herself. Hillary Rodham Clinton and bell hooks exemplify two opposite directions of self-naming. Retaining the Rodham is an act of connecting oneself to professional accomplishments attained prior to the marriage as well as to the resourceful status of her family of origin. In contrast, adopting the name bell hooks is about connecting to one’s

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ancestors, who, as off-spring of those trafficked from Africa and sold as slaves, were deprived of the right to name themselves. Their white owners had that right, and they used it in a variety of derogatory ways (Omi, 1997). By adopting her great grandmother’s name, bell hooks engaged in the courageous project of naming politics, valuing a devalued name. In addition to endowing the value of her widely appreciated scholarly stance to her female ancestors, she indicates the possibility of inversing the meaning of what was devalued by the enslaver, by taking pride in it. Miles away from bell hooks and Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the other side of the globe, the politics of naming that shape the struggle of Israeli women for the right to name themselves show many similar features, despite all differences. A glimpse of the extent to which names in general, and family names in particular, serve as a key discursive site of struggle (Mills, 2003) can be gained by looking at how names are used in Israeli mainstream media. Take for example Eretz Nehederet (in Hebrew, “A Wonderful Country”), one of the most popular and influential shows on Israeli TV. Since 2003, the show has been produced on a weekly basis and broadcasted during prime time for seven consecutive successful years. It features satirical references to current affairs through parodies of the people involved, as well as the thoughts of recurring characters. Dina Kraft, a journalist who has covered Israel for The New York Times and The Associated Press, accurately describes how “Every Friday night about one million Israelis–nearly 60% of the viewing audience—tune in to watch their leaders ridiculed and their country mocked. The show takes few prisoners, a reflection of Israel’s own lively and aggressive political culture” (Kraft, 2006). Within this setting, two of the recurring characters get ridiculed (among other things) by their unusual and very long family names. The first one is a semifictional male character called “Udi BenDavid Federbush.” His name is a mockery combination of the names of three well-known journalists: two of them men, who carry one surname in real life (Udi Segal and Alon Ben-David), 2 while the third is a woman, who carries a hyphenated name (Orly Vilnay-Federbush). In real life, all three are considered highly professional and successful in their fields. And yet, in the cast of the satirical show, Udi Ben-David Federbush is a clumsy un-useful commentator, who cannot do his work no matter what. The other character with a name issue on the set of Eretz Nehederet is an extreme parody replica of a well-known celebrity woman, named

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Judi Nir Moses Shalom. In real life, Mrs. Nir Moses Shalom is the daughter of one of the powerful elite families in the Israeli economy (the Moses family); she was married to a well-known ex-officer of the Israeli armed forces, who got killed in a mysterious plane crash in Mexico in 1988 (Amiram Nir), and is now married to a politician who serves as a minister in the Israeli government (Silvan Shalom). As this summary of her biography suggests, she has good reasons to carry all three family names, and she insists on doing exactly that. Nevertheless, none of her well-explicable reasons neither her protagonist pedigree protect her from being ridiculed for her name, as shown repeatedly by her character in Eretz Nehderet and on other similar occasions across popular media channels in Israel. These two characters and the way they are treated in the popular satirical show disclose Israeli society’s intolerance toward people who dare to challenge the normative naming practices. In real life, women who hyphenate their names are indeed a minority; those with two family names usually move within specific social and professional circles, and even there, they are marked as exceptional. In this context, common representations of hyphenation tend to be ridiculed, as shown in the examples above, exposing in its negativity some of the taken-for-granted assumptions regarding names and gender relations. The case of Udi Ben-David Federbush, the clumsy male commentator of Eretz Nehederet, may be seen to epitomize the interrelation between these concepts: the notion of a man, who breaks the norms of patronymy, as the ultimate horror. Considering the current state of affairs, this is not surprising. Until 1996 women and men in Israel did not have many choices regarding their family names after marriage. The “Law of Names (1956)” was strict regarding the relationship between a woman’s marital status and her family name. The options of retaining the name or of hyphenating were as good as nonexistent for women. Only after three appeals to the Supreme Court, the law was finally revised removing all legal limitations in 1996 (Omi, 2000). Since names and naming are not only a matter of laws and legal procedures, however, it is not sufficient to have a law enabling the free choice of one’s name. For women and men really to be able to consider their naming practices freely, much more work needs to be done. We hope to contribute to that effort with this book. The story we wish to tell begins with our own personal dilemmas. Being Jewish Israeli married women—one married prior to the change in legislation and the other afterward—we found ourselves facing the

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name issue from different angles. It started with Michal (family name from birth: Rom), who was contemplating the need to decide what to do with her name upon entering marriage. Her quest for the right answer quickly turned into a deep investigation of areas revolving around the last-name dilemma, which led to a systematic empirical research in the field of Israeli women’s marital names. Orly (family name from marriage: Benjamin) was soon drawn into the journey as a mentor, a guide, and a partner. As she was in a different stage in her established marriage, a mother to an adolescent son, and daughter to an elderly mother, who was sadly and slowly departing from life, she found herself reflecting on her longstanding routine of replacing her birth family name (Berger) with her husband’s name. While Michal experienced the patronymic tradition as a violation of her fundamental right to be in a position fully equal to that of her spouse, Orly saw in the same practice meanings of salvation and liberation, a way to give up on what was in part a monument of a father she did not want to remember. Instead, she hoped to obtain a symbol of her attachment to the man she choose to live her life with. We were dazzled by the complexities and depth of what we discovered. Even more intriguing was what we found in between our own personal stories. So many complex and varied meanings were attached to family names that surrounded us; it felt like we must take a deeper and closer look, not just on our names and ourselves, but on other women’s as well. Our own experiences seemed like the tip of the iceberg; beneath there where many more stories that had to be told. As these stories were gradually gathered, we discovered that family names accumulate meanings in ways that allow women to relate to them, at different stages of their lives, not only as they face the moment of marriage. “The name issue” comes back to women (and men) time and again, at major turning points as well as in unexpected daily moments of truth. In this book, we wish to lay out some of these meanings and their implications. We hope to unfold the crucial aspects that have a bearing on the issue of women’s marital names, and to expose their significance in the wide sociological context as well as their effects on day-to-day life. While this issue is commonly framed as one of either gendered conservatism or feminist resistance (see for example, Foss & Edson, 1989; Kline, Stafford & Miklosovic, 1996; Mills, 2003; Schueble & Johnson, 1993, 1998, 2005, 2007), our project adopts a wider framework for the investigation. Based on an analysis of the reflexive processes, through which women develop their standpoints with regard to their current and potential family names, we discern

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a process of self-naming, which draws on a range of ideological currents. These inform women’s reflexive processes and constrain their available strategies for avoiding the adoption of husbands’ names. Our study systematically analyses semistructured interviews with forty-two Israeli Jewish married women, revealing how the family name itself operates as an efficient analytical category for exploring the following three sociological phenomena: The first is that of identity performance: As our empirical evidence shows, the family name constitutes a key arena, where multiple identity dimensions are produced and reproduced. Among these are ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality. We conceptualize our findings in a theoretical argument regarding the cultural significance of family names, arguing that the family name has a “cultural loading,” which is formed by gender principles as well as by aesthetic evaluations, issues of ethnicity, and structural criteria. In some cases, the family name also has a “familial loading” depending on the sociohistorical significance of a specific family history that the name embodies. All these aspects together constitute the family name’s signifying power in the broad cultural context. The cultural loading and the cultural signifiers that it produces, have a salient weight in shaping married women’s practices regarding their family names. The second sociological phenomenon investigated is the discursive order as demonstrated in the reflexive processes concerning family names. We hold that women’s practices regarding their family names after marriage reflect the association between the macro level, where a discursive order is generated, and the inner reflexive process operating on the micro level. Following Michelle Lazar’s approach of critical feminist discourse analysis (Lazar, 1993, 2000, 2005), we trace the vocabularies of familism, nationalism, orientalism, individualism, and feminism in women’s accounts. The ambivalence resulting from the concurrent presence of these contesting discourses in the accounts is conceptualized as relations of dominance and subjugation constituting the discursive order. The third phenomenon is the gendered structure of the social category of “family name” in patronymic cultures, that is, the existence of a distinct array of meanings and functions that the family name has for women and men. Apparently women and men use their names differently: women sometimes apply a “fluid name-usage template,” that is, using different names in different contexts. In contrast, almost all men in these societies benefit from a constant and stable name. This

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point brings to light a gap between the literal meaning of the concept of “family name” and its social meaning, which clearly should not be taken for granted as being equally valid for both sexes. For a woman, her family name is not necessarily the name of her family. Feminist sociologists have already documented various forms of work that women do for their families, as part of the production of the “appropriate” family and “appropriate” familial relations. In line with this scholarship, we show how the family name is a central site for such family work. Our findings clearly indicate that women consider the name of their family as part of their effort to create the “appropriate” image for their family within a specific cultural context. The perspective adopted in this project derives from the field of language and gender as well as from the assumed interrelation between language and society. We locate naming practices within a sociopolitical context that includes dimensions of immigration, ethnicity, nationalism, and religion. Our research base is the Jewish population in Israel, where these issues permeate into language and, more specifically, into names as symbols of nation building. Sociohistorical circumstances such as the Holocaust and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict constrain identity positioning into distancing oneself from the Palestinian/Oriental, on one hand, and growing apart from the Diaspora, on the other hand. Naming practices reveal how national and religious symbols are used to create images of the “appropriate Israeli.” Furthermore, such practices unveil interethnic tensions that shed light on immigration societies in other cultural contexts as well. Our study focuses on processes of individual positioning within ethnic stratification structures, showing how the achievements of the women’s movement are subjugated in these processes. The concluding discussion of this project sheds light on experiences of ambivalent belonging as taking a specific form for three categories of naming practices. Ambivalent belonging in its three forms reflects the contingent relationships that Israeli middle class women maintain with communities around them. Recent data (Gooding and Kreider, 2010) indicating the demise of nonconventional naming practices among American women suggests that ambivalent belonging may be applicable to the understanding of women in late modernity outside Israel as well.

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Introduction

Names have long been regarded as symbols of the self and components of identity formation, signifying biography, social place, and collective histories. They allow the expression of connection and disconnection to families, communities, collectives, and their related narrative of social history. A large body of research documents the role of names in the social construction of identity, and more recently, the power of naming to serve as a form of social control and political action. A range of procedures connects naming practices to a person’s civil status. There are those who have no right to assert a name for themselves, since under specific political-historical circumstances, powerful others have appropriated that right. This was the case for slaves, who got their names from their enslavers, or more commonly today migrants, whose names are casually distorted by official administrators unable or unwilling to spell them properly. Likewise, illegal immigrants or excluded social actors are at times deprived of the right to be registered under their names in official records. And then there are those who have the power to insist on self-naming, despite social expectations that they would be named by others (e.g., married women who refuse to take their husbands’ names). The concept of self-naming means in contemporary reflexive times that a name is not necessarily assumed by others but rather wellselected by the subject who owns, uses, and carries the name. The notion of “self-naming” brings together two theoretically separated components of identity. The first component is the understanding of names as the product of active and well-informed agents shaping their own names within a web of relational, historical, and political concerns. The second component is the sociolinguistic conceptualization of names as identity-related. If names carry meanings that position us in specific social locations, then self-naming renders our diverse identities present. In this sense, selecting a name is, among other things, an action of giving a name to our multiple selves.

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In this introduction, we aim to prepare the ground for explaining the above process of self-naming as reflected in the complex interrelations between gender, ethnicity, and nationality. First, we provide a brief historical description of how and why family names have turned out to be as they are in Western patronymic cultures; this will be followed by a discussion on what may be considered as a universal, taken-for- granted understanding of the entangled knot between language names and identity. Within this discussion, we outline a theory on naming, gender, and power relations—a crucial element in our project. The introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book.

Global and Historical Perspectives on Family Names Naming practices throughout much of the world are enormously rich and varied (Alford, 1988). Within this diversity, there are some commonalities that have evolved through time in most cultural contexts. These include the overall pattern combining a personal name and a second name (surname or family name) for any person, and the tendency to use a relatively stable name. Both these practices can be traced to the rise of the modern state, linked initially to certifying property rights, then subsequently to the state’s concern with keeping accurate information about individual citizens (Hey, 2000; Scott et al., 2002). As the great variety of naming systems requires intensive historical investigation that we cannot offer in this context, we focus in this section mostly on the development of the modern family name in the form accepted in current Western industrialized cultures, including Israel.

The Birth of the Family Name While the most ancient use of a surname is traced to China 5,000 years ago (Hanks, 2003), the phenomenon of the modern family name is, broadly, of medieval European origin (Caplan, 2001; Hey, 2000). Until these times, communities were small enough for each person to be identifiable by a single name. But as the population increased, it gradually became necessary to use more elaborate means to identify people. Hence, from the eleventh century onward, the practice of adding a second name was started in Florence, France, and England (Wilson, 1998). Gradually and slowly, it became an integral part of an individual’s name, and by the fifteenth century a first name and

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a surname that was fixed and hereditary was practically the norm (Hanks, 2003; Scott et al, 2002). Since the purpose of the surname was to identify people and families, the majority of surnames were primarily of four types: names of a place (local, regional, ethnic, topographic, house names, or habitual); names of affiliations (patronymic, metronymic, kinship-based names); titles (based on occupation, status, nicknames, or anecdotal); and adjectives (diminutives, pejoratives, or variants) (Hanks and Hodges, 1988). In many places, the second name developed first as the privilege of the aristocracy, and only after having been established among the higher classes, other social groups were allowed to adopt them. In Japan, for instance, until 1868, lay people were prohibited from using surnames (Yasuda, 1983; cf. Jobling, 2001), while in Europe, historical circumstances facilitated an intensification of the use of surnames. The trigger was inheritance law, as it required the development of a system that could trace ownership (Caplan, 2001). The emergence of bureaucratic systems registering births, weddings, and deaths among the population accelerated the spread of surnames downward on the social ladder. Registering conjugal births under fathers’ names contributed to the establishment of patronymic administrative procedures. As the development of patronyms helped enforce private property rights, advance primogeniture regimes, and secure the ability of the state to make its subjects legible to its gaze (Scott et al., 2002), legislation regarding names and naming began to progress in various regions across the European continent. Eventually, it entered common law and was later transmitted worldwide as common administrative practice by the English colonial regime (Josling, 1980; Scott et al., 2002).

Women’s Marital Names in Patronymic Cultures In the past, when land and title were the basis of power and value, women were practically dependent on their fathers or husbands. Already in the thirteenth century (Omi, 1997), a handful of women voluntarily adopted their husbands’ surnames, in celebration of their status as wives. Powerful social incentives encouraged women to voluntarily adopt patronymic practices in order to acquire either an affiliation with higher social status (Hibbard, 2001) or the respectable status of a married woman whose children have a known father (Penfield, 1987). By the seventeenth century, the patronymic custom was already well established (Caplan, 2001), enabling registration

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systems to remain organized around men’s names. During the nineteenth century, women’s dependent status in the United States was further consolidated within the Coverture doctrine, a legal doctrine defining a husband and wife as “one person,” and the wife as “feme covert,” that is, “covered by her husband.”1 Under the Coverture doctrine, women’s naming also erased married women’s first names as women were treated as Mrs. husband’s first and last name. Between 1848 and 1920, suffragists were fighting for women’s right to vote and gradually weakened the position of the Coverture doctrine in the legal system, thus gaining their right to separate names and documents. Industrialization, bringing with it an increase in the importance of property and wealth, in addition to land and title, led to the articulation of middle- class women’s desire for formal legal recognition of their right to an independent share in their families’ newly acquired riches (Evans, 1977:30). Against this background, the idea of a separate surname gained in appeal. In other words, in their struggle for social and civic recognition, women first wanted their husbands’ surnames, even though no legislation forced them to adopt it. Later on, middle- class women, in particular, began to question the practice, when establishing their social status became more complex due to their claim to rights pertaining to ownership of property and other material assets (Stannard, 1973).

Women’s Family Names across the World Even though the patronymic system became part of the cultural norm in some parts of the world, and people find it difficult to contemplate alternatives, quite significant diversity may be found around the world when it comes to women’s marital names. In particular, practices deviating from the patronymic norm are found in cultures in which a matrilineal heritage is perceived as valuable, and local customs requires retaining women’s birth family names or hyphenation of the husband’s family name with the wife’s family name (MurruCorriga, 2000). In Spain, a woman’s name does not change upon marriage, and she is allowed to pass it on to her children. Newborns receive the hyphenation of both parents with their father’s name first. Upon their own transition to parenthood, they are expected to drop their mother’s name and transfer their father’s name to the next generation (Stodder, 1988). The Spanish system is followed in some variation in Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and several Latin American states, in

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all of which women keep their names upon marriage. Since 1996, couples in Germany are legally permitted to distance themselves from the patronymic custom, though both partners have to share one name (Murray, 1997). In Denmark, parents have to select the one family name they want to transfer to their children no later than six months after the birth of the child. If they fail to inform the authorities of a chosen name, the baby will be named after his mother (Valetas, 2001). In quite a few Slavic states, the patronymic naming system is based on the father’s name, but also reflects the place of a person in the family unit, adding the suffix “vich” to a son, or the suffix “nova” to a daughter. By the same token, sometimes (for example, in Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia) women are expected to adopt their partners’ family names, adding a suffix signifying their status as wives (A Guide to Names and Naming Practice, 2006). In South Africa, the law permits both partners to change their names upon marriage, but the procedure is more complex for women. In Quebec, Canada, women are compelled to retain their birth family names. In most Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Sudan), it is customary to address a woman by her husband’s name, adding a reference to her status as a wife. But in formal documents, her full name does not change, since such a procedure entails a legal procedure that is hardly ever followed. In Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and southern India, the use of surnames has not yet been adopted, and among the Indian Sikhs, all women carry the surname Kaur, and all men carry the surname Singh, therefore women do not replace their surnames upon marriage. Hindu people carry three names: in addition to their first name, they have their father’s full name (personal and family names); married women replace their father’s name with that of their fatherin-law’s personal and family name. In Cambodia, the surname is the first name of the father’s grandfather (his father’s father) and women retain their names after marriage. In China, Vietnam, and Korea, too, women retain their surnames or hyphenate, whereas children get their fathers’ family names.

Language, Names, and Identity The poststructuralist assumption that language plays a central role in reality construction and hence in building our social and cultural world is commonly accepted today (Baxter, 2004). Onomastics is

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a subfield of linguistics that applies this assumption to the study of names and naming and asks how names take part in constituting the social world. It explores how names are created and changed, based on the assumption that information about names can lead to valuable insights about people, culture, and society (e.g., Zelinsky, 2002). Poststructuralism also informs research on gender and language, particularly that which focuses on dimensions of power and ideology in the dialectic nature of relations between language and gendered social structure (e.g., Eckert & McConnell- Ginet, 1992). Most researchers in these areas deal with how language as a complex abstract system reproduces gender both as a social construct and as power relation within society. The feminist linguist Sally McConnellGinet (1988) stresses the need to distinguish gender as a grammatical structure or an organizing principle of language, from gender as a social structure embedded in language and reproduced by the way language is used. In her words, “Language (use) involves the production by linguistic agents (speakers or writers) of linguistic forms; in using these forms, agents are meaning to express content and to present themselves as social beings and actors in the world” (p. 78). In other words, language should be analyzed as a social praxis, a central act of self-reflexivity calling attention to the constitutive powers in any specific time and space intersection (Baxter, 2004). From this point of view, research in the field of language and gender focuses on lingual praxis and their contribution to the production of gender and its key ideas such as masculinity and femininity (Cameron, 1996; Bing & Bergvall, 1996). More recently, a lingual praxis addressed in this manner is naming (Pauwels, 2005). One such naming system is the asymmetrical set of titles used in most Indo-European languages for men and women, that is, Miss, Mrs., and sometimes Ms. for women, while men are always referred to with the title Mr. (McConnell- Ginet, 2003). Another relevant aspect of naming is the way names, pronouns, and professional titles are used differently when relating to a man or a woman (Fowler, 1991; Simpson, 1993). And last but not least is the case of the family name after marriage in patronymic cultures in which women are expected to replace their birth family names with their husbands’ names, while a man’s name does not change throughout his life (Romaines, 1999; Stannard, 1977; Spender, 1980). All these cases share one common aspect, namely, the degradation of women compared to men’s privileged status, held and maintained by means of their names and titles. Analyzing the mechanism that enables this process unfold provides a fundamental insight:

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the fact that the name is a linguistic object evolving through speech not only as the application of a lingual system, but also in the sense of a social practice loaded with meanings far beyond language use in itself. The definition includes the recognition of the signifying power of names, as demonstrated in the meanings that names embed, mark, and sign on the persons bearing them. In the next section, we describe some of the fundamentals on which that recognition draws, starting with the basic knot between names and identity.

What’s in a Name? Power, Entitlement, and Dominance Central to the ongoing discussion on names is the essence of relationship between the name and what or whom it comes to describe (Zabeeh, 1968). Not much can be said to refute Antisthenes’s insight into names, although almost 5,000 years have passed since then: “For most of us, a name is much more than just a tag or a label. It is a symbol, which stands for the unique combination of characters and attributes that define us as an individual. It is the closest thing that we have to a shorthand for self- concept” (Antisthenes, cf. Omi, 1998: 329; emphasis added). Whether as a symbol, a representation, or an integrated inseparable element of the self, names will always be considered as strongly attached to their owners or carriers. The fact that whenever you ask the fundamental question “who are you?” the answer begins with a persons’ name reflects the central role a name has in shaping and designing a person’s sense of himself/herself. Anonymity, or the lack of a name, has grave personal and social significance, not to mention the association between a change of name and identity change (Falk, 1976). The concept of names as an aspect of a person’s public appearance is originally associated with the work of Charles Horton Cooley, who conceived the name as one of “those ideas that are most generally associated or colored with the ‘my’ feelings” (1902: 153–154). Despite the centrality of the name as one’s familiar object (e.g., a specific hair style for a woman or a mustache for a man) that others recognize as ours consisting of the routine habits that a person identifies with, Cooley thought that under specific social conditions, particularly such in which the name is socially devalued, a person would prefer separating himself/herself from his/her name. Being sensitive to issues related to appearance, Cooley understood that names intensify

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a person’s assessment of how others evaluate her/his worth. In other words, as an aspect of appearance and social presence, a name triggers our imagination in guessing what value others attribute to ourselves after we were introduced. Therefore, the name becomes crucial for social value both vertically and horizontally. Whenever we hear a name, we unconsciously place the person, who owns it, in relation to local social hierarchies, assigning him/her a position between the center and the margins. In this process, the name serves as a basis for the evaluation of what is normative and prestigious, or else awkward and stigmatized. The former kind of evaluation tends to result in a sense of pride and belonging, while the latter may result in isolation and shame, or in Cooley’s words: “mortification” (ibid., 152). Cooley’s work laid the ground for understanding the mechanism that enables the intense relationship between names and identity. While his successors enriched this understanding in various aspects, 2 recent trends in the current sociological field of identity turn the spotlight on issues of power relations in regard to names as well. The power to name, the ability to choose a name for oneself, and the consequences of not being able to do so are in the center of current discussions, as detailed below. Historically, one of the places where the power to name has been exerted vigorously on people was in the United States where until 1865, the time of the Thirteenth Amendment, African slaves in the United States were named by their enslavers regardless of their African names. Bourdieu (1991), who extensively examined language as a form of power, emphasized that naming practices have the power to create the social world. Moreover, he saw acts of state naming as a form of symbolic violence, depriving social agents of their right to name themselves and the world around them. His belief is echoed in recent studies investigating naming practices, 3 embodied in the notion that “renaming is remaking” (Suarez, 1997: 237). One of the important writers on the political nature of naming is Meira Valery Alia (2007). Drawing on an analysis of the politics of place expressed and reproduced by the Inuit naming practices,4 Alia offers an elaboration on the common understanding of the way names and identities are intertwined. Stressing the role of names in producing and maintaining power relations and differential privileges, she argues: Names can control relationship, work and the ability to integrate one’s personal history into present and future. The politics of naming is not merely a politics on the psychological level expressing personality and

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power in the smaller social order. It is a macro-politics affecting legal structures and the operations of governments and transgovernmental agencies. (pp. 15–16)

Our project follows Alia’s call for exposing the political meanings embedded in naming practices, using a terminology that enables us to connect between “power in the smaller social order” and “macropolitics.” What allowed Alia to study the web of relationships between people, places, names, and political regimes, a web she defines as “naming politics,” was the Inuit initiative to rename themselves and their land, notably as a movement rather than as individuals. For her, the study of naming is a salient aspect of investigating political behavior and political structure. Naming, she contends, is inseparable from other political phenomena and is an important key to analyzing power relations (2007: 7). Alia elaborates on this aspect of naming, stating that “the right to bestow names is a right which signifies that the namer has power,” even if the precise extent of the power the namer holds cannot be inferred. Exactly this point turned women against patronymy, demanding more equal solutions. Married women have struggled against the attempts of others to name them as early as the nineteenth century (Omi, 1997, 1998). In 1830, the Saint-Simoniennes in France insisted on using only their personal names as these were the names they got from their mothers (Moses and Rabine, 1993). They claimed it was the only name they needed. A decade later, in 1840, the call for antipatronymic reform was heard among American women as well, as part of the agenda brought up by the suffrage movement calling for liberation, equality, and antislavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a relatively well-known figure in the history of American feminism, was among the few women who refused to carry their husbands’ full name. Her refusal to become Mrs. Henry Stanton was part of her protest against white men being the “lords of all” (1840, cf. Omi, 1997: 114). Fifteen years later, in 1855, Lucy Stone became the first white woman retainer, who resisted patronymy in spite of a range of social sanctions that were issued against her. She was the inspiration of several American feminist women, who in 1921 established the “Lucy Stone League” for the purpose of spreading the notion that women do not need to follow patronymy and of educating people as well as institutions toward the acceptance of alternative naming practices (Kaplan & Bernays, 1999). Eventually, the Lucy Stone League played an indispensable role in the history of the women’s movement

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in the United States and in its attempt to change the power relations between women and men. This is not accidental, as the struggle for a woman’s right to choose her own name is based on the fundamental constitutional right to autonomy and freedom of choice.

The Feminist Critique of the Patronymic System The patronymic custom deprives women of their right to name themselves. Instead it allows others, particularly their husbands and state registries, to name them. Consistent with slavery, patronymic naming renders women an objectified possession as long as the exchange occurs between a father’s name and a husband’s name in the way property would be transferred (hooks, 1989: 43). The power to name women in this system is practically the power to create and reproduce femininity by way of using the power of kinship. Gayle Rubin, who conceptualized male power as reproduced in the organization of kinship, suggested that kinship excludes women from the possibility to participate in a relationship. Instead, women can only become a conduit of the relationship (1975: 174). Following Rubin, many have pointed out the centrality of patronymic practice to the reproduction of the gender hierarchy (Spender, 1980; Romaine, 1999). Men’s main privilege remains their right of maintaining intergenerational continuity in their families of origin, while benefiting from and contributing to its social respectability. As names were historically used for signifying ownership over possessions, the automatic assumption that children should receive their fathers’ family names echoes past times when women could not have their possessions registered under their names (Fineman, 1993: 387–9). An additional reminisce of past times is that the male patronymic privilege symbolizes male ownership and their right for exclusive access to their wives’ bodies and sexuality (Miller and Swift, 1991). These past meanings resonate with contemporary stereotypes and contribute to the reproduction of the image of appropriate femininity as reflected in women’s temporary naming: resembling their family names, “women are expected to exhibit malleable personalities, a willingness to adapt to any given situation as an expression of their fundamental discontinuous and dependent names/selves” (Lebell, 1988: 14). Persistent feminist criticism has managed to reduce the power position of the patronymic practice to a certain extent. At the same time, the privilege of continuity in men’s family names, in combination with

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romanticized idealizations of the patronymic custom, particularly that of a joint family name for all members of the family, continues to accumulate power. The trends strengthening patronymic customs derive power from another tendency, that of idealizing the romantic nature of the old days. Most empirical studies suggest that the majority of married women today living in societies with patronymic customs still prefer the traditional method. In 1995, rates for adopting husbands’ names in Europe reflected a very limited challenge to patronymic custom.5 Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, and Portugal allow more women to distance themselves from this custom.6 In Luxemburg, Belgium, and Italy, most women use two family names, and women in Spain do not change their names upon marriage (Valetas, 2001). For the United States, the most updated rate of nonconventional surnames stands only on 6.4 percent, based on a representative sample of women born in the United States approached in 2004 (Gooding and Kerider, 2010). This limited rate echos Valetas’ (2001) findings for the UK in 1995, suggesting that our discussion in this study on the ways in which feminism is systematically defeated by familism might also be relevant for understanding the developments outside Israel. Gooding and Kerider explain that had they included non-native-born Americans in their sample, they would have been able to show a rate of 9.1 percent. Since cultural norms vary, it would have been impossible then to state that nonconventional naming practices act against cultural norms. Most interesting about the 6.4 percent rate is that it reflects a reduction in nonconventional surnames compared to Brightman’s study (1994), which reported 10 percent. This reduction is consistent with previous indications presented by Goldin and Shim (2004) who assessed such a reduction on the basis of Harvard University yearbooks. Gooding and Kreider (2010) are able to map women’s choices more specifically: among the 6.4 percent, the majority of the women (4.9 percent) are retainers keeping different surnames for husbands and wives, while the future of hyphenation or holding two surnames looks really bad with a modest 1.3 percent. Confirming the previous research again, this recent study found that challengers are younger and highly educated (often with a master’s degree or more). African Americans tend to score higher: if they are counted alone, nonpatronymic self-naming reaches 9 percent. The limitations of hyphenation were well explained by Kupper (1990), who reported that women who hyphenated their names had real difficulties facing various social control sanctions: while women are struggling to maintain the hyphenation as their

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only possible compromise, others around them are hardly supportive; hence these women are exhausting their energies to protect their nonpatronymic practices. In other words, society is refusing to relinquish its power position, and it seems to be successful, for the vast majority of women.

Outline of the Book The following chapters present our systematic attempt to understand the subjugation process described above, as it occurs in Israel. In chapter 1, we introduce Israeli society from a perspective of feminist naming politics. We aim at explaining the nature of the ambivalence in the Israeli public discourse in order to lay the ground for our discussion of the interrelations of women’s gender, ethnic, and national identities. In chapter 2, we introduce our theoretical framework. We present our presumptions on agency and on to the “poststructuralist subject” in order to enable the unfolding of our weaving together of several of our key concepts such as positioning, the discursive order, and community of practice. All these elements allow us later to propose, based on our empirical data, the notion of ambivalent belonging. In chapter 3, we introduce a powerful analytical tool, which we call “the cultural loading of the name.” That concept enables us to decipher the intriguing venues through which issues of national loyalty and ethnicity are riding on feminist feathers. We found that feminism is primarily providing legitimacy for the process of self-naming. However, it is generally used for justifying naming practices that serve the accumulation of social capital for women themselves and for their children. In chapter 4, we begin our presentation of our empirical material, analyzing the features of the four normative images: the ideal femininity; the appropriate wife; the responsible mother; and the loyal citizen. We find that images of femininity nicely respond to feminist calls for assertiveness and self-fulfillment, even if at the price of a direct attack on feminism itself. At the same time, the image of the responsible mother, best corresponding with the loyal citizen, has the power to tame emerging femininity. In chapter 5, we return to investigating reminisce of patrilocality in women’s consciousness and examine closely the efforts women exert in their struggle to protect their right to name themselves. We use spatiality and temporality as our analytical dimensions for understanding how women mobilize their resisting power across situations and relationships. Finally, in chapter 6, we turn to examine marital negotiation over naming

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practices. This chapter explicates the difference between Israeli men, who struggle on a daily basis to maintain their patronymic privileges, and other men shouldering the fight against the patronymic naming system. Our findings suggest that without men’s full cooperation in the sense of waiving their privileged status, particularly the automatic transference of their names only to children, the patronymic naming system will be vigorously reproduced. Without men’s cooperation, women are likely to keep facing the very high price of challenging the normative practice dictated by familism. Our discussion outlines the primary outcome of the continuous experience of no solution: a type of questioned citizenship in the form of three positions of ambivalent belonging. In other words, we raise the possibility that women’s struggle for self-naming, taking place in the context of little support and few feminist discursive resources, reproduces the hegemonic position of familism and, by the same token, that of patronymic custom.

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1 Local Context of Identity Formation

Israeli women’s understanding of the historical process that enabled the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 has a significant effect on their identity formation. In the context of the local bloody battlefield, almost everybody in Israel has strong views concerning entitlements, rights, resolutions, and hopes. These views develop, among other things, as part of beliefs regarding the continuous conflict between Jews and Arabs/Palestinians in this area. Thus, emotionally intense national matters affect all aspects of day-to-day life, including the relative importance of other identity dimensions aside from the national one. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that our study reveals the Israeli scene to be the one where women’s marital names are not a gender issue alone, but also, concurrently, a national and ethnic issue. Preparing the background for analyzing the specificities of local naming practices thus necessitates an exposition of several of the main political processes. We begin this chapter with such an exposition, followed by a discussion on names from an Israeli perspective and a methodological note on the research presented in this book.

Political Process Shaping Gender Relations in Israel Four glorified facets of Jewish life in the state of Israel nurture the myth that Israeli Jewish women have a more equal position than women in other countries. These facets are the commitment to gender equality in the 1948 Declaration of Independence; women’s service in the Israeli army; communal childcare in the kibbutz1; and Golda Meir as a woman prime minister between 1969 and 1974. Research has shown, however, that gender hierarchies were powerful

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in organizing the service of women in the army and in the division of labor in the kibbutz, and that the statement on equality had little practical implications, beyond the right to vote. The wide gap between myth and reality is reflected in the decision of local feminist writers to give their collective volume the telling title Calling the Equality Bluff (Swirsky and Safir, 1991). Tracing the roots of the “bluff” reveals how gender equality, though supported by continuous feminist political action on various levels (Berkovitch and Mohagdam, 1999), is blocked by a unique combination of some major issues. According to Dalia Moore (1998), these issues consist of dominant militarism; the dominance of the security-ideology, which tends to marginalize all other ideologies, and the persistent strengthening of religious right-wing organizations. To those, we add the consolidation of the secondary- earner status of women, even under the condition of full-time employment. Dominant militarism concerns the enormous weight of the army and army-related male careers in Israeli social life. Moreover, it involves the exclusive attribution of all military and security expertise to men, while at the same time this is considered to be the key expertise in society due to its militaristic disposition (Sasson-Levy, 2003). Throughout their days in the education system, children and teens are encouraged to take pride in the Israeli army and to develop aspirations regarding their future service as soldiers. During army service, men, particularly officers, acquire qualifications that are perceived as particularly suitable for both managerial and political positions. Moore (1998) explains that in this way women’s access to position of authority are blocked, and their self-image is lowered. The dominance of the security ideology concerns the prioritization of defense-related expenses and considerations in any public debate. Budgeting is influenced by military needs, both through the direct financing of the defense ministry and through the national debt generated primarily by the purchase of weapons (Shalev, 1999). Other policy issues are influenced by military considerations to the extent that any social expense is recognized in the public discourse as justified as long as it is constructed as conducive to military needs. Commitment to democratic rights and the protection of human rights has been generally denounced by the notion of a “selfdefending democracy” (Horowitz and Lissak, 1978) that tends to justify most military actions. Local legal discourse, for example, was found to silence the abuse of certain civil rights in three areas: “the

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legitimacy and legality of Israel as a Jewish republic, the place of the Arab-Palestinian minority in this context, and national security issues” (Barzilai, 2007: 267). The persistently growing strength of religious right-wing organizations relates to the fact that the Israeli legal system grants Orthodox Judaism an exclusive position: it is the only legitimate form of Jewish worship in Israel. Other forms of Judaism, the reform and conservative movements, more influenced by feminism and liberalism, remain very limited in their power and influence (Tabory, 2003). Marriages conducted by reform or conservative rabbis require additional validation by a civil wedding abroad; otherwise they are not legally accepted. As a matter of fact, there are no civil weddings in Israel. The orthodox religious authorities still exclusively control matrimonial law, and representatives of orthodox religious parties have controlled the ministry of the interior, including all state registries, since the establishment of the Israeli state (Halperin-Kaddari, 2004). Gender inequality is taken for granted in rabbinical courts; and in divorce procedures, the husbands’ refusal to divorce as well as differential evaluation of extramarital relationships can become important. A recent study shows that secular opposition to the orthodox regulation of matrimonial law has created a unique local form of cohabitation (Benjamin and Haze, 2011). Though this process may indicate a strengthening of secular forces, religious right-wing parties and organizations are constantly gaining strength to the extent that in the 2010 parliament one-fifth of its members are representatives of religious parties. The additional fourth issue consists of women’s position in the labor market. It mirrors class, national, and ethnic cleavages by allowing merely less than one-third of employed women to earn salaries that deviate from the “secondary earner” assumption (Kraus, 2002). The combined effect of militarism, the defense ideology, religious authority over matrimonial law, and a polarized labor market has been women’s continuous dependency on men and on state allowances, while gender equality remains a privilege of middle- class women. Furthermore, major differences among women evolved between three ethnonational categories of Israeli women in their modes of employment and economic opportunities: Ashkenazi Jews (from European descent), Mizhrah’i Jews (from Middle Eastern descent), and Arab women (Kraus, 2002; Haberfeld and Cohen, 2007). We turn now to

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the issue of ethnicity in the Israeli context, in order to provide more details on these disparate groups. The Jewish population in Israel is composed mainly of immigrants and/or their descendents. Immigrants from Middle Eastern countries and their descendents (“Mizrah’i”) consistently occupy a social stratum lower than immigrants from European countries and their descendents (“Ashkenazi”) (Kraus and Hodge, 1990; Cohen and Haberfeld, 1998). While Ashkenazi Jews were able to gain economic, political, and cultural advantages, Mizrah’i Jews were exposed to implicit and indirect exclusionary actions that were primarily silenced (Motzafi- Haller, 2001). Various geographic and education policies as well as resource allocation mechanisms are suggested as having played a role in the creation and reproduction of this reality over the years (e.g., Lewin- Epstein et al., 1997). In the 1950s, for example, immigrants from Middle Eastern countries were initially oriented toward “development” towns in the north and south of Israel, so as to populate peripheral areas. Immigrants, who remained in central urban settings, usually congregated in marginal, weaker neighborhoods (Tzfadia and Yftachel, 2004, Yiftachel, 2006; Lithwick et al., 1996). In class terms, Mizrah’i immigrants primarily held blue- collar jobs or performed unskilled or skilled work, or lower white- collar work (Bernstein and Swirsky, 1982). This was no less true for women. The labor force participation of Mizrah’i women was relatively low, and during the first few decades of the state, they were concentrated in blue- collar work and personal services (Bernstein, 1993). Over time, there has been some significant upward mobility, and Mizarah’i families have accumulated assets and entered prestigious sectors. Thus, second generation Mizrah’im have improved their socioeconomic status in relation to the first generation, though not in relation to the second generation of Ashkenazim (Lewin-Epstein et al., 2003). This mobility, in particular, characterizes those among the second generation Mizrah’im, who acquired higher education, mostly those living in centrally located cities, and those who got stable jobs. Many of the women in that category left service work and industrial blue- collar work, and entered low-level, white/pink- collar occupations and female professional occupations. Nevertheless, some have remained in service jobs, typical of the first generation. This form of ethnic exclusion is clearly manifested in the different unemployment rates between center and periphery of Israel. 2 Among these, Mizrah’i women in the south are particularly dependent on a restricted

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opportunity structure as are Arab women in towns and villages in the northern periphery (Keynan, 2007). Many scholars point out the processes of deskilling, devaluing, and, more generally, underevaluating women’s work (e.g., Grimshaw and Rubery, 2007) which apply in the Israeli labor market. Education was thought to reflect the cleavage between women entitled to a pension and those who were not. But, now, with the privatization of social services, it has become clear that women’s university degrees are gradually losing their value in the Israeli labor market, particularly degrees held by stigmatized ethnonational categories (Cohen and Haberfeld, 2007). As a result, class polarization is now enhanced to a large extent by segregation that is often based on ethnonational characteristics (see also Benjamin et al., 2011).

An Israeli Perspective on Names In this section, we focus on the legal and cultural contexts within which naming practices occur. We begin by a brief survey of the legal situation of naming in Israel, discussing the legal regulations regarding married women’s names and the changes that occurred over the years. We conclude the chapter by introducing the existing research on naming in the Israeli contexts, highlighting the striking absence of studies on women’s marital names.

Names in Israel: the Law of 1956 During the British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948), the local administration followed the British legal system that permitted all naming changes. In 1921, the high commissioner issued a regulation introducing three conditions: any person wishing to change his/her name must announce the change at the immigration department or at any local police station; must pay a fee; and must place a public announcement in a formal newspaper. Interestingly, it seems that no advertisements of this kind were ever published, although many name changes occurred during that time (Bokstein, 1980: 4–5). In 1956, the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) decided that the British legal system was too liberal on the matter of name changes, and that constraints should be introduced together with strict government surveillance. The legal changes were justified by the need for standardization in an immigrants’ state and for preventing related deception. Standardizing was a typical justification at the time, nurtured by the

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“melting pot” spirit. Introducing the initiative at the Knesset, the minister of the interior at the time defined the issue as a matter of the difficulties caused by the Arab tradition for the modern state system (Kamir, 1997). Extensive scholarship has developed since, arguing that standardization took the practical shape of adopting Ashkenazi custom, while stigmatizing the customs of other ethnic segments as inferior (e.g., Dahan-Kalev, 1999b). The regulations of the Law of Names include the duty to carry a first and a last name; a limitation on the number of names a person may carry; definitions regarding who has the right to name whom; and, most important for the matter at hand, limitations on name changes. A change of name is permitted only once in seven years; deceit is prohibited—understood as implying that a woman cannot adopt her partner’s name, unless they are legally married, and that a married person cannot change her/his name, if her partner does not change his/her name accordingly. Adopting names that may violate the public’s feelings is also prohibited (Kamir, 1997: 336; Bukstein, 1980:5). Still today, state surveillance of naming is enabled by the 1956 legislation, although some changes have been made in it along the years, as will be discussed below.

Israeli Women’s Family Names Already in its original form, the Law of Names included a specific clause on married women aiming at standardizing the procedure for all women by adopting the Ashkenazi custom. 3 Kamir suggests that in the early years, the state establishment intended to establish a clear definition of the family and to protect it; the Law of Names was one of the measures adopted for that purpose (1997). Clause 6 of the 1956 law is entitled “family name by marriage” and states that “on her marriage a woman will take her husband’s family name; but she is permitted, any time, to add her birth family name to her husband’s family name, or her previous family name, in case of a previous marriage. A woman may carry her birth family name, or her previous family name, rather than add any of them” (The Names Law, 1956). Clause 7 instructs that a divorced woman may continue to carry her marital name. Feminist analysis of the parliament discussions around this early legislation explains that they reflect an overall sensitivity to women’s legal and social status, but without any substantial commitment to equality. As in other

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legislation of the time, women are treated as wives and mothers, and not as individuals or independent citizens (Kamir, 1997; Berkowitz, 1999). Moreover, the administrative outcome of the law has been a procedure that automatically changes a married women’s name into her husband’s name without her being informed of the matter. This procedure underlines the exceptionality of woman making nonpatronymic decisions; hence those deviant women, who tried to reclaim their birth family names, had to face a series of administrative hurdles. One major barrier was the unpublished regulation prohibiting any such change to be made later than one year after the wedding. Women, who managed to request a name change on time, had to accept their partner’s name as their “previous name,” even if it was not really their previous name as far as they were concerned. In addition, the ministry of the interior that is in charge on all registration procedures took the liberty to inhabit single women from taking the name of a man they cohabited with. By these rigid procedures the Law of Names became an instrument of implementing the patriarchal custom, according to which a woman’s family name informs the public of her personal status. The policy implemented by the ministry of the interior regarding unmarried women and the prohibition affecting them generated political protest among women and brought the struggle for women’s right to choose their family names to court. Paradoxically, the legal battle for the right of a woman to name herself was promoted by women, who insisted on their right to embrace the patronymic custom, fighting in fact for broadening it. These women could not marry their partners due to restrictions in the Israeli Law of Marriage; therefore they were not allowed to adopt their partners’ names as they wanted to. It is informative of Israeli politics that substantiating women’s subject positions within the familist discourse, as mothers or wives, has often served as a precondition for women’s political activity. Moreover, the fact that antipatronymic struggle in Israel was not led by feminists is again informative, signifying the possibility that issues of respectability rather than issues of rights have the power to mobilize social protest in the local setting. In 1996, during a period of intense prowomen legislation, an amendment to clause 6 of the Law of Names was enacted, as a result of parliamentary activity that forced the government to change the law. The name of the clause was revised to “the family name after marriage” and its regulation determines the following three

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items: (a) a married person is permitted to continue carrying or return to carrying her/his birth family name, to choose her/his partner’s family name, to hyphenate her/his partner’s name or to select a family name identical to that selected by her/his partner, even if the selected name differs from both partners’ birth family names; (b) upon marriage a person should inform the marriage registry what family name she/he intends to carry, and any such change would become valid from the time of marriage; (c) the minister will determine how the notification on the new family name should be announced. Clause 7 was also revised; it now allows a divorced woman to return to her previous family name. In addition, clause 11 was cancelled, enabling couples to carry different family names; and clause 16 was added to secure that the minister cannot disqualify a chosen family name on the ground that it was chosen within a relationship of cohabitation (i.e., noninstitutionalized couplehood; this clause was added, because of a legal precedent). To date, there are no official reports in Israel regarding changes in family names. Data attained, upon our specific request,4 from the ministry of the interior indicate that the described legal amendment had little impact: only one percent of all Jewish Israeli women, who got married since 1985, 5 retained their birth family names after marriage. The increase in retainers after the amendment of the names law has been very minor. That is, among women, who got married since 1996, the rate of retainers is merely 1.2 percent. A bit more optimism can be elicited from the figure related to women carrying a different family name than their partners (nonconventional self-naming hereafter), even though here, too, the increase after the law amendment is limited. While among women, who got married since 1985, the figure for nonconventional self-naming was 14.4 percent, it is 17.3 percent among those who got married since 1996. In other words, the popularity of nonconventional naming practices has increased by about 3 percent since the amendment. This raises the question why the Israeli rate is higher than the recent American figure (9 percent) reported by Gooding and Kreider (2010). As we aim to argue in this book, the relative popularity of nonconventional naming practices stems from a specific local mix of feminist, occupational and interethnic motivations. Among women, who got married since 1996, 16 percent have a different family name than their youngest child. It seems possible

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to assess that 1.3 percent (deducting the 16 percent from the 17.3 percent of the nonconventional self-naming) are women, who made nonconventional naming choices and transferred them to their children. If we accept this proxy evaluation, it means that 1.3 percent of the women insist on a joint name with their children, while challenging patronymy. Nugent (2010) recently presented an in- depth account of why this figure remains so low. She showed how the prevalent perceptions of motherhood as devoted to protecting children’s well-being are reflected in a continuous social scolding of mothers, who dare to transfer hyphenated names to their children. In her analysis of web forum discussions, she found a persistent voice calling mothers’ attention to the alleged suffering of children with cumbersome names. A similar stance prevailed in our interviewees’ experiences, with the implication that in Israel too, micro and macro gender structures are reproduced through naming practices. Fascinating, even if small, is the trend of Israeli men, who waive their patronymic privilege to maintain the stability of their surnames and the automatic transference of their surnames to their children. Though surely not an accurate reflection of the daily usage of surnames in various situations, the data of the ministry of the interior suggest that next to the increase in the trend of women’s self-naming, a parallel trend emerges for men. Figure 1.1 shows the interrelation between these two trends. Figure 1.1 clearly shows that more married women have become reflexive about the option of self-naming, even though the number of those, who practically pursue a nonconventional choice, remains

Women

10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000

Men

−

2009 2008 Figure 1.1

2007

2004 2006 2005

2003 2002

2001 2000

1999

1996 19981997

Registered changes in family names of women and men 1996–2010.

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under 10,000 per annum. Given that in recent years there are about 50,000 marriages annually, the number constitutes just under onefifth of the marrying women. As the data includes formally married couples only, there are probably another 3 percent of retainers among those, who live in long-term cohabitation. At the same time, a small group of men join their partners in antipatronymic naming practices. True, their number remains under 2,000 per year, but as a process of an emerging community of practice, they surely herald a broader range of options for couples, who get married. These figures indicating new trends further emphasize that a routine report on naming practices is due. Such a report would need to include distinctions between the various naming options and between types of families and relationships, presenting for all categories statistics of women and men regarding their own names as well as their children-related decisions. The legal feminist expert Orit Kamir assessed the amendment as feminist in nature in the sense that it encourages women to consider their family names independently and remain reflexive regarding their subjective meanings. At the same time, the law presents several possibilities facilitating a woman’s name choice on the basis of her self-perception. Although the feminist amendment could be celebrated, the routine procedures of the ministry of the interior were left unchanged. The fact that the administrative system is hardly committed to implementing the progressive policy shows the ambivalent nature of the Israeli reality. In 2000, the state ombudsman reported a complete disregard of the legal change. Furthermore, women intending to refrain from adopting the patronymic practice find little support in the administrative corridors for realizing their naming rights. But before unfolding our findings regarding women’s struggles in this area, we want to relate to some previous studies on naming practices in Israel.

Studying Names in the Israeli Context Names have received considerable attention in the ongoing investigation of Israeli society. Jewish onomastics has already been mentioned in the introduction. Other disciplines have discussed names as well, mostly within the debate on the “melting pot” processes in the Israeli immigrants’ society. The major focus here has been on the process of Hebraization6 that was explored from semantic,

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lingual, and cultural perspectives (e.g., Bundi, 2001; Touri, 1988; Stahl, 1994; Beit- Hallahmi, 1998). In his studies, Touri described the forceful nature of the process whereby those considered delegates of the Zionist establishment, including diplomats and pilots were forced to Hebraize their names. Later commentators (Almog, 1991) suggested that this political practice had generated a powerful cultural preference for those with Hebraized names, which were associated with meanings of loyalty, value, rationality, and progress. In addition, a renowned sociological study of first names investigated the way they reflect the gradually emerging dominance of individualism and the changing commitments to the state-building project (Weitman, 1986). Another less known, but rather significant research project was presented by a sociologist, who analyzed statistics of name changes in Israel (Bokstein, 1980). Her findings report a decrease over time: while in 1923 just under 4 percent of the population applied for a name change, there were only 1.3 percent in 1972. In most of these investigations the issue of women’s naming practices is briefly summarized in passing comments, if at all. No systematical research in this matter was undertaken prior to our project; neither the Central Bureau of Statistics nor the Ministry of the Interior has ever published any statistics with regards to how many women retain their names. The figures presented above by us are the first to be published; they portray only a partial quantitative picture. Within the existing literature on names in Israel, one study was particularly powerful in demonstrating the essence of the Israeli familist discourse on the topic: Abraham Stahl completed his book on the origin and evolution of names in 2000, four years after the amendment of the Law of Names. He included five pages in a section entitled Retaining a woman’s birth family name. In this section, he clarified that upper- class women in industrialized countries no longer follow the patronymic practice, and that deep intercultural differences exist. Stahl was worried by the American feminist naming politics and thought that retaining might trigger marital tensions. Let us cite him in translation: There are men, who feel insulted, when women do not take their names, and there are some, who believe that by avoiding taking their husbands’ name, women hurt their children, because their familial identity will not be sufficiently clear in this way. At times

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Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel those protesting are not the fathers, but their parents, who are worried about the continuity of their names. One cannot deny that the reluctance to carry the husband’s name is a sign of a problem in the couple’s relationship, or even a certain problematic [read: pathology; our emphasis] in a woman’s general attitude toward the institute of marriage. [ . . . ] The hyphenated name is carried as a flag, but it is not always clear what the flag represents. Lengthy names are irritating in conversation and on the phone, especially when one needs to write them down [ . . . ] in an egalitarian society, where aristocrats’ status is no longer important, a lengthy name sounds at times pretentious. (Stahl, 2005: 240–241)

It is clear that the text was written with a decisive negation of feminist aspiration in the field of naming practices. Family- centeredness and marriage are magnified, and the harm to the children is made clear without any need to present empirical data to support the view.

A Note on Our Research Design Semistructured interviews served as the principal research tool in our project. At the end of a complex process of filtering and sampling, 42 Israeli Jewish women were interviewed for the purpose of this research. All secular and heterosexual, these women were in their first marriage and had stated that the issue of the family name after marriage was central to them at the time of their marriage. These women had made diverse choices on the question of the family name after marriage; in other words, there were those who preserved their birth family names, others who adopted their partners’ names, there were those who hyphenated both names, and still others who, together with their partner, took a new, third name. Without prior intention, the sample became organized in such a way that all women were middle class, all but one were born in Israel, and the vast majority was of Ashkenazi (Western or European) origin. They all had high levels of education and held relatively prestigious occupational positions. For an elaborated discussion on our research methodology and a detailed table of all our interviewees, their names, and naming practices, see Appendix 1. One important methodological aspect that is unique to the current study relates to how we present the names of the participants. As customary in this kind of studies, all interviewees were guaranteed

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full anonymity during the preliminary stages of the study. But since the names in our study are central to readers’ understanding of the discussed social processes, all names we use in this book are indeed fake names, but they were not chosen randomly. The specific process is described in the Appendix as well.

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2 Naming Identities: Politics of Identity

Introduction The field of naming practices, and particularly those which evolve in an ambivalent context characterized by contradicting and conflicting forces, provides an opportunity to disentangle the complexity of the concepts “identity,” “becoming,” “belonging,” and last but not least the experience of “choice.” We discovered evidence of all these in our data, as it expose the intensified reflexivity that is involved in the decision making process that women go through regarding their family name after marriage. Women’s accounts of their marital names are most revealing in explicating women’s ability to experience themselves as making a “choice.” In order to clarify the relationships between all these concepts, our analysis of the empirical data is constructed through a range of analytical concepts, particularly “positioning,” “community of practice,” and the “discursive order.” Following this trail enables us to contribute new insights into current discussions on the ambivalence of discursive orders (Lazar, 2005), as it had not been yet connected to the notions of positioning and community of practice. Naming practices are of a specific type of choices reflecting two contradictory routes of social being. One route is sometime called “resistance” while the other is sometimes called “accommodation.” The first reflects the struggle to experience oneself as becoming a liberated subject in the sense of playing with the idea of being independent from the approval of others. Such a play usually takes the form of constant reflexivity regarding degrees of freedom to maneuver in unknown terrains. On the other end, the second route of “accommodation” reflects the continuous search for a home in more than

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one meaning: in the sense of a home for oneself and in the sense of a home for one’s children. Sara Mills’ (2003) application of the notion “community of practice” to the study of women’s naming practices may provide a particularly effective path for mediating these two contradictory directions of negotiating the meanings of a family name. A community of practice is defined by Wagner (1999) as a shared domain of interests in which members join in common activities or a shared practice that is based on a particular competence. Over time, members develop shared stories and language that reinforces their distinct identity and mutual engagement in the shared practice. Importantly, the process of becoming a member and validating membership constantly depends on following the allegedly agreed upon practices of the community that serve as the entry tickets. Gee (2005) explains what kind of activities may qualify for this function: “an activity counts as a practice in a given community of practice just in virtue of its role in allowing a person to be accepted (recognized) as a member of the community of practice” (p. 590). The power of recognizing and accepting is a power position owned by concrete and imagined members of a specific community of practice. It affects the processes of production of the self of other members, who wish to belong to the community. This power relation may be revealed by using the method of positioning, as we describe below. A central tool in this method is based on speech acts in conversations. These are seen as important aspects of the interactions and relationship that are crucial for the becoming process. This process is also discussed below as part of the relational pragmatics perspective, which enables the understanding of agency from relevant aspects. So does the theory of performativity, which is the production of the self by the usage of an intelligible repertoire of actions and speech. In what follows, we introduce the framework we have developed out of our encounter with these notions. We find this framework conducive for explaining forms of women’s dependency on “others” in the process of becoming, positioning, and producing themselves. We practically translate this dependency as the requirement on women’s talk to remain rational and appropriate. On the basis of this premise, we undertake to investigate variations among communities of practice in what they consider rational and appropriate. We unfold our discussion in five steps: (1) in naming agency, we introduce basic themes in the continuous sociological scholarship on agency and some related feminist arguments on resistance; (2) in contesting naming agency, we clarify where we stand on the debate between Emirbayer and Mische’s

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(1998) discussion of relational pragmatics and Davies’s (2000) understanding of the subject as the basis to our decision to use the positioning method; (3) in positioning by the name, we introduce in detail the positioning method of analysis; (4) in the section the discursive order, we introduce the discourse interaction approach (Hajer, 1995) as our measure for shifting attention to the context within which naming choices are taken; and (5) finally, in politics of identity, we discuss the political relations between dimensions of identity and their impact on the process of positioning.

Naming Agency Scholarship on the relationship between free will and necessity, voluntarism and determinism have developed in sociology into a debate over the extent to which structure and agency should be seen as either separate or intertwined. Giddens (1984) had substantiated the idea of blurred boundaries between structure and agency by his conceptualization of the recursive relationship between human action and social context. The idea is that structure constrains the human action and action, in its turn, may either follow accepted routines that validate and reproduce the structure or it can gain enough power to mobilize resources to challenge and transform the structure. In his 1991 book, corresponding with Foucault, on the resources that the reflexive and knowledgeable subject develops in late modernity, he further elaborated on the structure’s dependency on human action. Emphasizing the contingent nature of trust while focusing on consumerism and self-help culture as facilitating suspicion, Giddens (1991) showed the reduction in the persuasion power of political structures. Life politics in the form of environmental movements operating next to individual action lacking the mobilization of social forces further substantiated his view of the recursive relationship between agency and structure. Alternatively, there are scholars who argue for the separation between agency and structure even though they accept the salience of agency and human access to power resources. Such scholars contend that it is important to ask how much change can be introduced by human action and what types of structures can practically be transformed. Many feminist writers, for example, now agree that despite persistent action of women organizations neoliberalism has weakened and transformed policies in ways detrimental to women around the world. Women exposed to class, racial, ethnic, and/or national exclusions were hurt particularly painfully (O’Connor et al., 1999; Walby,

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2009). This phenomenon raises the primary question: what structures are amenable to what specific change? Another set of questions that follows may be what significance bares the changes for whom among those interacting with these structures? Feminists who tried to answer these questions seem to have one thing in common: they had developed an intensified interest in the notion of resistance as a specific form of agency (Davis and Fisher, 1993). We turn now to discuss some views of resistance as they are central to our analysis. In her scholarship on perfomativity, Judith Butler had taken the furthest the possibilities of women’s resistance (McNay, 1999). To allow for a resisting subject, she dismantled two elements in Goffman’s (1959) earlier elaboration on perfomativity: predetermined social roles and limited audience intelligibility. Like Goffman, Butler argues that repeated gestures become recognized as forming steady aspects of a person’s self and identity. However, while for Goffman connecting to specific roles has the power to determine identity, Butler suggests that identity is continuously created by the action itself. Both see practices of daily life, including all verbal and nonverbal gestures, as a person’s way of socially producing his/her identity. But for Goffman, these will be used to validate the familiar role while for Butler, these will be used in more creative and hence potentially subversive ways. As society for Goffman can be quite cruel in discrediting stigmatized individuals, they can use performativity primarily to validate existing identities. In contrast, for Butler, identity is opened to transformation by changes in behavioral practices and routines. In her view, the resisting subject is not obliged to any predetermined roles. Free of any obligations to set in advance codes, Butler’s resisting subject can use audience in self-empowering ways that facilitate resistance. How did Butler manage to see “others” as a source of liberation? By reducing the limitations of the repertoires, from which specific practices are selected for producing identity through performance. In Goffman’s dramaturgical approach (1959), the audience holds enormous importance in constraining the repertoire; unless the audience, specific present people or imagined participants, are able to validate the gesture by accepting it as a substantial aspect of the self, the performance might fail. In contrast, benefiting from the poststructuralist turn in contemporary thought (Baxter, 1993), Butler locates the constraints elsewhere. She used the notion of “frameworks of intelligibility” (1990) to represent both situational constraints and subversive possibilities: Like Goffman (1981), Butler contends that the

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potential of any specific social practice to constitute an identity performance is contingent upon its intelligibility. As long as a culturally accepted discourse provides meaning to specific selected practices, identity is performed or in Butler’s words, gender is produced. Butler explains that “precisely because certain kinds of ‘gender identities’ fail to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility, they appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities from within that domain” (1990:24). The important point for her is, however, that intelligibility depends only partially on what is culturally accepted. Practices that are not intelligible within the cultural matrix may still persist and proliferate as they are validated by “subversive matrices of gender disorder” (ibid.). Identity performance then depends on the intelligibility of practices either within discourses that are culturally accepted, perhaps even hegemonic, or within oppositional discourses. In other words, identity performance for Butler may not depend on the validation of specific others, but rather on familiarity with oppositional discourses. Identities are not to be examined as either or categories, but rather as reflected attributes generated through active signification of the connection to a specific discourse. Thus the analysis of identity as performance focuses on specific practices, the exploration of which may benefit from actors’ reflexive considerations. Other feminists were reluctant to take Butler’s optimism regarding the accessibility of subversive repertoire of behaviors. Some argued for intersectionality of gender, race, and class as an important perspective for realizing material, social, and cultural dependencies in women’s lives confining the potential for subversive action (Fisher and Davis, 1993). In the context of material scarcity, Aptheker (1989) argued that resistance is subversive only to the extent that it creates “the conditions necessary for life, and it is about women expanding the limits of the restrictions imposed upon them” (169: 1989). On the basis of Scott’s conceptualization of back stage private resistance (1992), Lister (2004) supported Aptheker’s argument by elaborating on the political significance of both private and public forms of resistance. On the one hand, Lister’s analysis of resistance validates Butler’s theorization: even under the most constrained conditions, women are able to adopt subversive conduct. On the other hand, together with Aptheker (1989), Lister introduces an important issue: women’s responsibility and obligations toward their children and those whom they care for. Even if we refrain from going back to the self-in-relations

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concept of early feminist psychologist who Butler criticized for reproducing patriarchal stereotyping, we need a notion of a resisting subject that is fully obligated to protecting her children and family from the prices paid for resistance. Thus we search for a notion of agency that is located within relationships. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) suggest that individuals maintain diverse dialogues with situational contexts in a way that gives them power to act in creative ways outside accepted practices over time and space dimensions. For Emirbayer and Mische, the context refers primarily to others surrounding the individual who, as actors in the different contextual environments, invite or inhabit engagement. Echoing Wagner’s focus on mutual engagement enabled by belonging to communities of practice Emirbayer and Mische emphasize multiplicity in types of relationship individuals have. Without using the notion of community of practice, they too are interested in the options of mobilizing relationships, with their importance and intensity on different time and space sequences. Relationships, in their turn, are capable of transforming the significance of past memories, present concerns, and future hypothesizations. Intersubjectivity, social interaction, and communication are the processes through which others gain the power to constitute the conditions of possibility for action and negotiation. Within these concerns, agency emerges as always in “a dialogical process by and through which actors immersed in temporal passage engage with others within collectively organized contexts of action” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 974).

Contesting the Naming Agency Feminists have always emphasized the potential of women’s political organizations, community activism, and individual resistance defying hegemonic conservative images connecting femininity to passive obedience and disinterest in politics. Such feminist projects have developed against powerful liberal assumptions constructing a humanist view of the individual as liberated, autonomous, and capable of free rational choices outside societal constraints. In this section, we follow Davies’s (2000) clarification of the differences between these two stances while also comparing them with Emirbayer and Mische’s relational notion of agency. Along these lines, we hope to justify our theory of ambivalent belonging. Namely, our understanding of women’s power resources enabling them to negotiate their belonging to diverse communities of practice, some of which reject unconventional

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naming practices. Building a theory of ambivalent belonging requires the foundation of relational agency in order to deal with the question of how women as subjects become able to challenge patronymic routines and procedures, and what are the social forces that shape actions and meanings on this matter. Davies (2000) posits the humanist approach as different from the poststructuralist one on five clear contentions. The first deals with the notion of identity. Identity is central to the humanist approach, attributing the individual stable and unified skills acquired through conscious and rational processes. The acquisition of language serves to develop a coherent adult identity by constructionist shaping of values. The adult identity, in its turn, assists in rejecting any irrational and inappropriate emotions and urges. In contradistinction, subjectivity, the poststructuralist category, is positioned by discourses through acts of speaking and writing. Some of these are enacted by the self and some by the others. The notion of subjectivity fundamentally encompasses multiplicity of discourses as coherence is never assumed and more than one discourse will have constitutive effects without interrupting any previous discursive positioning. Contradictions rather than coherence are therefore the stable feature even if they have to be hidden in order to maintain an appearance of rational and conscious control. The relational notion of agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998) is obligated to people’s hope for accumulation of resources for themselves and others whom they care for or are responsible for in the various contexts of their social activity. Here the irrational is recognized and contradictions prevail, but the emphasis is on agentic work toward inner coherence; processual effort that would harmonize present considerations with future projections continuously shaping interactions and constraint negotiation. As articulated in many discussions of resistance (Scott, 1992) an individuals are full of contradictions—of loyalties, for example—but they must silence these for the sake of benefiting of scarce resources. The second difference deals with the notion of choice. The humanist thought emphasizes the rational nature of an individual’s choices. Feminists, however, have mostly refrained from using the vocabulary of rational choice, as it isolates individual women as responsible for their oppression and exclusion. More often, feminists have criticized scholarship related to culture-of-poverty argumentation as assuming a human deficit in its treatment of women who struggle to survive poverty (Lister, 2004). In poststructuralist terms, choices are the outcome of desire as much as the outcome of rationality. Subjective desire

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is discursively constituted and choices are inevitably constrained to paths made available by various discourses. Importantly, the desire to become a person who is capable of rational choice making is discursively constituted by hegemonic individualism but this path is available to the privileged only. In their emphasis on relationship, Emirbayer and Mische maintain a dialogue with rational choice while extensively detailing the context in which the choice is experienced. They explain that diversified structural, cultural, and interactional forces take part in the continual becoming into practice of any intention, obliterating the possibility of an asocial choice. The notion of community of practice, introduced above, seems to express best the possibility that the desire for belonging may become more powerful of any rational inner preference or desire for autonomous control. A third difference between the theoretical approaches concerns the dualism between the individual and society. The humanist approach assumes such dualism implying some presocial human entity that throughout the encounter with society undergoes a process of taming called socialization. The separation between a person and society embeds the expectation that a person will develop her own identity as separated from any crowd or collectives. Such a separation contradicts the poststructuralist approach as the subject in this view does not exist outside language and discourse and no presocial existence can be assumed. Discourses constitute subjects and people depend on categories provided by discourses to reproduce their belonging to collectives. Discursive constructions constitute available subject positions, which are then experienced as “I” in the sense of a set of unique dispositions. Being Meadian in its roots, the relational notion of agency distances itself away from the separation between individual and society because language, interaction, and membership in collectives are all considered to be salient dimensions of agency. Further, while basically accepting Giddens’s perspective according to which agency and structure are mutually constitutive, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) suggest that for analytical purposes they should be kept separate. Focusing on reflexivity, and more specifically on the evaluation ability, individuals exert a constant judgment on their collective while continuously assessing their position within these collectives. Adopting the notion of community of practice, which is also about the experienced struggle to be accepted and positively judged by specific collectives, enables us to follow the positioning methods and adopt a relational notion of agency. Thus throughout our analysis, we are interested in locating or identifying constitutive discourses

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in our participants’ subjectivities, while at the same time investigating women’s sense of belonging to the collectives around them. From this perspective, women’s concerns with their positions provide an opportunity to scrutinize their search for discursive resources. Utilizing such resources, women are able to produce their sense of belonging to specific communities of practice even if only partially or in ambivalent ways. Nevertheless, for us, the important information lies in the categories believed to facilitate rational positioning within specific communities of practice. Continuity versus fragmentation is the fourth way of distinguishing between humanism and poststructuralism. As mentioned above, the humanist assumption of a coherent set of values as defining identity is constantly refuted by the poststructuralists’ perception of the experience of continuity as discursively produced. Although some coherence is formed by habitus and by the routinized nature of daily life, from a relational perspective, agency is understood as capable of contradiction. Contradictions evolve under circumstances of ambivalence regarding long-term goals and goals set by the power of the situation, the interaction, and emerging events. Hence, the question is which discourse has been more powerful compared to other discourses in generating the experience of continuity and that of rational positioning. We accept the poststructuralist notion of fragmentation but ask under what conditions can fragmentation become visible? We argue that one major condition that allows fragmentation is the amount of renunciation a woman is able to experience once committed to a community of practice. For example, as long as she believes that she depends on the approval of any powerful community of practice for ensuring her children’s well-being, it is unlikely that she will resort to attend any possible fragmentations. One methodological point is raised by Davies (2000) as contrasting the compared views. Humanists consider stories to be versions of real events and that adults are able of distinguishing between real and false events. In contrast, poststructuralists believe that stories are people’s interpretations that cannot be used for documenting the way things are but only to document the ways people’s speech reproduces discursive categories. In this way, their speech practically creates the reality they live in. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) do not treat this issue directly. It can be inferred, however, that the emphasis on relationships and interactions can be taken as an indication that interaction is not perceived as fictional. Even if a multiplicity of stories can be told of an interaction and its interpretations can develop over time

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in diverse directions, still the interaction is real in its consequences. In this sense, it is interesting to ask with whom a person interacted and what past, present, and future are related to reflexive evaluations and were transformed by the interaction if at all. For our concern here, stories of naming practices are central to the proposed analysis not only because they expose interactions but primarily because they are located within a discursive order, which we are aiming to map. Having clarified our assumptions on the five contentions related to the topic of agency, we continue unfolding our theoretical framework by concentrating on the issue of positioning, which is central to the understanding of individuals’ utilization of discursive resources.

Positioning by the Name “Social positioning” is conceptualized as personhood production within conversation and interaction. In his understanding of positioning, Rom Harré (2004) emphasizes the salience of its flexibility as it incorporates the potential change of meaning of the same expression in various conjunctions of time and space. The notions of “position” and “positioning” consist of a dynamic metaphor, which derives from the constant attention to relationality as the positioning act always takes place against others and within a specific context. Positioning is about ways of speech that are being loaded with meanings as a result of the social relations in a situation. It is also about the efforts of participants in the situation to accumulate power of persuasion (Harré and van Langenhove, 1991). In many ways, positioning has much in common with feminist theory: they both utilize inner conflict, ambivalence, and contradicting experiences as sites for the understanding of social gendering processes (Davies and Harré, 1990). Harré and his colleagues define positioning as a discursive practice, an action by which a speaker bonds herself to a social value by and within a specific discourse. Thus, we are looking at a continuous action conducted throughout social interaction and the specific conversations, which can be held in it. Positioning examines what storylines can be jointly produced in a conversation, in order to elicit the process whereby participating in the process can be evaluated as rational and coherent. The basis of the positioning method is that concrete occasions of speech contain immense social information. Investigating what people say and how they tell the stories of their decision making exposes the reality within which they live. What aspect

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of reality is unveiled by the social information embedded in speech? That of the normative order, which shapes what people experience as the rules they cannot break in any of their conversation. These rules are always located in a specific sociocultural context and are closely attached to the discursive order in this context. What resources are available to people at the beginning of a conversation? Firstly, it is their memories of their own experience as accumulated through their personal history and biography. Their continuous learning within specific past conversations generate their knowledge of how their speech constructed past situations. Their memories of this knowledge render them able to construct present moments by using ways of speech that they believe are effective. One additional type of resource in the conversation consists of the memories of read/heard texts, which were consciously learned as guidelines. For instance, when a woman talks about herself as a child remembering how she did not want to answer when asked for her name, and explaining she got confused because her parents gave her a too-long, too- cumbersome name; she highlights long and cumbersome names as morally unacceptable for use in her world. In this case, the woman is using her resources, that is, her memories of past conversations and past event in a way that expresses a moral stance. This moral stance negating too-long, too- cumbersome names enables her to construct the situation in a plausible way. Thus negative consequences of past speech acts become a resource, often unintended. It reveals the potential effects of these speech acts in a present conversation, particularly with regard to the speaker’s position. The position here is the outcome of the negotiated image of a person in interaction, particularly in the sense of “is she rational at all?” the position may also be found in other adjectives reflecting her evaluation of herself as it mirrored in her evaluation by others for example: “sensible”; “serious”; “responsible”; “wise”; “committed”; “respectable,” and mostly significantly “appropriate.” This list is very tricky in fact because it means that using any word/expression/name that was loaded in past memories as negating any of the items on the list would deprive the speaker of the insider position. Being excluded is not always affordable, especially when the exclusion may affect your children too; thus, positioning requires a careful management of speech in conversations. For some, as Martín-Alcoff (2005) reminds us, the risk of exclusion and deprivation of an insider position is activated before they had the chance of showing their resourceful management of the conversation. That is because the visibility of their gender, skin color,

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body weight, or accent had overtaken the process. Under such circumstances, a name can be even more crucial. An Israeli Ethiopian immigrant had recently told the press that with his prestigious army service, MA degree, and his Israeli name, his CV occasionally triggers invitations for work interviews. However, interviewers cannot manage the gap between their impression, which is based on the written CV, and his Ethiopian appearance. Under such circumstances, the process of positioning can hardly begin. The main measure people use in the positioning process is “discursive practices,” which refer to the deployment of categories and concepts, the meanings of which they trust because they are familiar to them (Davies, 2000). They have already encountered them and had the chance of learning their meanings as part of their exposure to a certain way of speech. Importantly, they trust the category because they trust the discourse from which it is derived more than they trust contesting discourses. The social essence of discourse renders its categories reliable as long as especially powerful and appreciated others are using these categories. Take the category “responsible,” for instance. In any context where individualism as discourse has been institutionalized on a political level (as most contemporary places are), given the expansion of neoliberalism (Walby, 2009), responsibility can be trusted. It is a category heard repeatedly from a multiplicity of sources: therapeutic settings, self-help culture, new age engines, public discussions of welfare policies, ideologies of motherhood, and such. In all these discourses, responsibility is portrayed as the highest moral stance equated with the right way of action, rationality, and appropriate citizenship. Identifying oneself as “willing to take responsibility” is therefore a very effective discursive practice securing for oneself an insider position by signifying a shared value system. Any alternative, any questioning of the importance of responsibility or of the bad consequences involved in nonnormative actions runs the immediate risk of loss of a voice: who would want to listen to irrational insensible speaker? Investigating discursive practices is immensely powerful in tracing the features of the normative order as women’s lived experience. Ambivalence quickly surges once speakers are beginning to use subversive categories, exposing cracks in the legitimacy or authority of the dominant discourse. Taking on hyphenated [(+) cumbersome (+) difficult to pronounce and spell (+) with foreign sound (+) not-shared by husband and children] family name and insisting on it as a source of pride may be bad for one’s positioning in many situations. But

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more important, the fact that it happen means that some familiarity has been established with a different discourse constituting a heavy awkward name as a rational way to be. A transformation in the power position of the discourse enabled the awkward name to turn into a resource for positioning at least in a specific community of practice. Discursive practices allow individuals more specific subject positions than just the root position of a rational participant in the conversation. The acquisition of a subject position, which on top of rationality indicates specific authority, power, or relevant experience, would entail a repertoire of privileges that otherwise might be deprived. “Wait until you’ll have a child of your own” is a discursive practice that acquires a maternal subject position that benefits the speaker with the authority of the experienced, hence the privilege to set the condition for other’s speech. Those who do not have a child of their own cannot understand the complexity and if they had a child, they would have definitely justify the speaker’s way of action. However, the subject position also constrains the person to the vocabulary related to that position without which the production of herself might fail. In the above example, the speaker who aims at positioning herself as the experienced mother uses the vocabulary of maternal responsibility. Failing to do so would undermine the possibility to become a rational and sensible member of the relevant community of practice. At the same time, it is this exact subject position of a rational and sensible mother that defines and reproduces the social community of “experienced mothers,” to which she hopes to belong. Alas, using discursive practices is not enough as the production of the self tends to be fragile, illusive, and in any case contingent upon the uncertainty of the positions made available by others’ discursive practices. If a suggested nonpatronymic practice is constructed by others’ discursive practices as hurting a father-in-law’s feelings and hence inevitably also irresponsible, there is little one can do to gain a moral subject position under such judgment. In this case a position was made unavailable to the extent that it cannot be achieved without some very powerful discursive resources fed into a narrative that would reconstruct the morality of such act. At this point, the conceptualization of positioning comes very close to that offered by the notion of “community of practice.” Sharing values in a community of practice would also entail sharing the valuation of dichotomies. One illustration could be the dichotomy “responsible mother” and “childish feminist.” Since positioning is about production of the self, and as Davies describes producing oneself is about

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“imaginatively positioning oneself as if one belongs in one category and not in the other” (Davies, 2000: 90), two performative steps are required: firstly, using the right discursive practices that would acquire the positively valued subject position, hypothetically, the “responsible mother”; secondly, using the right discursive practices that would definitely produce oneself as not a “childish feminist.” Such two steps are necessary for the rational subject position in a community of practice that devalues the childish feminist. Likewise, such devaluation prohibits the subject position of the feminist and the broad set of discursive resources available to it. Ironically, the production of the self ultimately depends on the common consensus on continuity as compulsory for the rational mature subject. Otherwise one can be either feminine or masculine; either loyal or not loyal; either a responsible mother or a childish feminist. By proposing the analysis of the discursive production of multiple selves, positioning analysts are able to draw a relatively accurate map of a person’s attempts to accumulate power in a situation. Davies and Harré describe this map as the “fleeting panorama of Meadian me’s conjured up in the course of conversational interactions” (1990:47). Explaining the notion of perfomativity will allow us to connect this map to our major analytical device, the discursive order.

The Discursive Order In our introduction of Butler’s notion of intelligibility, we have emphasized the liberating potential of the notion particularly for broadening repertoires of signified actions that can be used in the process of performativity. At the same time, it is worthwhile realizing that intelligibility is twofold: on the one hand, it is the outcome of familiarity with specific discourses saturating the relevant cultural context; on the other hand, familiarity as well as the persuasiveness of a discourse depends on the level of authority that it accumulated over time. At this point, Butler’s perspective may be connected to Hajer’s discourseinteraction approach (1995). Mapping the discursive order, as we shall see below, is crucial for the study of intelligibility: both for tracing the likelihood of familiarity of a discourse and for understanding the specific power position it may have in any cultural, historically shaped power hierarchy. Let us explain how we see this power hierarchy in the context of multiple identities. Within a specific discursive order, power position refers to the extent to which a discourse gets to shape the appropriate ways of

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speech, those that would be considered the rational ones. Often such a power position depends on the presence and strength of social forces that promote it and its related presuppositions. There may be a cultural context, within which a woman’s reluctance to adopt her partner’s name would be perceived as a rational act, given a relatively powerful position of the women’s movement. At the same time, other discursive orders may shape the rationality of taking a partner’s name. For example, if the partner’s name is a short Hebrew name and her name is a long cumbersome name with specific negative ethnic identification, resisting taking his name may be seen as irrational within the ethnic discursive order. It is thus necessary to keep in mind the complexity of the matrix: a separate discursive order allocates intelligibility to practices corresponding with each specific identity. Ethnic identity, gender identity, and national identity, to name a few, develop each within a specific power hierarchy between social forces and their related discourses. The attempts to challenge hegemony made by contesting discourses can under specific terms generate a legitimacy crisis in the dominant discourse. This may lead to a situation where the challenging discourse is embraced, becomes more powerful for a specific collective, and turns into regulated practice. Alternatively, such an attempt can fail, thereby marginalizing and silencing the challenging discourse. Thus, Hajer’s discourse-interaction approach (1995) analyzes the conditions under which specific discourses gain enough power to influence specific identities and interactions: “discourses imply prohibitions since they make it impossible to raise certain questions or argue certain cases . . . [and] there are also certain rules regarding the conditions under which a discourse can be drawn upon” (p. 49). Hajer implies that power relations between interacting parties and their discursive stances define the appropriate ways of talking and thus necessarily also define ways of talking that cannot be regarded as appropriate. In the same vein, he suggests that “routinized forms of discourse” are the most effective ways of talk, because they “avoid confrontations” (1995, p. 57). Like positioning theorists, Hajer locates individuals within their social relations and is well aware of how important it is to maintain an appearance of agreement. Butler and the social positioning theorists locate the production of identity within the wider social and cultural context and the specific discourses in it. For a systematic analysis of this context, we follow Hajer’s approach, embracing his stance that mere familiarity with a discourse is not enough. In Hajer’s view, in order for the discourse to become a

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reliable source of support for identity performance as well as for social positioning, it has to gain sufficient power within the local discursive order. The local discursive order refers to the power relations between the discourses influencing a specific social location. The meaning of power relations between contesting discourses is that a given discursive order positions one discourse as hegemonic, despite attempts to challenge this dominancy by other discourses. Following Connell (1987) who explained “hegemony” not as a total cultural dominance in the sense of obliteration of alternatives, hegemony position of a discourse is ascendancy achieved within a balance of forces, that is, a state of play. Other patterns and groups are subordinated, rather than eliminated. If we do not recognize this, it would be impossible to account for the everyday contestation that actually occurs in social life, let alone for historical changes in definitions of gender patterns on the grand scale (ibid, p. 184). The discourse interaction approach seems particularly effective for the feminist project led by Dorothy Smith (2005). In her development of the methodology called institutional ethnography, she calls for the mapping of context that includes the documentation of discourses. These are crucial for the understanding of the context within which women make their choices. For her, like for the positioning method above, the sense of choice is a sense produced by the path made possible in a specific material, bureaucratic, discursive, relational context. If so, then the focus of feminist sociological research should shift from explaining women’s actions as either resistance or accommodation to explaining the context within which a specific path is chosen. Discourse interaction approach is a method that enabled us to pursue Smith’s recommended change of focus. Hence the focus of our project consists of power relations between discourses, more specifically the power relations between forces promoting the familist discourse and those promoting the feminist discourse in Israeli society. We believe that these power relations are reflected in women’s relationship, the relationship with “others” who mediate discourses allowing their permeation into intersubjective realities. To present the way we understand “others,” we now turn to discuss the notion of community of practice as an aspect of our proposed analysis of the relationship between the gender, ethnic, and national dimensions of women’s identity.

Politics of Identity The web of identities is difficult to draw. Metaphors of a quilt blanket, a tapestry or mosaic, a spider cobwebs, or of a Spanish handheld

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fan were thought to be helpful but they remained too simplistic once the need arose to introduce inner hierarchies, conflicts, and dynamic positioning into the picture. These metaphors were primarily thought to be useful in introducing the plurality and complexity of identity: people have combinations of gender, race, national, ethnic, religious, hetero/gay/LGTB /body-related identities and they also have occupational, intimate, parental, leisure-related identities. Each of these is a window to a world of possibilities in terms of where specifically a woman positions herself in relation to a range of discourses. Within this range, some contest the meaning of owning a specific identity while others reject, silence or ignore it. On top of these complex political processes, each of these identity dimensions incorporate the social-psychological questions of hierarchy between dimensions. Some identities may totally control the routines of daily life. Others remain marginal and hardly remembered. Obviously, these inner hierarchies too are discursively constructed in specific time and space sequences. For example, in most Western cultures, gender and race are socially constituted as fundamental for the self more than other identities; people who live closer to activists in national movements may develop a national identity that will require more of their resources than other people who detach themselves from national movements and perhaps condemn them as anachronistic. Complexity is clear: political power relations operate between identity dimensions and within each of them contesting also the expected relations between them. At a certain point in time, parental and occupational identities are expected to discord to the extent that one has to be given up; in other time and space sequence, intense parental and occupational identities are expected to be maintained simultaneously. Moreover, people are capable of maintaining either consistency or fragmentation and contradiction among these dimensions and they are able to join groups and movements on the basis of each dimension or adopt more solitary practices. The enormous noise of this complexity invited an attack on the concept of identity among social scientists. Responding to this attack, Martín-Alcoff (2005) had recently produced a defense on identity anchored primarily in the premise that beyond complexity, identity still carries analytical power. Above all, she claims, identity represents the negotiation between people and specific cultural contexts in which they value others and are evaluated by them. The evaluation takes form on the basis of visible features such as gender, race, and family names. Visibility here is therefore highly significant for the formation of identities and life chances more

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generally. Following this trail, we ask now to contemplate on the visibility of family names looking at two aspects of visibility: firstly, family names consist of primary representation of the self and play a crucial role in forming primary impression before additional information can be added. Thus, family names should be examined for their own visibility particularly their own visibility as evaluated by women who are about to carry them and allocate them to their children. Secondly, family names render visible the range of ethnic, national, and gender identities. What is so powerful in the notions of visibility is that it imposes on the analysis the constant awareness of the societal gaze. Some costly ramification may result: exclusion, distancing, suspicion, segregation, and oppression. Fear, anxiety, and worry become inevitable escorts of any brave visible announcement regarding the name and moreover, via the name. While courageous women may take pride in overcoming such fears as they experience themselves as protected, when it comes to worries about children, the visibility of family names may become a rigid barrier. Nevertheless, if ethnic, national, and gender identities become visible in a family name, we need to account for the relationship between these three dimensions of identity. Hence we now develop the argument in the direction of politics of identity. Our use of the concept refrains from its now (too?) common meaning as a derogatory for a political demand of a policy change in favor of an oppressed category. The meaning that we aim to utilize is that which concerns the political relations between dimensions of identity. Our point of departure for this discussion is that gender identity is different in essence from ethnic and national identities. National and ethnic identities are constituted in the context of social hierarchies that differentially allocate value to each subject position. Thus for both national and ethnic identities, the hope for a better valued subject position (e.g., Ashkenazi in the Israeli context) materialize an aspect of social mobility and access to resources and privileges. Gender identity, particularly feminist identity, is more complex in its relation to value. Usually being labeled as a feminist might not contribute to value. However, taking into account the multiple dimensions of identity, once feminism is connected to higher education, secularity, and professionalism, its value may be perceived higher in some specific contexts. Thus we need a theoretical framework that connects the discursive constitution of privilege allocating social hierarchies to processes of positioning and to available specific subject positions. We connect these two aspects of the relationship between

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identity dimensions through the notion of community of practice, which provides both a dynamic for privilege allocation and validation for a range of subject positions. The notion of community of practice, explains Mills (2003), should be used in the plural. People strive at belonging to a multiplicity of communities of practice and the meaning of a practice in one of them would shape one’s ability to be accepted or even hope for acceptance in another. Clearly communities of practice benefit of differential power position in society. The discursive resources they are able to equip their members with may become conducive to their access to additional social, cultural, and material capital. Otherwise, they may inhabit such access leading to stigmatization and discreditation. Once such communities of practice are seen as spaces of belonging for one’s own and for one’s children, the linguistic practices, including naming practices, can be conceptualized as crucial for social positioning. To the extent that a community of practice can become, or can be seen as, a metaphorical home, a home built together with others with whom values are shared at least to some extent, it is going to have a powerful hold on individuals’ identities and practices. If this is the case, identities and practices are constrained to a specific relevant accepted repertoire, one that is regarded as optional by members of the relevant community. This would be right if we accept that a sense of belonging is strived for. However, in the context of the hegemony of individualism, we need to recall contemporary pressures towards authenticity, control, and solitary responsibility for gaining achievements in the continuous competition over self value and worth. In an individualist gaze, longing for authenticity and control imply that many middle- class professional women suspect any community of practice that profess to become a metaphoric or even a real home, and refrain of joining it. The tendency to remain alone in private resistances, while connecting to others and fulfilling belonging through normative communities and collectives, calls for a theory of ambivalent belonging. Constantly evaluating present possibilities in the shadow of past memories and in the light of future projections, women have to remain vague over their belonging circles. In this sense, they can never assume center position in any community of practice as they always remain careful not to lose their loyalty to other communities of practice and constantly examined for their value and loyalty to any specific community. Negotiating from the margins allows them the relative anonymity from which using individualist control they can experience themselves as steering the wheel for their families’ future.

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Women’s choices within ambivalent belonging allows a path for responding simultaneously to multiplicity of normative imperative set by both hegemonic and oppositional discourses. Ambivalent belonging facilitates women’s ability to experience resistance and accumulation of resources while still maintaining a sense of belonging to a collective that will provide children’s identity. The community within which a woman intends to raise her children becomes her community of practice but she gets to maintain only ambivalent belonging to this community. Once she is required to surrender and accept the community’s boundaries, she becomes reflexive to the extent of weighting the available position made possible by other, less demanding, communities of practice. This weighting will be shaped by the power relations characterizing the discursive order constituting future prices for subversive actions. Clearly, the fact that Israeli women provide the ground for the suggested theoretical project means that motherhood is going to become a major disciplining force highest perhaps in the discursive order.1 In other words, discourses constituting potential prices paid by children are expected to have significant effect on women’s freedom of choice and resistance. Hence, early feminist contemplations of women’s liberation as dependent on childlessness receive reinforcement. Not because children maximize women’s dependency on men and on the state and not because mothers are devalued but because children’s alleged need for belonging render women dependent on collective’s validation of their own (imagined) acceptance. What then is the significance of multiple discourses? For us, its significance is derived from a shift in the analytical focus. We are primarily interested in the process of positioning in ambivalent context as an indicator of the discursive order containing gender, national, and ethnic discursive struggles. By doing that, we aim to reveal the power hierarchy between discourses, or, more practically, between communities of practice managing to gain trust within individual subjective world in the sense of securing a rational positioning for each one. The notion of “the cultural loading of the name,” which we present in chapter 4 is central to this discussion.

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3 Israeli Ambivalence and Gender Relations

Gender Relations in Israel Three recent Israeli books on local feminism describe how many among the natural constituency of Israeli feminism refuse to identify themselves with feminism or with the women’s movement. Erella Shadmi (2007) argues that the feminist idea, in general, and radical feminism, in particular, have not struck proper roots in Israeli society or among Israeli women (p. 145). Tali Rosin (2000) explains upfront that the problem is feminism’s bad public relations: “nobody wants to be thought of as bitter, evil, wicked, leftist, elitist, ambitions, lesbian, frigid, or otherwise lacking feelings” (Rosin, 2000: 17). Her book, entitled What is This Feminism and How Did We Come to Know Nothing About It?, begins with a question presented to the reader right on the first page, directly asking her about her tendency to distance herself from feminism: “When you say that you are not a feminist, do you mean that unlike feminists you don’t hate men? That you like to be courted? That you want to have kids, and that your looks are very important to you?” (p. 17). Apart from exposing local prejudice against feminists and feminism, Rosin’s question also reflects the dichotomy that many Israeli women believe to exist between feminism and femininity. Apparently, this is not merely a local belief. In The Female Thing, Laura Kipnis explains that feminism and femininity are incompatible within each individual psyche. She traces the source of the gap to the fact that femininity is still understood as “sustaining an underlying sense of female inadequacy” (2006:7), while feminism “wants to eliminate female inadequacy, to renounce it as patriarchal myth” (ibid). A third book about Israeli feminists, entitled We Don’t Want To Be Kind (Safran, 2006),

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confirms Kipnis’s suggestion. Hanna Safran describes in detail how the feminist movement in Israel has always been seen as out of place, irrelevant, esoteric, and foreign, corresponding to the stereotypical dichotomy between being a feminist and being nice (read: a nice girl) in the sense of pleasant, good, and polite. Even when Israeli society appropriates the feminist battle against men’s violent behavior toward women, says Safran, it still refuses to accept the relevance of feminism. Nurturing the myth that Israeli women are Western women, and that Israeli society is Westernized in terms of women’s citizenship, local policy makers produce discourses that render feminism redundant (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 1997). Moreover, by not challenging this myth, many Israeli educated middle- class women can benefit from the myth that distinguishes them from the “Other woman,” who is incapable of coping. Sylvia Fogiel-Bijaoui (1997) suggests that since violations of women’s civil-legal rights and of other universal political and social rights are silenced in the public discourse, women are led to believe that they can struggle individually in order to escape gender inequality. Our empirical data mirrors well this landscape of hegemonic incorporation of the hope for liberalization, equality, and progress that, at the same time, excludes the option of joint political action in those directions. Women in our study identified themselves with feminist values; they described feminist world views with diverse undertones; they even disclosed quite a few feminist practices. Yet, almost all narrated a highly complex and multidimensional understanding of the notions “feminism” and “feminist.” Only a few interviewees initiated the contemplation of feminism as related to the topic of naming practices. When interviewees seemed to avoid the topic, we raised it as the interview progressed so that the feminist meanings and interpretations regarding marital naming could be deciphered. Three stances concerning feminism seem to be attractive to women in our study: nineteen women explicitly presented themselves as feminists; thirteen women were determined to reject the label “feminist” despite their feminist values and practices; and nine women expressed blurred images of feminism and said they did not believe themselves to be feminist. Among the nineteen feminist women, some described their feminism as part of their personality, some said they were “born like that,” and others explained that they are “generally” feminists, but “it doesn’t burn in my bones,” or “I’m not burning my bras.” Interestingly, we found no clear link between these categories and the way these women used their names: naming practices of all kinds

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are distributed evenly among all three stances. The fact that the data shows no discernable link between women’s stances toward feminism and their naming practices supports our claim that naming practices reflect current ambivalence regarding gender issues in public discourses. In the feminist poststructuralist language offered by Judith Baxter (2003), this ambivalence is articulated as “a range of institutional discourses that provides the network by which dominant forms of social knowledge are produced, reinforced, contested or resisted. As discourses always represent and constitute different political interests, these are constantly vying with each other for status and power” (p. 25). This chapter aims at explaining how we see the ambivalence generated by the discourse interaction between familism and feminism and how we believe it becomes crucial for the process of belonging to communities of practices.

Cultural Ambivalence We live in a time shaped by three types of social forces: (a) feminist processes of social change, (b) neoliberalism-directed forces benefiting from remnant traditional beliefs and institutional arrangements, and (c) the newly emergent cultural forms reacting to the power accumulation of feminism (Walby, 2009). The omnipresence of the struggle between the old gender order and newer options became a fertile soil for ambivalence, primarily in its form as concurrent excitement and fear triggered by the new possibilities (Weigert, 1991). Janet Finch in a recent study on personal names (2008) emphasized the idea that in contemporary cultures names embed an ambivalence created by their potential to signify both belonging and individuality. Explaining the particular relevance of ambivalence to the understanding of naming practices, she says: “Names therefore do not act as unambiguous statements about family membership—increasingly they may not denote either household memberships or relationships formed by marriage” (p. 714). Thus, ambivalence emerges as a notion that requires further exploration once it comes to forging a feminist perspective on naming practices. Applying Raymond Williams’s (1973) argument concerning the incorporation of alternative/feminist themes, Rosalind Gill (2007) illustrates the emergence of gender-related ambivalence in the media. By analyzing “post-feminist romance,” Gill shows how the obsession with heterosexual romance becomes instrumental in reinforcing ambivalence. More specifically, Gill points out to

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the reactionary effect that romance media has in reproducing the power position of heteronormativity and traditional femininity in young girls’ inner world. Israeli media also take an active part in generating ambivalence in similar ways. Daphna Lemish’s research on Israeli preadolescent fans of the Spice Girls (1998a, 1998b) conveys that local girls escape the strong local national culture. They resembled European girls in holding both conservative family values and enjoying television series mocking them. From the perspective of assertive feminists, they can admire the resourceful appearance of the Spice Girls’ images and, at the same time, develop a heightened concern with their own bodies and appearance from the perspective of traditional femininity. Local national culture is perhaps losing its grip on them, but they are nevertheless kept within a hierarchical gendered order that measures their value through their weight. And indeed, despite continuous feminist contestation, the hierarchical gendered order for adult women in Israel is maintained. Familycenteredness is a powerful feature of the social organization of care in Israel, even among secular middle-class women, who would define themselves as liberal. Thus, we begin by introducing familism, followed by a brief portrayal of Israeli feminism.

The Israeli Version of Familism The mix of Jewish1 and Israeli-Palestinian (Muslim, Christian, Druze) populations, in addition to massive waves of Jewish immigration, 2 implies that Israeli women’s experiences are intensely fragmented. Diverse gender/class positions enable different kinds of effects of familism, in the sense that it can be stronger in one position and weaker in another. This is mainly a result of its interaction with feminism that also has different kinds of meanings and outcomes in different gender/class positions. The diversified power position of familism has contradicting effects on marriages and gender roles. Growing geographical, social, and occupational mobility among Israeli women facilitates an increase in exogamy and the adoption of more flexible gender roles among Jews. Recent data report the very widespread presence of the dual-earner household, with quite a few households relying on women’s income.3 The predominant pattern of long working hours for men and mommy-track4 jobs (Izraeli, 1992) for women nevertheless leaves the gendered domestic division of labor in its place.5 All in all, there is a wide consensus among researches in

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the field that “the family in Israel continues to be strong, central, and more stable than in most industrialized countries” (Lavee and Katz, 2003, p. 194). Figures from various sources support this claim. For example, 75 percent of Israeli couples remain married for the entire life cycle6; the overwhelming majority among them raises two or three children; and families tend to remain in close contact with their extended families. In line with these facts, a recent report found that 30 percent of Israeli adults report voluntary care-giving for an elderly parent.7 At the same time, as the feminist commentator on Israeli families, Sylvia Fogiel-Bijaou explains (1999), a pattern of postmodern families has developed to include Gay and Lesbian parenthood8 and a persistent increase in long-term cohabitation (not in the sense of premarital cohabitation), constituting 3 percent of all couples in 2008 (Benjamin and Haze, 2011). More than anything, familism is locally recognized as an aspect of public policy with implications in areas such as pronatalism and reproductive technologies. Feminist researchers have argued that Israeli political familism9 stems from the predominant republican perception of citizenship in Israel. Moreover, specific sociopolitical processes have resulted in the emergence of motherhood as the criterion of the good citizenship for Israeli women, in a form parallel to the criterion of military service for Israeli men. Nitza Berkovitch (1999), for example, describes how in the context of the national-Zionist discourse motherhood was constituted as loaded with national meaning, and as such, served as an entry ticket for women’s participation in the nation-building collective. Other authors further substantiate the argument that motherhood is instrumental for Israeli women’s materialization of their citizenship (Kimmerling, 2001; Bernstein, 1987; 1992). Analyzing early leaders’ addresses to women encouraging them to enhance their fertility, these authors suggest that motherhood is women’s main contribution to the nation-building project (Safir, 1992; Kahn, 2000). Kimmerling (2001) and Helman (1997) relate this institutional familism to cultural militarism that characterizes Israeli society, within which motherhood is constituted as producing, nurturing, and supporting combatants. What elsewhere can be perceived as civil and private maternal practices receives nationalmilitary meanings in the Israeli militaristic context, enhancing their importance (Berkovitch, 1999). A broad repertoire of mechanisms enlists the family into the combat collective (Yuval-Davis, 1993; 1997), indirectly strengthening the traditional gendered division of labor.

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Feminism in Israel Continuous feminist campaigns have exposed many women in Israel to the possibilities embedded in egalitarian perspectives. Feminist activists are currently organized in 90 NGOs (Abramovitch, 2010); about 20 of them are Israeli-Palestinian organizations. Additional feminist spaces include ten gender studies programs and centers in colleges and universities; diverse courses given by feminist lecturers inside and outside the academia; feminist activities within the army; and intense activity at the women-status committee at the parliament. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, the parliament committee was very active promoting a range of legislations: The Equal Opportunity Act (1988); The Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act (1988); The Prevention of Family Violence Act (1991); validation of the UN act against all forms of discrimination against women (1991); The Equal Pay For Equal Work Act (1996); and The State Council for Women’s Status Promotion Act (1998). Furthermore, several existing laws were amended, such as the amendment to the Women’s Employment Law (1954), allowing fathers to benefit partly from maternity leave. Affirmative action guidelines were also introduced into all statements related to appointments in the public sector and to boards of directors of public and state corporations. More recently, the feminist voice in the public discourse became more present: numerous feminist campaigns and conferences focused on issues of women’s trafficking, pornography, child custody, sexual harassment, women’s precarious employment in the context of downsizing and privatization. At the same time, numbers of identified feminists remain quite small: according to one source, in 2006, 12 percent of Israeli women defined themselves as feminists (Moore, 2006); the ICBS social survey data for 2008 indicate that 80 percent of women under 60 years of age thought that affirmative action for women is important but only 18 percent thought it was more important than all other types of affirmative action. Five stages have been identified in the development of the feminist discourse in Israel (Herzog, 2006): “the absence of women”; “add women and steer”; “inequality and discrimination as a social problem”; “from sex to gender”; and “from gender to genders.” Herzog emphasizes that these stages did not replaced one another in a linear process. In addition to the diversity in academic writings, these stages coexist in the public discourse to some extent. For her, this coexistence is the main reason why a subversive feminist position

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criticizing the current social order and its oppressive mechanisms has not become prevalent enough. Herzog suggests that the stage of “inequality and discrimination as a social problem” was interrupted by later stages. Hence the potential unified category of women that could cooperate for shared goals and purposes was deconstructed by inner fragmentation in the women’s movement that occurred too early. Inner conflicts between Ashkenazi and Mizrah’i feminists; between Jewish and Arab feminists; between heterosexual and lesbian feminists—and perhaps most of all between Zionist and antiZionist feminists—tore the category “women” apart. This process, reaching its peak in the feminist conferences of the 1990s, was destructive both for the reputation of the women’s movement and for the chances of joint action for shared goals or for protecting past achievements. Thus the feminist subversive categories did not manage to gather enough prevalence and authority. Herzog (2006) argues that nevertheless powerful feminist activities are currently taking place within civil society organizations and through ad hoc coalitions and campaigns. Analysts subjecting Israeli feminists’ talk to systematic investigation find that the texts produced by the local movement evolve within an inherent ambivalence. Jacobs (2004), for example, argues that local feminism remains responsive to the call of contributing to the Zionist project and to the aspiration of promoting feminist values and practices. According to historians,10 the Zionist aspect was stronger during the first prestate wave of Israeli feminism, and feminists primarily struggled against the traditional sex-role constraints in the nation-building project. During the second wave in the 1970s, feminist values became stronger, and feminists struggled to challenge the false image of equality and to increase public awareness of violence against women, and public recognition of free abortion and lesbianism. The mutual contestation of familism and feminism in Israel generates ambivalence that permeates women’s forms of speech and naming practices. Ambivalence tends to be the most visible, when women are exposed to feminist discourses; they adopt feminists discursive practices, but yearn for the validating approval from communities of practice holding familist standards for good motherhood. Under these conditions, the contestation of the familist discourse by the feminist discourse leads to open conflict and a process of “maturation”—i.e. the realization that feminism is childish. Importantly, the multiple communities of practice, between which

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women move, do not allow them to establish their belonging in any straightforward way; hence their belonging always remains partial and basically ambivalent. The exact forms, which this contestation takes, emerge in our analysis of the discursive order generated by it as presented in the following chapters.

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4 The Appropriate Name

In her recent account of social relations in Israeli society, the feminist legal scholar, Orit Kamir, has contended that Israeli society is organized around the principle of respectability (Kamir, 2007). Respectability is seen as a person’s most important possession. Therefore, people have to protect it under all circumstances. Hebrew, continues Kamir, has had a significant part in locating respectability at the heart of Zionist daily life. Names as an aspect of language, and in the local arena, as mirrors of language struggles, have become a measure of enacting respectability: a person’s name contributes to his/ her respectability providing him/her with “a respectable social status, high self-esteem, the entitlement to pride and self-importance as well as respectful social treatment” (2007: 19). In this chapter, we aim at showing how women’s self-naming practices after marriage are anchored in social, political, and cultural processes typical of their locality. These processes tend to cross gender boundaries and to define social assets. Self-naming is an action of signifying belonging or a refusal to belong to specific social categories. It takes place within the historical social construction of belonging to a community of practice as valuable and as benefiting. “Deciding whether to belong” and the experience of “being given or refused permission to belong,” as explained by Morewenna Griffiths (1995: 86), increase in complexity as a woman encounters more communities of practice. Throughout the process of becoming a part of communities of practice, women are entangled in reflexive considerations of the benefits of belonging to social categories and groups. Moreover, it is central for the self that a group’s acceptance is established, once belonging is considered as valuable. As Griffiths continues to explain, however, groups may provide ambivalent acceptance, which means

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that signifying belonging may become more important, but perhaps also more difficult. An Israeli-Palestinian woman, to take the most hypothetical example, would encounter difficulties, if she took a family name that signifies the crossing of the national boundary, moving from an “Israeli” family name to an “Arabic” family name, or vice versa. Thus self-naming practices embed enormous social knowledge of the cultural meanings folded into names as representations of belonging and exclusion. It is an implicit knowledge retrieved only at the time of reflexive calculations.1 This chapter introduces women’s knowledge of the cultural loading of names as reflecting the Israeli cultural context. Far beyond the question of whether a woman should maintain her birth family name as a statement of her feminist loyalties stands the local cultural meaning of a name as a stratified position. A set of rules produces family names as a distinct social category, carrying characteristics that echo the various historical trajectories of immigrants arriving in Israel. Some of these entrance paths elicit pride and others were loaded with shame. The hope to secure a family’s respectability is an inevitable aspect of self-naming. The intentions to escape names loaded with shame render the social permission for selfnaming into an opportunity to enlist pride-related names. Self-naming is the result of what may turn into a lifelong weighing process of continuous reassessment, involving measurement and evaluation, of different family names. The deciding parties are both thoroughly knowledgeable and reflexive, but more important, they are aware of the social effects of a family name. As explained by Bean (1978), individuals’ awareness is raised primarily by the effects related to their diverse identities embedded in the name as a speech act; “participants in a speech act may bring almost any combination of social identities to it” (p. xiv).

Cultural Loading of the Family Name We use the notion of cultural loading as containing the social knowledge that enables a person to shape the appropriate name. In the scientific study of psychological measurements, the same notion is used, where implicit or explicit references to a specific cultural context are attributed to an item (van de Vijver and Poortinga, 1992). We have come to believe that like items in questionnaires, names embed implicit or explicit references to sets of cultural meanings, which either allow women to perceive a specific name as “appropriate” or not.

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The cultural loading of a name, then, is the complex set of meanings and rules that enter the evaluations of a name and determine its appropriateness. In the following, we present an analysis of the empirical material, on the basis of which we study the phenomenon of “cultural loading.” It is plausible that the specific dimensions of the cultural loading of family names differ in each cultural context according to the specific historical and political characteristics. For the Israeli case, we present a discussion of cultural loading as demonstrated in ethnic, aesthetic, structural, and gendered dimensions.

Ethnic Dimension Three instances shed light on the ethnic dimension of the cultural loading of Israeli names. Back in 1984, Abraham Stahl, an education researcher, who was also interested in the issue of names, gave the same composition, supposedly written by a pupil, to 150 tenthgrade teachers. In half of the cases, the composition carried typical Mizrah’i names, and the other half carried typical Ashkenazi names. The research was meant to determine whether the teachers’ evaluation will differ according to the students’ names. The results showed a statistically significant difference in favor of the allegedly Ashkenazi compositions (1994). Few years later, on a radio program in 2005, a leader of the religious Zionist movement told a story of a man who could not find a job as long as he carried the name Cohen (more common among Mizrah’i families even if unspecific). Once he changed the name to Katz (an abbreviation in Hebrew that stands for “Cohen Tzedek”—a common name among Ashkenazi families), he immediately got a job. The religious leader told the story and then gave a general permission to Jewish people to change their family names when applying for admission to religious education institutions or for jobs (Ben-Haim, 2005). The third instance involves a study conducted by Chaim Fershtman and Uri Gneezy (2001), in which 966 Israeli students participated. The investigators organized an economic game between students of two universities, in which trust-based deals could yield financial profit. One of the main results of the study was that men carrying Ashkenazi names were trusted to a significantly higher extent than men carrying Mizrah’i names. This differential trust characterized both Mizrah’i and Ashkenazi participants of the study. The ethnic dimension within the cultural loading of a family name appears to be performative in the context of the apparent ethnic hierarchy. It performs one’s ethnic identity by applying intelligible

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connotations with their specific meanings as shaped within the ethnic discursive order. However, in the context of immigration, the meaningful components of a name may lose their meaning as intelligibility fails. For example, the name Booh’boot in Tunisia implied social respect, as it meant “the owner of a belly”—a belly used to symbolize affluence. In Israel, particularly with the time passing since the immigration waves of the 1950s and 1960s, the name Booh’boot lost its meaning and was often used in the media in connection with criminals and other transgressors of the law. Thus Ben-Haim (2005) tells of a religious family in Jerusalem that changed its name to Lev, the Hebrew word for heart. When members of the family were asked for the connection between Booh’boot and Lev, they explained that it stands as an abbreviation for “not booh’boot2”—as if saying that any name is better at the moment in Israel than Booh’boot. The names people choose for themselves and for others offer windows into how a culture views these names. Moreover, as Aceto (2002) explains, names reveal how individuals prefer to be perceived by society at large, according to the identities, roles, expectations, hierarchies, or values constructed within a social space. In our study, this was particularly visible among women, who enter interethnic marriages. These women became aware of the possibility that society will use their family names to locate them in ways that are not consistent with their own perceptions of themselves. Those, who crossed ethnic lines, spoke of family names as signifiers of class position and status much more than those, who remained after their marriages in social locations similar to those of their parents. The interviewees, who spoke of the ethnic dimensions, were particularly concerned with the possibility that the family name as a source of information regarding ethnic origin might violate their place and status. When you introduce yourself, and people don’t know you yet, and you only send the name, let’s say through e-mail, or when you meet someone hmm . . . that you don’t know and . . . and they haven’t even seen you yet, they only just received your name, so they try to learn something from it about you . . . and let’s say, and that’s a very funny thing, and I’m sorry, but I must change the subject for a minute, today when I say my name, people get very confused [laughing] so it’s as if, I mean . . . and that’s the less problematic instance, when they’ll say, wait, you’re the Roseman or the H’ajby, as if . . . as if they’re trying to draw some information from the name, they want to know what are your origins. (Meira H’ajby-Roseman, 31, originally Roseman, married Uri H’ajby; they both hyphenated the two names)

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As a signifier of ethnic location, the family name turns the moment, in which it is about to be adopted into a stratifying one. An Ashkenazi name, such as Roseman, is often perceived as a social asset, providing family members with a higher social position. It is a position that is stereotypically associated with rationality, professionalism, knowledgeability, and a good grasp of Hebrew (Almog, 1997). However, some family names are “too” Ashkenazi, in as far as they reveal a biography that is strongly bonded to the Jewish Yiddish-speaking small towns of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. According to Boyarin’s conceptualizations (1997), the Jews of Eastern Europe were feminized in Zionist historiography viewing them stereotypically as weak, ugly, poor, and dependent, in need of support. An even worse aspect of this negative Diaspora-based image is that these old-time Jews were unable to protect themselves in the public sphere, irrespective of whatever authority they may have yielded in the private sphere. Israeli culture has distinguished itself from this negative image by constructing an image of the typical Israeli person as forceful, physical, body-centered, and thus able to provide for himself/herself. Moreover, it negated all aspects of Jewish life connected to the exile (Raz-Krakotzkin, 2001). In this historical context, some Ashkenazi names may be culturally loaded with meanings of weakness and dependency. One of our interviewees encountered such a weakening name and refused to adopt it. Irit: “Fligel” is really, I couldn’t think of a name that is more typically Diaspora-based, irritating and [laughs] Michal: What’s so irritating about this name? Irit: It’s really Polish like; if you think “Fligel,” you are, at once, transferred . . . You get to see immediately that plastic table cloth, as Gal once said, with which his grandmother used to cover the kitchen table. It is really out of place. And my parents are this kind of Zionists . . . you know, they gave up on their European passports, when they immigrated to Israel. Michal: Your passport? Irit: Theirs. Yes. My parents. My parents are Zionists and they Hebraized their name, and going back to “Fligel” now, seemed to me really not . . . and that my children would be “Fligel” is even less eh . . . imaginable. (Irit Yarden, 34, originally Lahav, married to Gal Fligel; they both changed their names to Yarden)

The description of the Diaspora-based name as arousing archaic associations, which are rather grotesque in bringing up the style of “his

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grandmother’s plastic table cloth,” was echoed in other interviews as well. The interviewees tried mainly to emphasize that these names are just terribly distant in time and place from anything that can be perceived as fitting to daily Israeli life. As Irit says, “it is really out of place.” Her first response, that of a negative emotion, being irritated by the name, turns “Fligel” into a name that cannot even be considered as appropriate for herself or her children. It seems that she is concerned with the possibility that on the imaginary stratifying ladder, a Yiddish sound implies a social decline. The meaning of the Yiddish word “Fligel” is neutral: it means a wing and it is used as another name for a bird. Nevertheless, in the cultural world of the speaker, she is only able to negate the Yiddish sound with her parents’ Zionism. Irit constructs the narrative of her refusal to adopt “Fligel” as her name, as part of the dialogue with her parents’ Hebraization of their European names, as if saying that in adopting “Fligel” the Zionist act will be cancelled. By using the phrase “going back to Fligel,” she explains that adopting the name means in fact a reversal of the Zionist practices of giving up the European passports and a return to Eastern Europe of the nineteenth century. Adopting the Diaspora-based name that her partner brought into the relationship implies a daily reminder of a social hierarchy, namely the hierarchy between veterans and new comers; between Zionist citizens certain of their belonging to the upper social echelon, and immigrants, excluded perhaps, on the lower one. A woman facing the doubts about whether or not to adopt the family name provided by her future family undergoes a reflexive process, in which names are being weighed against their stratifying cultural loading. In this process, a woman tends to utilize two coexisting parallel hierarchical poles corresponding to the ethnic dimension of the cultural loading of the name: the first pole is organized around the question of the ethnic reference contained in the name: how Mizrah’i is the name, against how Ashkenazi it is, while Hebraized names, which do not reveal the ethnic origin, stand in the middle. The second pole is organized around the question of how Israeli is the name, against how Diaspora-based it is. Here, Hebraized names constitute one end of the pole, and Diaspora-based names the other. The closer a name is to the Diaspora-based position, it will score lower on locality. The ways, in which these two poles serve to evaluate family names in Israel, support and reinforce the compatibility between the categories “Israeli” and “Ashkenazi.”

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By the same token, the category “Israeli” is persistently constituted in the naming processes as disconnected from the category “Mizrah’i.” Mizrah’i family names continue to be excluded from the Israeli collective. A woman choosing to maintain a family name like “Dahan” opts for always revealing the Moroccan origin of her family, creating the possibility that her children’s belonging will be questioned on ethnic grounds. As Mizrah’i in Israel is often perceived within the scheme of the degraded stereotype of the Mizrah’i (Shifman, 2008), a Mizrah’i name means continuous scrutiny and suspicion. The latter might persist until a future point, when a significant distance will have been established between the family, either the children or the parents, and the degraded image. A name, the interviewees seem to know, may generate a position that will discredit family members until that future point. It is worth noticing that our interviewees were able to unsilence the routinely silenced and mystified power relations between the local ethnic categories by using aesthetic justifications.

Aesthetic Dimension For example, Yogev, is an aesthetic word; it has an aesthetic sound; it looks . . . when you write it down, it’s aesthetic, yes, Ben-Yaakov and Buchach-Appleboim have in them something, which is not . . . which is less aesthetic in its sound, in the word, in a signature, eh . . . and its meaning is pleasant and basically good. (Elinor Buchach-Appleboim, 31, originally Ben-Yaakov, adopted her partner’s name)

In Hebrew “yogev” means a peasant, an agricultural worker—on its face value, nothing very prestigious. The word “yogev” is used, however, in the Bible (in Jeremiah, 52:16) and in contemporary literature and poetry. It epitomizes the trend of Hebraization: the renewed usage of biblical words as well as the principle of the new Jewish person cultivating the new homeland (Almog, 1997). These two aspects of the Hebraization contrast the Diaspora-based image of the Jewish religious person. In the interview, Yogev, as a family name, is described as the aesthetic name, which excels in sound, appearance, and meaning. But the speaker’s name is not Yogev. The names that she carries are neither her birth family names nor do they correspond to any aesthetic criterion on her list. Her detailed discussion of the advantages of “yogev” is a class identity performance. Her language invokes the aesthetic dimension, which—at the same time—allows her to maintain the silencing of the ethnic dimension.

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Aesthetic criteria are known since long to have stratifying power and to reflect social class positions. Bourdieu (1986) generalized the connection between aesthetic taste and habitus explaining how salient it is for one’s positioning to master aesthetic criteria accepted in specific cultural fields. By arguing that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (1986: 6), Bourdieu departed from the Kantian concept of aesthetics seen as operating outside sociopolitical power relations. Feminists applied Bourdieu’s concept to discern the ways in which women historically challenged hegemonic aesthetics and questioned traditional aesthetic theory (Clair, 1998). However, Skeggs (2005) explained more recently that because the cultural competence reflected in taste is used so powerfully as evidence for social difference and distance, women’s duty to convert economic capital into symbolic capital for their families through the display of taste generates ambivalence. Thus, even if women are competent in subversive capital accumulation strategies, ambivalence has to be recognized as playing a crucial part in understanding aesthetics and its political nature (Skeggs, 2005: 29). From a perspective focusing on ambivalence as salient to the condition of women with families, two meanings are embedded in taste. For one, it is an aspect of class positioning by specific consumption and cultural choices that reflect one’s claimed social habitus and location; and, secondly, it is an opportunity to promote subversive intelligibility. We read our interviewees’ statements that taste is responsible for their self-naming practices, within this framework. The multiplicity of meanings in names aesthetic has already been tackled by Lieberson (2000; with Bell, 1992) who has studied issues of social taste and fashion in the field of first names. He found that considerations of taste are central, and that first names are chosen according to clear aesthetic and beauty criteria. Echoing his findings, our interviewee repeatedly described their wish to hold a “beautiful name.” Michal: you said before that Yarkoni is not the name you dreamt of. Naama: No, it’s a name like . . . , it’s not a beautiful name. (Naama Yarkoni, 34, originally Blumstein, took her partner’s name) As I see it, the names that are nice, I mean, if I could have a name like that, it would have made me very happy, not Kraus and not Atias, let it be a name eh . . . a name like, like Shah’ak, it is very beautiful. (Ayelet Hashah’ar3 Kraus-Atias, 34, originally Kraus, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his birth name; the children carry their father’s name)

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The emphasis on the penultimate syllable deprives Yarkoni of its potential aesthetic value: it is very local, it is drawn from the name of a small river in Tel-Aviv, and it is also a name of a local bird. Several veteran families of the prestate era Hebraized their family name to Yarkoni. Shah’ak is easier to explain: it is a word used for the sky in the Bible (Jeremiah, 51:9) and currently in poetry. The speaker is probably longing for a reinforced belonging, which neither part of her hyphenated name provides her with. The analysis of the beautiful name yielded several criteria: the sound, the length, its unique nature in contrast to common usage, easy to spell and recognize in contrast to weird, convenient rather than cumbersome, creative and unique rather than common, and finally its suitability for being considered a name in Hebrew. Some of these criteria are dealt with below, but let us first explore what all our interviewees saw as the ultimate criterion for an aesthetic name and presented in the common phrase: “shem shel tayas,” “a name of a pilot.” A Name of a Pilot The expression “a name of a pilot” was repeatedly used in different contexts in the interviews. It seems that it is used as a common measure to attribute specific characteristics to a name, or more specifically, it is used as a synonym for “a beautiful name.” Historically, Israeli pilots were among the social categories, whose representative roles required Hebraization. In May 1948, in the midst of the war, Prime Minister Ben Gurion issued an order for all army officers to Hebraize their names. In November that year, the army declared a specific week as the “week of replacing foreign names,” and in December, the army distributed a special pamphlet entitled “choose a Hebrew name for yourself” (Bundi, 2001). Moreover, during the first five decades of the state, pilots were often recruited from the elite layers of society, entailing the reproduction of the Hebraization in pilots’ names. Whenever you encounter a very beautiful name you say “a pilot’s name,” why? You know why, you actually mean a name that is properly Hebraized, probably has biblical roots; it is usually also very original, something that you can see in its original form. (Meytal Elad, 36, married to Yair Lederman, each kept his/her birth family name; the children carry her family name, Elad)

In addition to serving as the epitome for the beautiful name, names “of a pilot” represent the hegemonic ideal of white men, whose ranks position

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them highest on all standards. The local pilot is known as the rational, emotionally restraint, talented and successful white Ashkenazi man. At this point, the theoretical possibility that the issue of family name after marriage is anchored in a field of cultural production in Bourdieu’s sense arises as well. It seems possible to speak of a field, where naming practices bear social outcomes. These in their turn regulate the value of concrete practices in the market, where symbolic capital is exchanged. In this framework, naming practices utilize a discursive repertoire: an intelligible cluster of norms, rules, and models available to individuals and groups for the organization of their daily lives (Even-Zohar, 2002). Thus, the name of a pilot becomes a type of choice that follows a socially specific convention, implying that a symbol becomes a power resource. Women, adhering to the aesthetic convention, work their way toward belonging to a community of practice embracing the hegemonic Zionist ideal. Not all women, however, can adopt “beautiful names” that match their aesthetic criteria. Instead, the beautiful name is reproduced as the hegemonic ideal that even if it cannot be implemented in the selfnaming process, it is still used to evaluate names and to enhance their holders’ social positioning. The taste as reflected in the evaluation is performative in signifying a woman’s class identity. It is also salient to the weighing of the aesthetic value of the man’s name in comparison with that of the woman. If choice is legitimized, justifying the choice has to rely on accepted ways of talking and local convention defining the name’s value. Apparently, a choice based on the aesthetic value or taste provides women with a legitimate justification structures. As can be seen in women’s choices, even one of the four aesthetic components would suffice. However, for taste to provide legitimacy, silencing of other motivations must also occur. Thus the social value of a name and its positioning implications must remain silenced. The Right Sound for a Name A name’s sound in the ears of real and imaginary others is clearly heavily involved in considering a name. “Pleasant” and “delicate” sounds appear to echo the ethnic and aesthetic dimensions by being contrasted with “brutal” or “rough” sounds. One interviewee said the following about the name Zuker (here not as a fake name, but the real name she used, which is one of the names she encountered in her life): The beautiful name in my eyes is a short name that has . . . a nice sound, Zuker is not . . . it’s something that . . . it has something in it that is too rough, the way it is pronounced is not nice in my opinion.

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“Zuker” is the Yiddish word for sugar and for sweetness more generally. But a woman, who grew up with grandparents that did not speak Yiddish nor used “Zuker” as a loving gesture for their beloved ones, as it used to be the case in other families, cannot relate to its sound as containing a positive emotional meaning or as pleasant. Instead, she explains that she disregards its pronunciation. And indeed, one forceful way, in which Hebrew distanced itself from Yiddish, is by shifting the emphasis in the pronunciation of many words. Yiddish commonly emphasizes the penultimate syllable (mil’el—penultimate stress, paroxytone) and Hebrew commonly emphasizes the last syllable (mil’ra—ultimate stress, oxytone). Consequently, names based on the mil’ra pronunciation, are commonly attributed more social power and aesthetic value when they accompany the other aesthetic dimensions. In addition, interviewees tend to point out gutturals, more common in Arab names, as disturbing and unpleasant sounds in names. Sibilants, particularly in combinations common to Arab names, are likewise indicated as ugly. The discussion of non-Western letters enables women to reject ethnically problematic sound under the disguise of nonaesthetic sounds. In other words, the accepted ways of talking encourage speakers to present as aesthetic concerns, issues which are basically related to political hierarchies. Interviewees speak of the sound of names as a personal matter of taste, translated into a subjective stance of emotional attachment. In their ways of speech, they use the same verb as for romantic relationships: “letters, which I don’t love”; “a name, I didn’t love”—or alternatively, present beauty as a personal subjective matter. Furthermore, it seems easier to explain one’s dislike for a name, than to exemplify the pleasant delicate name one would want for oneself. There is a gap between what can be felt as pleasant or unpleasant, and what can be said regarding these instances. Clearly some silencing occurs in the effort to maintain the appropriate way of talk and one’s own position as adhering to appropriate manners. Yuval: I always loved it [her birth family name], no, no, I don’t remember that I ever loved it in particular, or any time I had problems with it. I always liked it, I mean . . . Michal: So what you like about it is the sound? Yuval: Yes. The sound and the fact that I was born with it [ . . . ] it’s short, it sounds right, it plays in the right form, Michal: what do you mean ‘plays’ in the right form? What doesn’t play in the right form?

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Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel Yuval: Fiedlberg, for example, doesn’t play in the right form, clearly not. Michal: and what’s so wrong about how it plays? Yuval: It has an ancient sound . . . an irritating sound . . . what do I know? I never really devoted any time to thinking about it, it sounds awful. (Yuval Schiller, 34, married Liron Ben-Yzri, kept her birth family name; the children carry their father’s name)

Schiller is not a traditionally Jewish name. A Zionist teacher and activist adopted it in the late nineteenth century, while escaping the Czar’s army. The name was later adopted by a Kibbutz that was founded just when he died in 1927. It is a German name with a prestigious local history. We hear plenty of justifications for keeping it: sounds right in contrast to Yiddish names such as Fiedlberg. Fiedlberg in Yiddish is meaningful conjoining the words for a violin and a mountain, but in contemporary Hebrew, it sounds “ancient” and “irritating.” The term “irritating” is probably a good proxy of foreign, belonging elsewhere, loaded with (perhaps tedious) stories that nobody feels like listening to now. Fiedlberg has a demanding sound, something that demands listening because of the past stories that have to be told and passed on. This heavy loading does not fit into contemporary culture as Schiller does. Using the effect of “irritating” for the heavy loading of Fiedlberg and its orientation toward the past suggest that an unfit name might disturb the balance. In disclosing that “I never really devoted any time to thinking about it,” the taken-for-granted is powerfully exposed in generating a strong emotional response (“it sounds awful”)—without any reflexive pause for clarifying it. Differently interpreted, the interviewee feels that she herself was exposed in ways she would not want to: as a person holding prejudice. The Appropriate Name In the context of continuous waves of immigration, ethnicity in its dichotomized structure (Ashkenazi/Mizrah’i, Israeli/Diaspora-based) generates among Israeli women a colonialist gaze on family names. This gaze is directed toward an intended preference for Ashkenazi and/or Israeli names; these names tend to meet the aesthetic criteria of sound, length, and meaning (some or all of them together). Ethnicity and taste together form an orientalist aesthetics (Said, 1978) that appears to dominate women’s reflexive consideration of possible names.

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I had several woman friends, who told me that Yes. That it is obvious . . . that I must maintain Kraus because of what Atias . . . Because of the racist element because Atias is so Mizrah’i, and Kraus is so Ashkenazi like and it’s more eh . . . it’s nicer eh . . . you are better off, if your name is Kraus, than if you’re name is Atias. (Ayelet Hashah’ar Kraus-Atias, 34, originally Kraus, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his birth name; the children carry their father’s name) Yuval: I have a friend, I mean, she married and changed from Doitch to Zander, well, as I see it, I mean, and she agrees with me that one is awful, and the other is terrible, it’s . . . Michal: Yes, Yuval: Such ugly names. Really, out of place . . . I mean, I don’t know, I mean, it’s like, you’re not going to find around anybody, walking with the name Hershle. It’s like, it doesn’t make any sense that a person, all of a sudden, would be called Hershle. Now, it wasn’t, it is possible that a name like that would be really beautiful, I don’t know what, let’s think for a minute of Mizrah’i names, then, you could say that, I don’t know, somebody’s name would be Beber, that would be weird, but perhaps Nicole, that does sound nice, that’s something that would be more acceptable. Michal: Are you talking of Mizrah’i names? Yuval: No, these are French names; I’m speaking from the Moroccan side then eh . . . I don’t know . . . I can think of . . . well, because nobody around here is called Muhamad, I think. (Yuval Schiller, 34, married Liron Ben-Yzri, kept her birth family name; the children carry their father’s name)

Both Ayelet and Yuval are Ashkenazi women, who married Mizrah’i men. In the Israeli context, where ethnicity is a stratifying structure, the meaning of the interethnic marriage is that both crossed the lines and that they might pay a social price for that. These women are more conscious than other women of the possible prices associated with the signifying effects of a Mizrah’i name. Immediately after stating that “Atias is so Mizrah’i, and Kraus is so Ashkenazi like,” Ayelet adds her account of the weighing: “it’s more eh . . . it’s nicer eh . . . you are better off, if your name is Kraus, than if you’re name is Atias.” The term “nicer” is instantly swapped with “you’re better off,” unveiling the immediacy of the translation: the aesthetic dimension is translated into the accessibility of social and material resources. Concrete profits are attributed to the taste preference.

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For Yuval, the ethnic meaning of names is reinforced around the principle of local vs. foreign. She explicitly focuses on the aesthetic dimensions—“such ugly names,” translating it to a spatial level: “out of place.” Justifying her sense of the wrong name, she makes an effort to draw for illustration on what she believes is a parallel case—the case of first names. Eastern European Jewish names receive a stream of extremely negative adjectives to substantiate the orientalist aesthetics dominating her world. Toward the end of the discussion, it becomes clear that what she is dealing with here is the question of how much of the Arabic connotation of names the local scene could tolerate. Both Arabic connotations and French connotations are associated with Mizrah’i names. Naming considerations reveal that French connotations are more tolerable in the subjective world of Ashkenazi interviewees. After exposing the relations between the ethnic and aesthetic dimensions in generating the “appropriate name,” we now move to the two additional dimensions of the cultural loading of family names.

Gender Dimension The cultural loading of a family name turns it into a communication device transferring private information from the intricacies of a family to the outside world. In the context of the patronymic conventions, where men get to keep their names throughout their entire lives, while women have to change theirs according to their familial status, the family name as communicating private information sharply distinguishes between men and women. In this sense, the cultural loading of the name is not gender neutral; instead, it contributes its share to reinforcing the gender hierarchy. The core of the information embedded in a family name on a woman is her (lack of) power to influence her partner’s family name and the name of the family as a whole. Women’s birth family names tend to succumb to the hierarchical relations between the public and the private spheres. Respondents’ stories unveil its nature as private, personal and embedding no obligation, commitment, or responsibility for other family members. Men’s family names are different and public in nature as they carry immediate implications for those around them. Under the patronymic custom, a man’s family name—often the name of his family of origin—is always also the name of all other individuals who belong to the family. For women, this is not the case.

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In the past, when the patronymic convention was even more dominant than it is nowadays, a family name announced a woman’s marital status in public: still single or finally married. New characteristics of women’s family names, hyphenation in particular, are even more informative. In patronymic cultures, hyphenated names declare a range of private pieces of information, and are even more suggestive with regard to the family status: they can announce a woman’s divorce as well. More problematic, they tell of a woman’s trouble making character. I mean, in many places eh . . . people ask me: so, wait a minute, so what’s the relationship between you? So you didn’t get married? Or did you get married? It says many things to people around you, eh . . . and it, I mean . . . they tend to make a fuss around it, I mean, I didn’t even want that. I didn’t want to have to tell my story. (Dafna Gany, 35, married to Elad Naftally, each kept his/her name, and the children got the hyphenation of both, hers first)

When a woman appears in the public sphere with her partner or children, her family name is primarily portraying of her nature as a “nice girl.” One short, easy-to-spell name shared by all members of the family is indicative of the appropriate path a woman should follow. A woman’s family name that is different from that of her family members, steps outside the natural order of things, in the sense of leaving her accountable of her exceptionality. How would she produce her place as the “nice girl” under these conditions? For women, the information unfolded once the story of their family names is told is crucial and testifies to their femininity, their past identities, their evaluation of their new kinship structure, and more generally their loyalty to the order of things.

Structural Dimension The structural dimension of the cultural loading of the name refers to the meanings embedded in a family name for the family as a social institution as well as to the role, which the family name has regarding the family’s stability and reputation. In a patronymic culture such as Israel, the discussion draws on the central principle that all members of the family should share the same family name. The appropriateness of the name depends on that. The second central principle, which also stems from the patronymic system, is that the family name should

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consist of one word. Only families, whose family name consists of one word, including compound words such as Ben- Simh’on, pass the basic test of their status as normal families. Women prone to hyphenate their family names contravene both principles, but they run a higher risk when deviating from the second principle. we were sitting at a family dinner, and I said that, I don’t know, I somehow said Cohen-Nah’many, and his father burst out on me, how dare I, and where did I take the Cohen-Nah’many from, and that Cohen is not a standard name, and that it is absolutely prohibited for cohanim to have two names, and that it’s unacceptable, and turned it into a whole story. (Tamar Cohen, 27, originally Nah’many, adopted her partner’s family name)

Tamar is firmly scolded by her father-in-law, who resists the idea of hyphenation and justifies himself on religious-traditional ground: those carrying the name Cohen are believed to be the offspring of the temple servants. Jewish religion subjects them to several prohibitions related to purity. Nevertheless, it seems that her father-in-law activates his privilege in a particularly creative manner. Hyphenations involving Cohen are common, and a religious prohibition of this type does not exist. But this creative way of speech is important in another respect: the cultural norm of the one-word family name is presented as derived from a higher-level religious set of rules. Far more powerful resources will be required, if Tamar is to undermine the sacred status given in his talk to what is presented as a rule against hyphenation. For lack of any such resources, Tamar’s access to autonomous self-naming is blocked. Furthermore, she is labeled as a deviant, who dared to raise the possibility of hyphenation. On a more implicit level, she is probably also labeled as problematic, undermining the importance of religion for the community. The structural dimension of the cultural loading of the family name raises criticism—among women carrying hyphenated names themselves as among others in the wider communities around them. Apparently the women are finding it difficult to maintain a distinct self-definition of their own naming practices, and they are highly tuned in to the ways of speech prevailing in the social circles, to which they would like to belong. Dana: It always seemed a bit pompous to me, this form of two names . . . But eh . . . it still seems a bit pompous, but eh . . . OK it’s

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necessary, it’s an arrangement eh . . . it seems better than one of us having to give up on his/her name. Michal: Is it because of responses that you get or just how you feel about it? Dana: It’s that as well, I mean, in the same way that I’m thinking of it as pompous, I know that there are many other people in my social circles that think the same. (Dana Amir- Oren, 36, originally Amir, married to Yoram Grinbaum, each of them added ‘Oren’ to the previous name; he is now Yoram Grinbaum- Oren, and their son’s family name is Oren)

Negative labeling is one of the measures used to restore social order and protect it from women, who do not hesitate to risk their social reputation. “Hyphenating women” will face daily questioning of their naming choice: What is it good for? Why do you need that? As Lazar (2000) explains, the world, within which women attempt to produce their positive moral selves, is an ambivalent one. Namely, old and new discourses coexist and maintain contrasting guidelines for the appropriate femininity. In this ambivalent context, women make choices, which fit into one discourse, but expose them to a critical gaze anchored in another discourse. Thus, next to the others, who question their choices, women themselves feel the need to define their own action in negative terms, using adjectives like “pompous.” These conservative self-definitions are performative in the sense of restoring a woman’s conformist stance within the gender order. Hyphenation for Children We have argued above that women’s family names reveal private information. Here we contend that more specifically, a woman’s commitment to good motherhood is publicly announced by her name. From a discourse-interaction approach, it appears that the patronymic expectation deploys “motherhood” and “the children’s wellbeing” to restore its hegemonic power. The “good mother” is thus constituted as a position in opposition to women’s attempts to generate alternative paths. The hegemonic discourse extends its threat of penalty to the children, who pay the price for their mothers’ struggle to establish alternatives to common naming practices. The price paid by children is presented as higher and more extreme than the price paid by women themselves. This exaggeration is typical for responses to women attempting to pass on hyphenated names to their children.

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The evaluation of hyphenated names for children is particularly negative: “giving two names is like punishing the child.” The “good mother” should protect her child of the “heavy,” “ridiculous,” “childish,” “depressive” burden ensuing from a family name that is “so long.” The “good mother” should give up on her supposedly weird ideas and succumb to the normative imperative of the one-word name, for the sake of her children’s well-being. And then we decided OK, that it’s going to be H’ajby-Roseman, and we began asking our friends again, and they said that yes, it sounds right, and that they can relate to it better than previous options we had, and that it’s a lot more reflecting the people we are, hmm . . . but that it is slightly long, and what will happen, when we’ll have children, and our poor child will have, already in kindergarten, to write all these letters. (Meira H’ajby-Roseman, 31, originally Roseman, married Uri H’ajby; they both hyphenated the two names)

“The poor child” represents the impossible burden that the mother, who does not protect her child, is expected to shoulder. Women, who are willing to accept the negative labeling of themselves and the ramifications of hyphenation for their children, are accused of neglecting their children. By carrying a name that is too long, too cumbersome and too heavy, they allegedly expose the children to foreseen misery. Women could face such guilt, if there were a voice in the public discourse that legitimizes their self-naming as an act in favor of the children. Such legitimization could, for example, draw on the possibility that a child might benefit from a stronger relationship with the mother’s family heritage. Legitimacy could further be enhanced, if the option that a kindergarten teacher will teach the child to write the first letter only or the two first letters would be more accessible. The structural dimension of the cultural loading of the name prohibits these options, however, so that women’s cultural tool kit remains without any alternative to the collective definition of the situation. Hence, little negotiation is enabled. Some women take this poor negotiation position to the extreme and reject hyphenation: Meytal: We wanted, we wanted one family name that [her son] eh . . . that he will eh . . . that he will carry, I mean, that will be clear to him. One family name and not two. Michal: and how did you feel?

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Meytal: We felt that . . . there weren’t many children in kindergarten that carried two names eh . . . and, I mean, it complicates things, it complicates, it’s bulky, it’s awkward so that, I would say, OK an adult can carry it. (Meytal Elad, 36, married to Yair Lederman; each kept his/her birth family name, and the children carry her family name, Elad)

Of the hyphenating mothers in our study, only two dared to transfer the hyphenated name to their children. Children draw the boundary between the traditional and the innovative naming practices, and many women do not dare or are unable to cross it. They are willing to pay any price required, but refuse to put their children in a situation, where they will have to pay the price. The accepted ways of talking are organized around a supposedly known distinction between what adults can manage and what children can. Children cannot carry—it is implied by the “common knowledge” distinction—the prices attached to the hyphenated name. The tension is experienced as one of maternal responsibility. Had not the mother initiated the option of hyphenation, there would be no harm done to the child’s well-being. The structural dimension of the cultural loading leans on the fact that it is her, who exposes the child to the risk of an unwieldy name that will signify the child as exceptional in a way that invites public ridicule. This emphasis on the mother’s responsibility is clearly more powerful in Israel in comparison to other countries, as motherhood is the sole path to citizenship for Israeli women (Kimmerling, 2001; Bernstein, 1987, 1992). The future of the country, goes the national myth, depends on women performing their roles as mothers, appropriately (Berkovitch, 1997). Thus, women are obliged to give birth and to do all the work required for raising the children to become the appropriate products suitable to undertake the project of nation building. Signifying their exceptionality violates this goal.

The Cultural Loading of the Name: Summary It is now easier to grasp the idea of cultural loading of a family name as a cluster of meanings. We have worked out the diverse macrolevel directions that encumber meanings onto the family name. We have shown how the power of these meanings to shape self-naming relies on women as producers of their identities and their need to locate themselves appropriately. Women engaged in self-naming as well as

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members of their social circles are able to decipher the cultural loading. Women are the first to apply their cultural literacy. During the process of self-naming, they encounter the various ways, in which the cultural loading of any chosen name will become a trouble-making identity card. We have examined the process, through which the aesthetic dimension of the cultural loading becomes the accepted way of talking to reject the implications of the ethnic dimensions. Similar dynamics connect the gender and structural dimensions, which maintain their separate and combined effects in the complex cluster of the cultural loading with one minor difference: the gender and structural dimensions are not disguised as aesthetic issues, but moral ones. It is a woman’s moral character that is revealed by her obedience to the patronymic system. In this sense, the gender order is shown in our study of Israeli society to enjoy a stable power position, regardless of the political potential in self-naming. As we have shown, the four dimensions of the cultural loading support each other through the production of the appropriate family name. Women have to possess fine social and political assets, if they are to refuse the temptation of invisibility allocated to those, who adopt the appropriate name. The women, who adopt an appropriate name, free themselves of the constant requirement to account for their deviation that is a legally supported option. In this complex cultural context, our study yields an additional level in the construction of meaning for family names. On that level, which we introduce in the next part of the chapter, women are found to be even more active agents. Not only as literate readers of cultural hints paving a safe path through significations, over which they have little control, but also as active producers of meaning. We name this microlevel production of meaning and identities, the familial loading of the family name.

Familial Loading of the Family Name In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes defines “myth” as a mode of signification, a form; a myth is a type of speech that is defined by the way, in which it utters a specific message or connotation to be signified or represented by an object. The process, in which an object passes from silent existence to an oral state, opens the object to appropriation by society thus generating the meanings loaded upon it (1972: 109). The forms of speech utilized in the process of mythologizing family names, allowing names to transform in ways

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that render them conveyers of social messages, emerges in the interviewees’ accounts. Some of the interviewees tell the stories of their family names in ways that reflect oral family traditions, which basically serve as family mythologies. At the center of these stories stands the narrative of how the name was created, how it was selected, how it was maintained, who transferred it to whom. The stories answer all these questions, while they also include additional events related to the history of the name that basically consists of the history of the family itself. These narratives conform to Barthes’s definition of a myth, in the sense that they reveal how families appropriate their names and load them with a range of positive and lucrative meanings. Needless to say, such meanings turn into the foundation of the social position of each family member carrying the name and telling its story. Issues of collective memory are solidly connected to the way women socially deploy their family names. According to Vered VinitzkySeroussi (1998), one of the means to explore personal and collective identities is listening to their stories, of which collective memory is constructed, because microsocial collective memory is shaped and organized in a way similar to the shaping and organization of its macrosocial counterpart. It is selective insofar as who remembers and what is remembered. Moreover, those in charge of organizing the memory of the collective exercise disproportionate power over the way the past is publicly perceived, while the voices of the majority of the participants are ignored. (ibid: 89)

Telling the story is, thus, a power position, in which the narrator receives the opportunity to organize the memory of the family and to select the exact elements to be remembered and associated with the family members. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) coined the notion of “collective memory,” while using the notion of a joint family memory and its products: it shapes the family members’ reputation, builds the bonds and relationships between them and generates an identity for the family. Each family acquires an ever more elaborated history that becomes an asset for its members. At the same time, families tend to add their own interpretations to existing stories, and thus traditions are created and serve as the cement of rituals, continuity, and family cohesiveness. Analyzing family myths, and particularly the ways, in which they lean on the cultural context for meaning production, allows us to

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point out the social process, through which myths permeate the reflexive process of evaluating names. These interrelations suggest that in addition to the cultural loading, a familial loading is sometimes constructed and used as a power position in women’s stance towards their birth family names. Three forms of speech are found to constitute the familial loading in ways that reveal its interrelations with the cultural loading of the family name: families with daughters only, intergenerational transference of mythical narratives, and Hebraization stories. Let us unfold the meanings, which we trace in each such pattern of speech, before discussing the interrelations between the two types of loadings of the family name.

“Because we are all girls in the family” In patronymic systems, only men transmit their names to future generations. As a result, family names might disappear, unless a boy is born. The fact that other families continue to carry the same name is considered irrelevant to a family’s effort to transmit its name. In families without sons, the common expectation is that daughters will take their partners’ names and their children will receive their father’s name. Even an unmarried daughter, single with no children, in a patriarchal familistic society, cannot rescue the family name from its deadly fate. H’agit: my brother is twenty, and he now speaks with me of his intention to change his family name. Michal: Why? H’agit: because . . . because he is tired, he is sick of it, well, of this Vilkomirsky. Truth is that just before I began my studies at [an institute of higher education] I made a documentary, in which I interviewed my father on . . . on what it means for him to be Vilkomirsky. And I believe that he is kind of upset at the moment because of my brother’s intention. He is his only son. Other than him, we’re only girls, and thus we don’t really count. So eh . . . but he is his only son, and he’ll be very upset, if he changes his name. (H’agit Vilkomirsky-Ravid, 31, originally Vilomirsky, hyphenated her partner’s name with hers; he did not change his name) Yael: I have one brother and he has three daughters, so a little bit around this matter, a family thing has recently came up, and we have this joke that says the last Shfetzler to leave should turn off the lights, and that’s because—

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Michal: because of what? That there’s no one to keep the name? Yael: yes, we’re being wiped out, because he has daughters and he probably doesn’t intend to have more kids, so that’s probably the end of the story. (Yael Snir, 28, originally Shfetzler, married Tomer Balulu; they both changed to a new name, Snir)

H’agit’s father is disappointed of his son’s intention to change his family name. The fact that his daughter kept the precious family name is not even worth mentioning. Daughters, she explains, remain invisible, if society is organized around the patronymic tradition. In Yael’s family, jokes convey the uselessness of her brother’s fertility: no boys were born to save the family name. The expression “wiped out” implies full identification between Yael and her birth family name Shfetzler. Apparently, she is worried about the idea of a family being wiped out, rather than just a family name forgotten. Furthermore, she seems to experience herself as responsible and as holding the power to slow down the process. But yet, she did not keep it. The death of the name is woven into family gatherings: jokes and tales produce a cohesive family identity among those, who can share the loss of the name, those who are touched by the loss. Those growing up in families with daughters only somehow develop a sense of responsibility toward maintaining the name, despite the clear tendency of other family members to ignore their involvement. When women with this type of biography reach the point of evaluating possible family names, the potential loss of the name arises in their subjective world as an issue which requires accountability. It comes from a fact that I’m Ben-Yaakov, and we’re four daughters at home, and there isn’t going to be anyone, so I stay Ben-Yaakov [ . . . ] we’re four daughters at home, there isn’t even . . . the name eh . . . I mean the name is lost. (Elinor Buchach-Appleboim, 31, originally Ben-Yaakov, adopted her partner’s name) We’re . . . and that is also the reason, why I had to keep my name, we’re only two daughters, which means that there are no continuing members. My sister didn’t keep the Shah’ar, which means that, I mean, that’s it, in that it is over eh . . . the Shah’ar. (Gal Shah’ar-Moyal, 33, originally Shah’ar, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his name, and their children carry his name)

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The speakers adopt the patronymic stance, mourning the name and the family story that is to end because intergenerational transmission cannot be enacted. Their ways of talk indicate the power of the family name’s disappearance to represent the death of the family itself. The stories of their names, apparently, constitute a sufficiently significant component of their identity as family members. Consequently, they positively consider a naming practice that will allow them to keep their birth family name. Their responsibility to protect their birth family name, as standing for the family itself, from its lethal fate enters the interplay as one of the factors involved in the naming processes, as one aspect of the whole picture, as one among a range of considerations. Yet, Elinore did not proceed actually to enacting her responsibility to her family of origin. Her story shows that in the final power balance of all issues taken into account, the cultural loading of her partner’s name was evaluated as potentially heavier in securing the enhanced social positioning she longed for. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of being a girls-only family, she reveals the potential of this pattern to become a legitimate justification structure—one that gives the familial loading of the family name a power position to confine that of the name’s cultural loading. Clearly in this case, the family loading produced by the myth of a girls-only family corresponds to both the gender dimension and the structural dimension of the cultural loading. Her position as a “nice girl” is at stake: she may either appropriate the benefits of the good wife or those of the good daughter. By bringing an Ashkenazi component to the hyphenated name that is fortified by a detailed commemoration family myth (see below), her partner forces her to work through the possibility of adding a third name (a compound word, Ben-Yaakov) to the hyphenation. The impossibility of holding a chain of four words as a family name makes it easy to understand how the structural and gendered requirements of the cultural loading limit women’s self-naming practices.

Myths about the Name Mythologies of family names are created within a specific and distinct historical context. Like in Barthes’s argument, an event becomes historically important and can therefore become a myth; thus it can transform the meaning of a specific family name. Two types of historical narratives organize mythologies of family names: unusual historical events that enabled women in the family to act against the

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patronymic system, and points of congruence between the national Zionist ethos and the personal biography. Both types of narrative convey messages assuming the ongoing operation of a signifying awareness (Barthes, 1972). The former presumes familiarity with the rules related to routine naming practices and is formed as contrasting them; the latter converges with the Zionist narrative in an attempt to emphasize veteran belonging and the due entitlements. It is important to note that each of them corresponds to specific dimensions of the cultural loading of the family name. The first one derives its meaning from the structural and gendered dimensions, while the second one derives its meaning from these two and the ethnic dimension as well. We discuss each of them separately. Stories of Nonconventional Naming Practices Women are proud to belong to families with stories constructing women heroines, who accumulated enough resources to challenge normative imperatives prevailing at their time and place. Family myths allow women to indulge in such pride by opening up the possibility to speak of the name and of its meanings. This type of family myths often opens a range of possibilities regarding the family name, a range that exceeds the boundaries of the hegemonic requirements. Michal: What is Shah’ar? Where does it come from? Gal: Shah’ar is . . . eh it’s nice, isn’t it? Right, I didn’t tell you that yet; listen, see what a nice story: it has to do with the fact that my grandmother was one of the first feminist women. My grandfather wasn’t Shah’ar. He was Shweiks, and they didn’t like this name . . . because it sounded too much of a Diaspora name, so they were considering, what name they should adopt. My Grandmother wasn’t Shah’ar from home, she was . . . well, I can’t remember what was her birth family name, it’s not important, but she had Shah’ar in her family, I mean, one day they went and investigated her family tree, and they found that she had Shah’ar in her family eh . . . and they decided to adopt it . . . well, it sounded a lot more Israeli, and they took Shah’ar so, I mean, their name has a family source from her side and not from my grandfather’s side. (Gal Shah’ar-Moyal, 33, originally Shah’ar, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his name, and their children carry his name)

Gal carries a name stemming from her grandmother side of the family, and she is proud of it. Her pride is supported by the story that

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she can tell on how the name was selected. The story is transformed into a myth by loading Shah’ar with the meaning of a name that came from a grandmother, who was one of the “first feminists.” As a form of speech, however, the myth can pass the evaluation process thanks to a small, but crucial addition: “well, it sounded a lot more Israeli.” Hypothetically, one can play with the option that the feminist grandmother would insist on adopting a name, which does not meet the aesthetic criteria of being meaningful in Hebrew (Shah’ar means dawn) and of being short. It is difficult to guess how the myth would fare under such circumstances. What we suggest is that the story is indicative of how the familial loading and the cultural loading support each other. The fact that the grandmother’s name meets the aesthetic criteria allows the biographical connection to an act of resistance to elicit pride and a sense of aesthetics: a beautiful story of a beautiful act with a beautiful name as its resolution. Next to pride, the family myths praising women’s resistance are stories of familial affection toward a positive and beloved person. The positive image of the person provides a positive meaning that can be attached to the unconventional naming practice, while the historical impact is presented as inevitable: “I grew up with it”; “it seems natural.” In another story of a brave grandmother, Ayala Moriela Reinhardt is telling of the possibility of maintaining a woman’s birth family name after marriage. Ayala: To me, it’s really awkward to replace the name that one is born with. And also, eh . . . I grew up with it, because my grandmother, eh . . . she always used to say her maiden name as well. It was really very important to her. Yes, so, I guess that in any official document, she was Grinberg, which was my grandfather’s family name, and on the door, she always had it Grossman. She always had this thing where she, that was important to her. Michal: Did she ever said why? Ayala: eh . . . I think that perhaps it was also connected to the thing of commemorating her family. Perhaps, the thing of the Holocaust, where a part of her family died, and I think that it was also about immigration. I think she was the first of many bothers and sisters, who immigrated to Israel, and she became a source of help, the family rescuer, a famous persona known for her care and support. All other members of the family, who immigrated, passed through her, and she helped all of them and was always in touch with most . . . with all the family, so it was probably about her family and the importance of being recognized as a member of the family, which

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she came from. I mean, I knew this option from, I mean, since I was born, I knew this thing that you don’t have to give up on your name. I grew up with it . . . that . . . that it’s not unnatural. (Ayala Moriela-Reinhart, 33, originally Moriela, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his name and the children carry his name)

Ayala’s grandmother is the historical heroine of the family, whose life story connects between the national project of supporting immigration and her daily work and actions for the benefit of the members of her family of origin. In the mythical life story, maintaining the birth family name is justified as essential for the political mission of supporting those in need of her help. Increasing the mythical value of the story is the nature of the specific family name, which Ayala herself gets to keep as an exceptionally rare matrilineal name. Ayala repeatedly mentions the matrilineal story, which is told in her family about names. She is perfectly aware of the circumstances, within which she acquired an alternative point of view. As also other interviewees contributed family myths highlighting the naming actions of grandmothers and mothers, our data is consistent with a study conducted by Johnson and Scheuble (1995). These authors found an interrelation between mothers’ choices and their daughters’ choices in the area of naming practices of marital names. When mothers had made nontraditional choices in this area, their daughters were three times more likely to make such choices than daughters of mothers, who had followed the patronymic tradition. To the similarity emerging here between American women and the women in our study, we can add on the basis of our investigation that family myths nurture justification structures. These arm women with (“natural”) ways of talking that reinforce their negotiating position against patronymic expectations. Moreover, our study shows that the circles of influence are wider, daughters may follow not only their mothers, but also other admired feminine figures in their families. Stories Connecting History with Biography The mythical speech as a message conveyed via processed raw material assuming a signifying consciousness (Barthes, 1972) appears to introduce a powerful effect in stories that connect the private and the public of women’s memories. The interviews unfold quite a few stories that weave together the sources and occurrences of the family name and the family itself, with the hegemonic narrative of the building

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of the nation. The women’s sense of belonging to the Zionist collective is repeatedly reinforced in this way. It is worth noting, however, that according to speech-act theory as applied by Varonique Mottier (2000) to the study of national narratives, each story of belonging is concurrently a story of exclusion. The production of the “us” is necessarily the signifying of the others. In our case, the others are those, whose family names have not been loaded with the national aura. The Holocaust is present in some of the family name stories supporting their mythologizing by the taken-for-granted necessity to remember the victims. Women’s claims such as “almost all the family died”; “my grandfather and grandmother lost everything” occurred repeatedly as encouraging hyphenation solutions, whereas the husband’s use of this type of family myth excludes the possibility of even raising the possibility of the woman maintaining her birth family name. Eli’s [her partner’s] father and his brother were adopted by their aunt and uncle, who died in the Holocaust. He was the only one, who survived, and he decided to add their family name to his name, so his name Appleboim received the prefix of the aunt and uncle’s name, Buchach. (Elinor Buchach-Appleboim, 31, originally Ben-Yaakov, adopted her partner’s name; he kept his name and the children carry his name)

The common denominator in the stories appropriating the Holocaust is the exposure of the power of a myth, so that communication is blocked and negotiation becomes impossible. A family’s will to remember its members connects the different generations around the task. This unity is made possible by the still powerful emotional identification with the Holocaust-related loss among Jews in Israel. The public discourse reinforces this aspect of the collective memory more than any other aspect, drawing continuously the boundaries between those, who belong, and the others. Roseman is originally a German name that my grandfather adopted, when he escaped to Latin America. In Israel, there aren’t many Rosemans other than my father, another uncle and my brother. Most of my father’s family is in Chile. It’s a common name there. H’ajby is also a story of one of these names that, they don’t really have a firm foundation, because . . . I mean, the Roseman is really a newer version of the original name . . . and the H’ajby’s story is that both Uri’s parents

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are from [a state in the Middle East]. And one of his grandfathers is originally from [a province of another state]. The details of his story are not really known, and when he got there, he was asked for his family name and gave the name of the town, where he came from. So they named him H’ajby, and that’s how H’ajby entered the story, so it’s really a story of those, who moved from place to place, these are names that were created from people’s lives . . . these are not names with very deep roots, but rather names that reflect the geographical movements . . . so in this sense, we felt very comfortable about constructing our name of people’s real-life events. (Meira H’ajby-Roseman, 31, originally Roseman, married Uri H’ajby; they both hyphenated the two names) Eytan is a name that originally was something that came from my grandfather’s participation in the Hagana [pre-state military organization] eh . . . it was his code name, that’s how they called him there eh . . . so he simply decided to change his foreign name and take the Eytan as his family name, it is wrapped with all what it means to be Israeli and it has its origins in something very Israeli. (Maya Sade, 28, originally Eytan, adopted her partner’s name)

Maya points out the meaning folded into her family name, emphasizing her family’s contribution to the national project of establishing the state. This past contribution of her grandfather locates her as holding veterans’ entitlements in the Israeli context. Meira’s story is not connected to the military Israeli history, but embraces the image of Jews moving around the world and arriving in Israel with significant journey stories in their luggage. She contrasts her story of connecting to these journeys and the challenges, which they represent, with the common Israeli tendency to disengage from the fascinating past of their families. She is proud to tell the story of each of their names, generating a symmetry that has the social power to mend the asymmetries of local interethnic marriage, such as her own. She connects the histories of the two families, hers and her partner’s, to the Zionist myth of the ingathering of the Diasporas (Kibbutz Galuyot). Thus she is able to take pride in her naming practice as an enactment of her belonging to the national collective as well as to her three families: her birth family, her partner’s birth family and their future family. In his book Sociological Imagination (1959), C. W. Mills already elaborated on the enormous importance of connecting the personal and the historical for an in-depth social analysis. In the family myths, which appropriate the nation building into personal and family

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experiences, the narrators insist on a self-presentation that substantiates their belonging. The two quotes, however, contrast two analytical options for understanding the personal as historical. One is the voice of a woman benefiting from a cultural atmosphere that permits her to negotiate a web of circles of belonging. In order to associate herself with members of these circles, she exploits all the resources available to her. By such signification, she practically writes an elaborated family narrative, through which family pride is to be transferred to future generations. The other analytical option focuses on the voice of a woman benefiting from access to the resources related to belonging to the national collective. Regardless of this power position, she declines these potential resources for the sake of performing traditional femininity. It so happened that this task demands that she should separate from the mythical name. These two analytical options challenge us to ask how these two ways of connecting the historical and the personal clarify the power relations between available femininities. What does the multiplicity in women’s ways of appropriating the national myth teach sociologists on the present historical moment and the value attached to wider circles of belonging? We deal with these questions toward the end of the chapter.

Hebraizing Names Boyarin’s (1997) argument of the ways, in which the Diaspora-based Jew was feminized in Israeli culture and conquered by the masculine new Jew, was introduced above, when we discussed women’s cooperation with the need to distance the supposedly humiliating images of the foreign past. The issue of Hebraization, however, appears to be more complex in women’s subjective worlds, and a theme of alienation emerges as an oppositional stance. If I were born in a family, where the name was already Hebraized, then perhaps I would treat my names differently. I can’t really say. I feel that a name is something meaningful. (Efrat Hotzler-Mendlebaum, 37, originally Hotzler, hyphenated her partner’s name; her partner kept his name, and the children carry their father’s name)

It is important to note that Hotzler-Mendlebaum does not meet any of the aesthetic criteria, which we elicited in our analysis of the interview material. Both are long, foreign, Diaspora-based, and

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meaningless in Hebrew. Mendlebaum is an almond tree in Yiddish, but the speaker does not refer to this potential or any other aesthetic values. For her, “a name is something meaningful” in the sense of the longstanding attachment of people to their names. In other words, there are instances, where the familial loading may contradict the cultural loading. In specific cases, the connectedness may be valued as reflecting the family’s position as a sufficiently valuable asset that does not need promotion and marketing by Hebraized names. A name that has not been Hebraized may carry the respect of what is authentic and fundamentally rooted in family heritage. Against the common knowledge that Hebraization is possible and accessible, and against its hegemonic construction as preferred, a non-Hebraized name may bear positive social consequences. In some cases, a sense of pride and seriousness can be traced relating to the “too heavy” names. It is a place of a knowing experience that equips women with a unique approach, called by feminist thinkers a “stand point” (Harding, 1996; Stanley & Wise, 1990). The non-Hebraized family name stand point is a dual position of detachment, on the one hand, and involvement, on the other hand. It renders family roots visible and connects its holder to the emotionality aroused by these roots. At the same time, the non-Hebraization standpoint sharpens the skill of differentiating between naming practices. Neta: I don’t like it, when people Hebraize their names. Michal: Why? Neta: Because I think that it’s terribly artificial. It takes years before a person turns a name to being her name. Eh . . . and to me, all those people, who hold a name . . . let’s say, Katzenboim, all of a sudden turns into Kalanit (Hebrew for Anemone), I don’t know, to me they are doing something that is terribly artificial. It’s like a nose job, where it could be the case that a person would become prettier and more aesthetic, but still it has something very artificial, it takes ages before it becomes integrated in the face as a whole. And many people went through this process, and I believe it’s part of the immigration process and actually a part of many things that I won’t go into right now. (Neta Noyman, 42, originally Gross, adopted her partners’ name)

Like wondering, whether a nose was shaped by a plastic surgeon, the holder of a naming standpoint looks for hints regarding the roots of

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a name, considering the artificiality of Hebraized family names as inferior. Alienation arises in particular, when one’s own family name is deeply rooted in the family history: It simply seemed irrational to me after being Vilkomirsky for 30 years to suddenly give it up; and I said, well if only I could replace it with an authentic name, but Ravid? That’s [her partner’s] name, and in fact his father changed it after he got married. Originally they were [an Arabic name], he came from Iraq. So it bothered me that . . . I saw it as an internalization of the oppression of . . . you know, people did it in order to feel that they belong, in order to feel more “Israeli”, yes? Eh . . . so he had to Hebraize his name. So I said, well, if at least there was a name that would be well rooted in history, then I would be happy to connect to it; but what is this Ravid? It’s a piece of fiction, really. (H’agit Vilkomirsky-Ravid, 31, originally Vilomirsky, hyphenated her partner’s name with hers; he did not change his name)

Ravid (literary Hebrew for a necklace) is the ultimately beautiful name according to the aesthetic set of rules listed above. And yet, it is powerfully rejected by the speaker as a “piece of fiction.” The speaker’s longing for a rooted identity and a story, a home in the sense of belonging, remains unanswered. Reflecting on the universal rootlessness generated by late modernity, Bauman (1993) has already pointed out the state of continuous longing of persons, whose constant cultural displacement leaves them longing for a shelter. In Bauman’s view, this longing is the human response to “the ultimate contingency and ambivalence of the human existential predicament, and the ensuing curse and blessing of self- constitution and meaning-formation” (1993: 158). It is intriguing that between H’agit and her partner, that is, between two descendents of immigrating families, the one carrying the heavier name, the family name that refuses to meet many of the local criteria of the appropriate name, is the one that is able to connect to existential longing of those, who were dislocated. Within the framework offered by Bauman the ability to express the longing is explained. The more powerful social position accorded to the speaker by her heavy family name allows her to engage in “self- constitution and meaning-formation.” In other words, the dislocation has to be metaphoric or existential for an individual to experience and express the need for shelter. For those, who were practically dislocated or for their descendents, whose belonging is still questioned, such expressed longing for shelter might be too dangerous.

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The familial loading of a family name embeds justification structures that have the power to undermine central dimensions of the cultural loading. We learn that authenticity and the search for connections with real people and their experiences are relevant issues, from which meaning is drawn. Furthermore, quite a few interviewees construct the meaning of their family names through an ongoing negotiation of such issues. The expression that H’agit uses, “It’s a piece of fiction,” provides a good opportunity to distinguish the ways, in which the familial loading is generated, and the process involved in establishing the cultural loading. The latter constitutes meanings within historical gender, ethnic, and—sometimes—class power struggles that are characteristic of a specific collective. These meanings are loaded onto a family name in a process that is only partially dependent on the individual’s performative production of identities and positioning efforts, because these meanings have been institutionally embraced in various manners and have become hegemonic. In contradistinction, when we speak of the familial loading, we speak of a different level, on which the meanings of the family name are anchored in the historical context. At this level, a family, or anyone of its members, appropriates admired or otherwise positively perceived aspects of the historical or institutional context. Theses aspects are imported into the family, transferring the positive loading to specific occurrences within the family. For H’agit, Vilkomirsky is perceived as authentic because of the meanings she is able to attach to it in relation to her father’s biography. Had the name been left to the mercy of its cultural loading, it might have been seen as a foreign sounding name. But her active meaning production loads the name with additional value: that of the familial loading.

The Familial Loading of Family Names: A Summary The familial loading of the family name emerged in our study as a crucial notion for investigating the meanings of family names. It was only when we realized the richness of meanings in our interviewees’ subjective worlds that we could appreciate the actual range of identities that is relevant to self-naming. The fact that our participants’ identities as members in their families of origin played an active part in their reflexive calculation of their family names imposed a new level of discussion on our analysis, and we had significantly to extend the range of identities, which we considered relevant to self-naming. These identities emerged in three forms of narratives: daughters-only families,

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Hebraization stories and the inter-generational transference of family narratives. The notion of the familial loading of the family name relates to meanings of the family name that both correspond with the dimensions of the cultural loading, and are derived from the connection, which women make between the biographies of members of their families and their family names. While several retainers justified such connections through the prism of being the ideal daughter or members of their families, eventually, becoming the ideal feminine subject, the ideal wife, the ideal mother and the ideal citizen, emerged as equally important. In our next chapter we investigated some of the connections women make between such cultural ideals and naming practices.

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5 Getting More Out of It: Identity Positioning through the Name

Introduction Typical storytelling in advanced capitalist societies involves individualistic and active ways of narrating life’s events as choices, decisions, capacities, compromises, and personality. As identified by Beck and Beck- Gernsheim (2002), people are no longer willing to think of their lives as prescribed by alien forces outside their control. “Living one’s own life” (p. 25) means magnifying choice and responsibility as the only way of experiencing life as meaningful at a time of increased precariousness. Accordingly, many of the women we interviewed narrated the transition from families of origin into families of procreation as a celebration of their choice, or more specifically of their ability to produce their unique individuality through their choices. In this chapter, we portray four identities that these women reproduce through their naming practices: the ideal feminized women, the ideal wife, the ideal mother, and the ideal citizen. In many ways, this chapter discusses how women try to get more out of the naming dilemma, as they discover that it opens a range of opportunities for them in their dealings with various aspects of names and naming in their dayto-day lives. In a wider sociological perspective, we show how these four individual ideal types allow understanding the discursive order in interviewees’ world, and more specifically the power position of “political familism” and the subjugation of feminism in Israel. The concept of celebration clearly emerges from the naming stories, particularly as women report taking an active part in making the “new family,” in its idealized meaning. Sharing a family name with

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your partner is often seen as romantic, and adopting a “new name” for both partners is part of celebrating the materialization of romance in one’s own experience. Pride may accompany the sense of choice and that of achievement concurrently indicating belonging and the benefit of social validation and approval. In this way, pride becomes the exciting outcome of the project of adjusting to the new situation of sharing a last name. Bernards’s now classic notion of “his marriage”–“her marriage” (1982) is being marginalized in newly-weds’ consciousness so that they can adhere to the belief that their partner shares the excitement and the pride. Nevertheless, for some women, pride is accompanied by other experiences, including the disappointment generated by asymmetrical expectations. If the “new family” is going to have a unified “new name,” they will have to shoulder the implications of losing their birth family names. Such a loss may be experienced as worthwhile, if understood as part of a larger deal fulfilling the feminist expectation that a relationship of a new type is created, based on reciprocity, sharing, and close friendship. The idealized form of that relationship sets, according to Pepper Schwartz (1994:108), at least five requirements: (1) mutual dedication to being a couple beyond being a family; (2) continuous reciprocal display of physical and verbal affection; (3) spending time together in nonutilitarian ways; (4) intense conversational exchange; and (5) rituals of intimacy renewal through celebrations. Our empirical data shows that for many women, a joint name is sometimes taken as a signification heralding a few, if not all of those. Once women feel they have the power to influence men’s naming practices, they feel like they have something to celebrate. If the result of their effort is one unified esthetic name for all family members, the celebration is multiplied: Hila: I’m proud to . . . declare that I got married, because for me it’s a sacred institution, I mean, it’s not simply that . . . eh . . . It’s not simply that I found a partner and I live with him, it’s something that you tend to want to declare for the whole world to know that I found the person that . . . Michal: What’s the importance of being married? What do you mean by sacred? Hila: Yes it’s very . . . in the sense of being part of a couple, not in the sense of eh . . . tradition eh . . . I think it’s nothing easy, I didn’t think I’ll ever find myself married. And there are many examples around

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me of bad marriages, so for me, I mean . . . to be married and happily married, I mean, I know that: it’s not due to the name but it is something that in my eyes is my own achievement; I mean . . . eh . . . I’m proud to say that I’m Cohen- Selah because . . . eh . . . I found something, and the name indicates that . . . to me, it indicates that we’re synchronized and . . . we’re happy together and . . . I see us together for good. (Hila Cohen- Selah, 30, originally Selah, married Omer Cohen, both hyphenated)

In Hila’s world, marriage holds the high status of a “sacred institution.” Being part of a good marriage is a matter of personal achievement, something you want the whole world to know about. The pride of being Cohen-Selah is the ultimate reward enabled by a moment of convergence between two somewhat contradictory motivations. The first is the one defined by Bauman as the “lust for authenticity” (1993: 246) in a world controlled by commoditization and constant questioning of one’s self-worth. The second is the lust for a community, for belonging to a community. Appropriating the categories provided by the dominant language as a discursive resource in one’s narrative of marriage allows the merger between individuality (separation and independence) and a sense of belonging to a collective. A social and psychological reality is produced by calling marriage a “sacred institution,” devoid of any doubt, ambivalence, or inner conflict—it is as perfect as a fairy tale. In this sense, Hila who presents herself as someone who thought that she will never marry and who knows all about bad marriages, celebrates in her name choice not only her personal achievement but also the joy of safely connecting to the hegemonic discourse. The hyphenation in her name signals to her surroundings the high quality of her marriage as reflected in the joint choices she and her partner make. Moreover, since the children will carry the hyphenation too, her name becomes a shared object rather than a means to isolate her from the others. This is the ultimate reason for celebration. As explained by Francesca Cancian (1989), one of the implicit forms of gender dependency that developed in the reality of decreased economic dependency between husbands and wives is women’s dependency on their partners for the production of their appropriate femininity. Cancian shows that in a culture of prevalent divorce and repeated disappointments related to the lack of intimacy in couples’ relationships, appropriate femininity is contingent upon the

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production of intimacy. Alas, for producing intimacy women depend on their male partners’ cooperation with their efforts to coordinate interactions that can be interpreted as intimate. Producing a relationship that can be experienced as intimate is thus concurrently producing appropriate femininity. Using the hyphenated name is for Hila a declaration of her success in her production of herself as the ultimate familist feminine ideal, who is happily married, part of a family and, as a consequence, the ideal feminine citizen. A citizen for whom, beyond the coherence of her daily life with the familist discourse and societal orientation, experience is coherent with a language that reproduces the local appropriate femininity. These different layers are revealed by analyzing the speaker’s assumptions regarding the appropriate ways of speech. As we direct attention to those, we discover ambivalence between marriage as a “sacred institution,” and “I didn’t think I’ll ever find myself married.” The former represents a conservative interpretation of gender relations, and the latter represents a feminist interpretation of gender relations. That raises the question: What is the relationship between these two interpretations? In order to answer, we adopt from Michelle Lazar (2005) her focus on ambivalence as telling in terms of the power relations between the two interpretations. Lazar documents ambivalence as central to the way in which a dominant discourse appropriates categories of the oppositional discourse by way of subjugating it. She shows how the copresence of two discourses of gender relations resonates simultaneously with two sets of sociohistorically contingent meaning potentials, while ambivalence is generated by the way in which egalitarian values are discursively overwhelmed by the prevailing conservative values, so that the egalitarian categories become nonthreatening. The appropriation of the feminist categories changes their meaning in ways that disconnect them from the possibility to undermine or challenge the conservative meaning. Thus their voiced form is no longer subversive. In addition to Lazar’s focus on ambivalence as disconnecting feminist categories from their subversive potential, we draw on Davies and Harré’s concept of social positioning (1990, 1999) to study the subjective meaning of self-naming. As explained in chapter 2, social positioning is conceptualized as personhood production within conversation and interaction. The process of producing personhood occurs through signifying the self as having the characteristics that locate it as a member of a collective that shares a discursive storyline (marriage is sacred; the good marriage is a personal achievement).

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Davies and Harré (1990) explain that in our talk we position ourselves as belonging to the world in certain ways. This aspect of belonging that is produced through the appropriate ways of talking led Maarten Hajer (1995) to suggest that the storyline emerging in the appropriate ways of talk are analytically powerful in exposing the discursive order in a specific space. As argued in previous chapters, tracing moments of assumed belonging may be powerful in unveiling the personal benefits that individuals gain from relying on the dominant discourse. In this chapter, we aim at analyzing the storylines that emerge in our interviewees’ talk, exposing the sense of belonging gained by relying on various storylines in the dominant familist discourse. Thus while the next chapter will map the hard personal work involved in nonhegemonic naming practices and subversive ways of accounting for them, here we focus on four ideal subject positions, produced by women’s patronymic practices: femininity, the ideal wife, the ideal mother, and the ideal citizen. Before proceeding with our analysis, it is important to recall some of the insights regarding Israeli society and its cultural and institutional familist characteristics, introduced above. There we discussed how Israeli political familism derives from the predominant republican perception of citizenship in Israel; how specific sociopolitical processes have resulted in the emergence of motherhood as the criterion for the good citizenship with regard to Israeli women, corresponding to the criterion of military service for Israeli men; and how political familism in Israel is basically institutional familism, in the sense of policies designed to preserve the basic power position of the family in its conservative forms. Within this specific combination of discursive, cultural, and institutional power positions held by familism, even small acts of resistance practiced by women in specific areas in their daily lives cannot benefit from an arena totally free from all familist meanings and pressures. No matter what specific ways they practice in order to distance themselves from the position of the traditional women, women still remain under the familist influence, framing their daily actions and identity production in constant dialogue with its normative imperatives. In this context, we present below our examination of women’s talk as a form of positioning that constitutes their struggle to produce their selves as valuable, appreciated, and rational. We ask what types of interaction between feminism and familism can be found in women’s talk by directing attention to the five dimensions introduced: ways of being, the sort of occasion invoked by the talk, the

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availability of alternative discourses, autobiographical contradictions, and the assumption on whether moral stances are shared or raise conflict. Our first section unfolds the constitution of ideal femininity in women’s talk.

Ideal Femininity In aiming at an analysis that would expose egalitarian and conservative categories in women’s discursive constitution of their feminine selves, we inductively learned that our interviewees negotiate their disciplining primarily in four areas of their daily lives: the ability to compromise; management of anger and conflict; overcoming hurt and disappointment; and their perceptions of feminism and feminists. In each of these respects of the feminine self, we found ambivalence as characteristic of women’s attempts to find specific blends of egalitarianism and conservatism that would allow them to benefit from rational positioning by both vocabularies. The process, in which women consider the possibility of diverting from patronymic expectations, reveals these four ambivalent constructions of local appropriate femininity. Within familist discourse, early marriage is the normative imperative. Women are expected to marry in their mid-twenties and not being part of a marriage-oriented relationship by the age of twentyseven is a source of worry. We learned from Yael Snir that marrying early is not only an achievement in itself, but it is also indicative of a major requirement of local appropriate femininity, the ability to compromise on principles: My sister is 38 years old and not married. I believe she won’t be able to change her name let’s say, because she’s carrying Shfetzler, for 40 years already, so I think she won’t be able to escape it any more, but in my case it wasn’t too, I wasn’t single for too long . . . and the thought of a joint name came really as a compromise here; yes, it was the egalitarian element, you see, that he said that he refuses to be Shfetzler, and I said I refuse to be Balulu, so let’s find something in the middle, it was a kind of a compromise you see, now somewhere along the way, I came out with the awkward feeling that here I am, a bad bride who forces her poor groom to change his family name, and it came from me and not from him . . . well, you know, a woman has to accept the decisions at home (laughs) . . . it really was difficult to say that he wanted it . . . It became clear that that’s how I felt about it, and he . . . when we would remain on our own, he’d clearly define it as my own madness; and

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something he can’t bother to deal with any longer, like, go ahead, do whatever you want! I did appreciate it at the time that if there were people around, he’d explain it as our shared choice . . . . And perhaps he was right. Perhaps it was my own madness, I mean, if I look around me, most people around us, if I look at my closest circle of friends, they all took their husbands’ names without exception. All of them!

And in another place: I don’t have a problem with it, I have no pangs of conscience over it or over me being the one who had initiated the whole thing; I decided, I pushed it forward; that’s very clear . . . but you see, he is not exactly the kind of guy whose wife manages him; no one can say that about him, so it was in this area that I managed things a bit, and I have no problem taking the responsibility for that (Yael Snir, 28, originally Shfetzler, married Tomer Balulu; they both changed to a new name, Snir)

The speaker introduces a way of being that consists of two feminine achievements. Without her sister, it would be difficult to construct their nature as achievements. Her sister serves in her speech as the other, the one who failed to marry as late as the age of forty. The fact that her own singlehood was short justifies her ability to compromise on her principles, refrain from retaining, and accept a third name. In contradistinction, her sister, who has been single for a long time, would not be able to compromise on her principles; If she ever got married she would have to retain her surname. The speaker implies that in her sister’s case, retaining is an item that is part of a different cluster of actions constructed as a kind of deviation. Thus, in her ways of speech, two separate clusters of femininity are distinguished: long singlehood goes with name retaining, short singlehood goes with the normative demand to compromise on principles. It seems important for the speaker to maintain that the practice of a third name was the only option fitting the “egalitarian element”: the compromise she made by giving up on retaining, practically led her into an egalitarian path. Comparing her “egalitarian solution” to that offered by Sharon Lebell who proposed the “bilineal solution” as the feminist alternative (1988), we can infer how the subversive nature of a nonpatronymic practice is blurred by calling it egalitarian. According to Lebell, overcoming male privilege in the patronymic system entails the dismissal of the ideal of a shared name, while holding on to a joint transmission of names to daughters and sons.1 Thus,

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the construction of the third-name practice as the egalitarian one uses the discursive resource of the external symmetry (He refused, I refused) to legitimize the familist requirements of one, unified, short Hebrew word as name. Moreover, becoming the mature woman able to compromise on principles and to find egalitarian solutions deviates from social expectations around her. Yael’s way of speech evolves in two separate discursive contexts. One of them is assumed to be shared with the interviewer and is based on feminist attitudes; in its context a third name is a compromise. The other is attributed to a wider social circle and is based on the demand that a woman should not burden her husband’s life with her own “madness.” Yael has to produce her appropriate femininity in the awareness that society still expects her to be the good bride. The nice-girl femininity serves the emerging ambivalent production of the feminine self by using humor: a cynical statement regarding the dichotomy between the good and the bad bride. Interestingly, producing the ideal femininity both contradicts the bad bride, who forces her groom to accept her “mad” ideas, and is consistent with the good wife, who in certain areas takes the decisions at home. The moral stance taken is clearly assumed to be in conflict with the surrounding social circles, to whom a negating gaze toward the “bad bride” is attributed. Her form of speech invokes an occasion of moral scolding, stating “I have no pangs of conscience over it.” The statement refers to the crossing of boundaries embedded in generating an action that is socially exceptional and deprived her partner of his patronymic privilege. At the same time, appropriate femininity, within current middle- class, highly educated spaces in Israel, is not drawn along storylines of passive obedience or emotional self-recruitment for the task of pleasing husbands. The storyline takes a shape of an expected delicate management of relationships. The shared intimacy is constructed as achieved despite her management of things, her decision making, and her insistence on her initiatives. These may cause overt disagreement without reducing the quality of the intimacy, something Ya’el is very proud of. The concluding statement about her willingness to take responsibility for her management of things suggests that individualism, too, provides her with discursive resources. Thus the emerging appropriate femininity is mature, powerful, assertive, and responsible, echoing a local study of the discourse on Israeli women’s reproductive choices, where the appropriate femininity is constructed as “responsible, committed and reasonable” (Amir and Benjamin, 1997).

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Israeli current ideal femininity is ambivalent in the sense of concurrently corresponding to the requirement of responsible independence and to the romantic dream of the “nice girl” whose epitomic self-fulfillment is marriage. Ideal femininity is about being sober and aware of the uncertain chance of attaining independence and selffulfillment that depend on another person. As the first quote cited in this chapter has shown, current femininity is about the realization that many marriages fail, next to the deep-seated belief that marriage is a sacred institution. It is intriguing to watch the ways of talk that are used for maintaining this ambivalence side by side with a reliance on individualist categories that highlight responsibility: Michal: So you’d say you have chosen the name Cohen? Tamar: In one way or another yes. By not fighting it and by not insisting, it became my choice. I’m not trying to escape my responsibility. (Tamar Cohen, 27, originally Nah’many, adopted her partner’s family name)

The “nice-girl” type of femininity is reflected by the speaker’s awareness to alternative options: she could have fought against the “Cohen,” she could have insisted on not adopting it. Fighting and insisting are forms of conduct that belong elsewhere: as a mature, reasonable and responsible person, she recognizes their potential presence, but at the same time excludes them. In demonstrating her ways of being, she focuses on the choice she took by not allowing the alternatives to intrude in her relationship. Her last sentence invokes another optional occasion—that of accusation. As if being accused of evading responsibility, she is already on the defensive: she is the nice girl who will not attempt shirking her responsibility for the consequence of her patronymic naming practice. Feminists have since long pointed out the salient role of the category “nice girl” in the interpellation of women into local sets of structural and cultural constraints (Fox, 1977). 2 Davies and her colleagues have recently reported the strength of the “nice-girl” category in the constitution of the ambivalent feminine selves in the school system (2001). The “nice-girl” category was also conceptualized as the basis for women’s traditional emotion work (Hochschild, 1983). Avoiding conflict and restraining anger for the sake of pacifying and attending to the negative emotionality of others were defined in this way as salient normative imperatives for appropriate femininity (see also Shields, 2002). The emerging conditions validating the “nice-girl”

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category in the Israeli context studied here is the mature and responsible stance of avoiding potential conflict—the conflict that could have arisen had women insisted on struggling against the patronymic practice. Lazar’s understanding of ambivalence as subjugation of the feminist alternative is substantiated: the notions of choice and responsibility loose their subversive meaning that they may have had in the context of a feminist interpretation. Instead they are used to justify traditional ways of being: Tamar’s construction of herself as choosing to avoid conflict contributes to our understanding of the ideal femininity as still dependent on avoiding conflict and direct expressions of anger. At the same time, ambivalence emerges again, as the opposite is also true: current ideal femininity in the discursive space studied is apparently identified with a high level of assertiveness. As we saw in Ya’el Snir’s case, the local assertiveness involves a delicate managing of relationships. In the case below, this management requires giving priority to individual goals over the feelings of others. It seems that an egalitarian emotional management facilitates the achievement of goals even under the condition of partners’ negative feelings. Ta’hel describes, for example, how she gave priority to the goal of a shared new name over her partner’s regret: I can’t recall who exactly asked him, but he was asked in front of me: “what? Have you given up your name?” and the person continued: “but that’s how everybody knows you, everybody knows you as Weinberg!” and then Idan came to me and said, you know, I must tell you that I find it a bit difficult . . . and I was surprised, and I was hurt by it because I realized that my pride, the pride I had in us doing this step of the shared new name together, that it said that we have this kind of relationship that we could take such a decision and that we were both willing to give up on our former names in order to find the shared name, you know for whatever it worth on a symbolic level, and he suddenly comes and says I’m unhappy about it; there was something insulting in it as it meant that I’m on my own in interpreting things that way, and you know what, still today he hasn’t changed the voice message on his office phone on which he introduces himself as Idan Weinberg! Really annoying. (Ta’hel Rimon, 28, originally Rinzler, married Idan Weinberg, they both took the new name Rimon)

Ideal femininity is no longer a story about marginalizing the self or suppressing one’s own emotions for the sake of pacifying a husband’s negative emotions. Ta’hel is devastated to realize the cracks in her

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romantic idealization of their relationship as capable of accommodating a hard joint decision. Nevertheless, she is not going to give up on her achievement. Despite her partner’s regret and overall doubts about crossing societal convention in the dramatic way of distancing himself from the patronymic privilege, her insult is there to signify the impossibility of withdrawing to earlier stages in the process. She emphasizes her insult twice producing her femininity as romantic directed at preserving the relationship perceived as overall positive and based on friendship, and as assertive directed at maintaining the egalitarian spirit of the relationship and her related achievements. Togetherness is important and supported by the discursive order, but if togetherness is to remain valuable, her femininity has to be produced in ways that enable experiencing it as authentic. To understand more accurately the interaction between the feminist and familist discourses in her speech, it is worthwhile to focus on how her insult is constructed and how she makes sense of it. The feminist discourse provides the categories of insult, “it’s really annoying.” These categories suggest the direct expression of feelings of disappointment, invoking a distancing from the traditional emotional work, demanding its marginalization. However, the feminist discourse provides rhetoric alone: in practice, familism as a conservative discourse requires the disappointment, the cracks in the togetherness-image to be embraced: “I’m on my own in interpreting things that way” does not provide a path for action. It becomes visible that the appropriate local femininity is compelled to compromise on such principles as shared values or shared emotional responses. The preservation of the relationship is enabled by the belief that it does meet the egalitarian standard which is ironically confirmed by her expression of the negative feelings. The expression of this negativity constituting her ability to respond authentically to cracks in the togetherness provides the evidence for shouldering the challenge faced by couples, who insist on the egalitarian pattern (Schwartz, 1994): the challenge of maintaining a sense of significant intimacy that reinforces authentic friendship rather than alienated false idealizations. Up until this point, our analysis of the storylines facilitating the exposition of the appropriate local femininity in our material, focused on ambivalences expressed by women’s speech. It this way, we traced the storylines of the mature woman, the nice girl preferring to avoid conflict for the sake of maintaining her responsible and reasonable self; and that of disappointed femininity that prioritizes the preservation of the relationship as long as she is allowed to express her negative

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feelings. In addition we found a fourth storyline focusing on egalitarianism. Women’s talk here consists of a direct attack on feminists, drawing as main discursive resource on a dichotomy between the self as reasonable and rational, and feminists as the “Other,” who fail to meet these standards as they insist on meaninglessly keeping their flags flying. The first quote below suggests that individualism provides the legitimizing categories for this dichotomy. After explaining in detail how egalitarian her partner is in his willingness to shoulder all tasks related to child care, and how successful she is professionally, Elinor Buchach-Appleboim explains that she cannot wave the flag, and that she is unwilling to fight any battles either at home or in the public arena: I, I have a lot of complaints regarding how things are managed, but I don’t feel that I . . . that I have to start the revolution, I feel that things are happening, that I can do things, that it is in my hands, in my world I don’t have to . . . It’s not that I think that the condition of women is that good, but I don’t feel that I need to take care of . . . other women, to promote their status; I need to promote my status, like a man who needs to make sure that he progresses and attains a higher status. (Elinor Buchach-Appleboim, 31, originally Ben-Yaakov, adopted her partner’s name)

Next to her feeling, quoted in chapter 4, that she should have retained her birth family name, the speaker is describing her belief that she needs to promote her status like a man. “Like a man” invokes an omnirelevant comparison and evaluation of whether battles are worthwhile. Would a man struggle for his name? Her narrative is one in which she did not struggle to retain her name, as her husband was very sensitive about his already hyphenated name. The comparison to men continues in her speaking within a discursive order dominated by individualist currents. Like a man, Elinor produces her ideal femininity as unrelated to other women. Her way of being is separated of them, is similar to that of a man, who ought to be concerned with his own promotion. Invoking an occasion of a public that accuses her of not acting on behalf of other women is an indication of the relative strength of the feminist discourse in her surroundings. She feels, however, that it is definitely safe not to take responsibility for anyone but herself. Surely, she is not going to pay any social price for drawing on the individualistic category defining her only obligation as the maximization of her efforts to promote herself. She clearly takes strength from the ideological stance that liberates her from the need

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to identify, as a woman, with others who are politically active for the cause of women in society. Realizing just how limited the options for other women are has no implications for the appropriate femininity. The opposite holds true, had she been concerned with the problems of other women, she would have failed the ultimate criterion for reasonable action, being like a man. Echoing Fogiel-Bijaoui’s argument (1997) regarding the hegemonic construction of problems in Israel and the problems of problematic Other women, Elinor is constructing her femininity as disconnected from any feminist endeavors and as separated from Other women. Na’ama Yarkoni takes the storyline of disconnecting from feminism a step further. Na’ama: Let’s put it like that, eh . . . I think that . . . no, because this was the last time I tried to talk with him about that [taking a third name] . . . Look, there is this convention that a woman, whose name shows both names, is a feminist. But it, it’s just a symbol, you see, it doesn’t say anything. I know a lot of women who show all the feminist flags, but at home, they, very nicely, take the garbage out, cook, eh . . . I don’t know what, and their man is a real chauvinist, and they surrender to all chauvinist rules, but they know how to show the flag on a theoretical level. It’s not that [the name] that will make you a feminist or not. If you changed or didn’t change. It’s about things that are much more . . . Michal: and are you a feminist? Na’ama: I’m a feminist in my life-style, I’m not . . . I’m not showing any feminist flag. I mean, I live an egalitarian life, I eh . . . I’m all for things that are important; I believe there should be equality in all kind of things, equality of opportunities and equal treatment. But I don’t show any flags, and I don’t fight for things, and I don’t know feminist theories, and I haven’t learned them. Michal: Why? What is holding you back? Na’ama: Nothing is holding me back and nothing attracts me to it. I work in a feminist workplace, I work at [a feminist center], I’m the coordinator of [the name of a project]. Michal: (laughs) Na’ama: That’s right, so I tell you, in my daily life I’m doing some very feminist stuff, but I’m not carrying the banner. I’m not . . . I’m not a feminist . . . I don’t just sit around and say, I don’t define myself, I don’t sit and say, I’m a feminist, but I’m more than most of the feminist women that surround me in my daily life . . . Michal: and at your workplace, did people commented on you taking his name? Na’ama: at my workplace, all the women changed their names. Perhaps one woman retained hers. I don’t know. You see, in [her workplace],

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which really is a feminist place, by definition, all women changed their names, we don’t bother about these matters. Michal: so for you, it’s just a marginal issue on your way Na’ama: No. no, it’s not a topic that, it’s seems to me . . . look, feminism is making a lot of mistakes. And . . . at times, eh . . . feminists are picking on secondary issues instead of looking at the main stuff. And that [the name] is one of these things . . . it doesn’t really say anything - it’s what you’re doing with it. If I had been Na’ama Blumstein-Yarkoni, but I’d be a slave at home, then what? OK? So I’m Na’ama Yarkoni, but I live a life of equality, and that’s how I raise my kids. (Na’ama Yakoni, 34, originally Blumshtein, adopted her partner’s name)

The dichotomy between herself as the really egalitarian woman and feminists who live like slaves who show meaningless flags, picking on things of no importance such as naming practices is instrumental for a value hierarchy. Working in a feminist workplace with other women who consider themselves feminists is not presented as leverage into feminism but as a source of value. Her feminist workplace provides the basis for generalizing about feminism and feminists, proudly rejecting the possibility of reading any feminist material. Contrasting the value of the workplace, “feminism-is-making-a-lot-of-mistakes” is a form of speech that clearly devalues feminism. That mistakes are the opposite of reasonable femininity is clear, but how exactly does the reasonable femininity look like: it seems that individualist categories converge with the familist conservative discourse to equip Na’ama with discursive resources. Her description of her own family, her egalitarian partner, the way she raises her children, and of her own workplace invokes an ideal image of a woman who found the right path for herself. The important point is that she perceives the path “found by herself” as an achievement of her own, totally disconnected of any previous feminist struggles. As an individual, she knew what to do, when, where and with whom, so that she can celebrate her disconnected reasonable lifestyle that allows her to live an egalitarian life in contrast to the Other women. Those, whom she ridicules as raising the banner, but being unable to live according to what they preach, help her to construct herself as ultimately rational and protected from any moral dilemmas. Employed at a feminist workplace, she speaks in the context of the consensus provided by “all” the women working there; they all maintain their individuality so that they remain protected from the possibility of being misled

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by mistaken feminism. There is no ambivalence in the direct attack presented by Na’ama Yarkoni. The ambivalence, as Lazar maintains, is in her specific brand of egalitarianism, devoid of its subversive aspects, completely incorporated into familycenteredness, and in the condemnation of women insisting on the subversive value of nonpatronymic naming practices.

The Ideal Wife Among other meanings, taking the partner’s name and using it in the diverse spaces of daily life is a social gesture stating “I’m a married woman.” Under the powerful influence of familism, this type of information is of immense importance, since marriage constitutes the ultimate approval of a woman’s social value. The approval is her ticket to a wide range of social entitlements and recognition including for upper middle class women, the option of being provided for, and for lower middle class and working class women, the social permission to spend money on household interiors (Luken and Vaughan, 2005). In patronymic cultures such as Israel, hyphenating a family name is likewise a social declaration of the marital family status and its diverse benefits. Since hyphenation is relatively rare in comparison to adopting the partner’s name, it is a powerful social declaration, stating a woman’s power to challenge the patronymic expectation. When she was born, we became a real family, and the name is one of those unifying things, you know, the family name is the one name that we all share . . . It was as if I said, we’re a family now, we need to have one name . . . And in another place: But then, I looked at her when she was only a few days old . . . I looked at her and felt that she resembled me a lot more . . . eh . . . I don’t know, I mean, either I felt a stronger sense of belonging to this name or . . . perhaps it was the birth and how dramatic this moment was, and it suddenly came out of me, this strong feeling, that it’s unfair that she should be Bukay, she ought to be Swartz, it was suddenly clear . . . But this too was a passing thought and I don’t feel like that anymore. . . . . And by the way, there is a girl in my daughter’s class that until the third grade carried her mother’s last name, and then all of a sudden they decided to replace her name, and she was registered with her father’s last name, all her class mates got confused, and her mother told me that her in-laws got really mad about their grandchild not carrying their last name.

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And still in another place: (talking of Jody Nir-Mozes-shalom, the celebrity woman mentioned in the preface) . . . it is ridiculous for a woman to carry three names, but in her case she didn’t have much choice because her first husband got killed, so I can empathize with her will to leave his name, on the other hand, she has a new husband now, and it’s unfair to the current husband, I see it as problematic. (Daniel Bukay, originally Swartz, took her partner’s name)

The hegemonic position of the patronymic practice is evident in her reproduction of the appropriate way of talking that is consistent with worrying about what is or is not fair to the husband and his family. It is important to deal with what is fair and unfair, as clearly the ideal wife is required to be fair to her husband and his family. Fairness raises several moral dilemmas for Daniel Bukay: it is “fair” to adopt a partner’s name; at the same it is unfair to maintain older names. For a moment it also feels unfair to a baby (as well as to her mom) to deprive her of the one name that could signify the family she really belongs to, the family she resembles; but, here’s what had happened to a woman who dared giving her birth family name to her daughter: her in-laws got mad, and in the third grade, her daughter and her classmates got so terribly confused. It seems that the speech assumes a general agreement on the probable devastating consequences of not succumbing to patronymic expectations. The appropriate wife is produced through her ability to adopt the rational voice that protects her from doing such confusing stuff to her own daughter and from being unfair to her partner and to his parents—even if she felt for moments that keeping her birth family name was the right thing for her. The wise wife, the appropriate wife, knows how such momentary lapses of rationality should be treated and that the really important issue is that the family is unified by a joint name. The romantic idealized family that shares one name provides a storyline that is there for her in the process of producing the moral self. Similarly an individualist understanding of the ideal wife is used by another interviewee in producing her moral self: Tamar: I feel it’s like the becoming of a family identity . . . something is being created, and it gradually becomes part of me . . . there was a moment when the bell rang, and I had this insight that me and my partner, we’re suddenly, we’re a family now, I mean, and when I say a family, so I don’t refer anymore to him and me only, my close

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family now consist of him, me and my parents . . . so it was like suddenly realizing that we’re really close now. And in another place: Tamar: Unlike my first name which was always part of me and of who I am, my current family name is part of a choice I made in one way or another, it signifies many things, it signifies my choice to get married, it signifies the name I chose, and I haven’t chosen my first name. Michal: Which is more important, your first name or your last name? Tamar: well . . . [a sigh] . . . It’s difficult to say it. The answer, my instinctive answer would be, the answer I feel like saying is that my first name is more important, but eh . . . No! on second thought, it’s not like that, it’s not right. Because saying that, is like saying that my relationship with my husband is less important than me, maybe, I mean, the family name represents my relationship with my partner and husband, so if it’s like that, and if that’s the choice I made, and that’s a conscious choice I made, it’s hard to say that this choice is less important to me, because now he is part of me . . . Michal: say a friend comes to you to consult about how to decide. What would you say to her? Tamar: I’d say she needs to consider what’s important to her, and what’s important to her partner. (Tamar Cohen, 27, originally Nah’many, adopted her partner’s family name)

The ideal wife emerges as constituted through the encounter between two separate discursive arguments: one suggesting identity to be the trail of past primarily premarital experiences; the other suggests identity to be the result of adult choices, the choices made as part of the process of creating the family of procreation with a person, who is now part of the primary family bonding, just as her parents are. Both these meanings of identity are valid, but relying on the romantic discourse, Tamar produces her position as the ideal wife by identifying herself with the latter. Her postmarital identity is as salient as is her premarital one. Using the phrase “on second thought” is a measure of invoking the adult consideration of her relationship with her partner, being as important as the self. The egalitarian discourse is incorporated into the appropriate way of speech as is evident in the used

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storyline delegitimizing the traditional wife that would completely undermine her own interests while prioritizing her marital relationship. At the same time, egalitarianism loses its subversive aspects as the ideal wife cannot perceive her past experiences and identities as more important than her marriage. She has to accept that the disruption of her biography by the turning point of a marriage demands that any identity-related issues will be now examined in light of what is important to both partners. Moreover, as the ideal wife, she undertakes to maturely allow identity issues not to interfere with in-laws’ feelings and avoid any possible conflicts around what is important to them too.

The Ideal Mother The ideal mother is responsible for the well-being of her children; and the social system as a whole, says Sharon Hays (1996), depends on mothers to take responsibility for child care. The North American mothering discourse is present in the local discursive order focusing, as explained by Dorothy Smith (1999), on the mother’s pivotal and irreplaceable role and her prime responsibility for raising competent, successful children. Diane Reay (1998) found that middle class women are exposed to discourses that render them doubly responsible: they have to reproduce their children’s class position and to produce their children’s schooling achievements. The latter enables the former. Discursive mothering is about protecting the well-being of children in ways that are conductive for their future development. Thus, mothers’ naming practices emerged in our participants’ talk as either “bad” for the children, or responsible and protective of their tender souls. In other words, not all women know how to fulfill their responsibility towards their children, and the discourse of the good mother is there to allow women’s self-positioning that equates patronymic practices with maternal responsibility. Ayelet- Hashah’ar: You see, my sister who immediately adopted her partner’s last name ridicules what for her is my madness; she says, what do you need this hassle for? What does it matter? But I’m this kind of person that holds on to her principles; she doesn’t have that many principles, and I’m a fighter, and I used to be very feminist once . . . it’s part of the whole thing you know . . . it’s me, me, me, I mean, I don’t’ have to give up my name just because I’m a woman, but it stopped for me with the girls . . . people asked me so why don’t you call the girls Kraus-Atias? And I said, my choices aren’t

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their fault! If one day they’ll decide that that’s what they want, so that’s what they’ll do . . . eh . . . I mustn’t complicate their lives; I also refrained from giving them a cumbersome first name like mine; you see already my first name is cumbersome in itself; so I said they are going to have easy convenient names without too much fuss, without too many options to choose from later in life . . . Michal: But did you have the option at all? Ayelet- Hashah’ar: No, I didn’t, I mean, I thought about it, it’s not as if I didn’t give it a second thought; it wasn’t an automatic movement. I gave . . . I said . . . I mean, I knew it was going to really disturb Roni [her partner], if suddenly they’ll have two names, and then I also realized that if at all, we’ll all have to change our name, and he can’t change his last name, and in the end I’m the one who is left out, but there’s nothing you can do about it, I’m not the kind of person who would bang her head against the wall . . . I said NO, the girls need their . . . if they’ll ever want they’ll do . . . I mean I have no problem with it, and I don’t want to complicate their lives, and I’m sure . . . look I’m sure that they won’t do it, but with time . . . they, at the moment, they don’t even know that I’m Kraus. Michal: Was it an option to give them Kraus only? Ayelet-Hashah’ar: NO! that’s completely out of the question? Have you lost your mind? Michal: Why? Ayelet-Hashah’ar: Listen, wars eh . . . , I believe we shouldn’t be plunged into wars. I’m not that . . . . It’s also about . . . if there was too much of a problem with Kraus, I’d give it up but, eh . . . but Roni accepted it and understood, I didn’t even try to ask him whether he wants me to be called . . . because the NO was clear to me, I know him, and I know myself, and that’s was enough; I had enough; I, I don’t think that it is that important; I believe the Kraus is part of who I am, that it reminds me who I am, but it’s not important enough to enter a war over it. Michal: so we were talking about the girls Ayelet-Hashah’ar: Yes. You see, I’ve got this separation thing, I separate very clearly between you could say also that my name is Ayelet-Hashah’ar Kraus-Atias, but in their day- care I’m Ayelet Atias, I mean, it’s my responsibility there . . . Here I can play with whatever I feel like, it’s not my responsibility, I was of course responsible for choosing their first names, but there it’s my responsibility to protect them . . . Michal: what do you mean when you say that it was your responsibility? Ayelet-Hashah’ar: for example, for example, there’s this kid I know, well, I don’t know the kid, I know the parents who have a child with a very complicated last name, and every time at day- care, when he

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Feminism, Family, and Identity in Israel was asked what’s his name, he’d say his name, and people would ask, what? What? What? So after a while, he began refusing to tell his name, shrugging his shoulders . . . the name is problematic . . . very nice but problematic (Ayelet-Hashah’ar Kraus-Atias, 34, originally Kraus, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his birth name; the children carry their father’s name)

It appears that the story at the end of the quote, describing the child who carries a cumbersome last name, is expected to explain some kind of enormous damage caused to a very young child by irresponsible parents or mother. Resembling recent findings from the US Israeli women seem to be exposed to a prevalent understanding of long surnames as carrying a harmful potential for children (Nugent, 2010). The fact that the child gave up trying to tell adults his name, is not told as an indicator to the child’s wisdom protecting him from the irritating world. Instead, it is told as an indication of a negative consequence— obviously, the negative situation, to which the speaker would have also exposed her daughters, had she been less responsible. The list of optional irresponsible decisions is long: embarking on a war with her partner for the sake of negotiating with him the option of transferring her birth family name to her daughters, is carefully constructed as irresponsible and unreasonable; likewise, giving her own hyphenated name to her daughters is negated with the responsible steering of the delicate situation in the space of the day-care center. Responsibility, there, means fully obeying the patronymic imperative, completely deleting any problematic hyphenation. Even if the speaker is willing to be perceived as somewhat extreme, mad, radical or as a fighter in the eyes of her sister, she will never risk being perceived as such in the eyes of the kindergarden teacher and the other parents. Her familiarity with the local familism and the expectations it generates, equips her with the right intuition regarding the production of herself as the appropriate mother and, more generally, the reasonable person.

The Ideal Citizen In most developed countries, women’s right to self-naming is not yet recognized as a civil right. Tirosh (2010) has shown that European legal systems still uphold the importance of the name for the state, operating to perpetuate the gender order. More specifically, her analysis of the rulings of the European Court of Human

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Rights on petitions concerning name changes shows that the court does not yet recognize the relevance of the right to name oneself to citizenship. Tirosh concludes her analysis by commenting that the legal subject’s interests in autonomy and equality are marginalized by courts playing the role of a “covert guard of a secure symbolic order” (2010:306). In Israel, the patronymic custom is institutionalized to the extent that men can be completely safe from any act imposing a change of name against their will. Thus men entail the privilege of a protected name and the almost automatic transfer of their names to their children. Women’s civil rights are more complex in this sense, and as described in chapter 3, the practical procedure exposes many women to routines of name changing despite the formal legal situation. Moreover, the right to name one’s own children is hardly accessible: few women manage to succeed in passing a preliminary stage of negotiation with their partners and their partners’ families of origin and an additional bureaucratic stage at the ministry of the interior.3 The current situation does not provide proper protection for self-naming as a civil right. Legally speaking, women are able to practice self-naming, but practically their options are circumscribed. Limited citizenship is revealed as highly significant in our interviewees’ stories. Moreover, it becomes clear that in women’s subjective world, naming practices are connected to the issues of citizenship through two unique characteristics of citizenship in Israeli society: militarism and religion. As portrayed in chapter 3, these two spread into the concept of citizenship and shape its essence and procedures. The first is reflected in the way Israelis adopt the militaristic ethos of moral support and practical care for those who sacrifice themselves as soldiers, while fully embracing the military logic that prioritizes security-related issues over other concerns. The second is reflected in the cooperation with the regulation of all matrimonial issues by the religious authorities, that is, the rabbinical court for Jews. Due to the lack of separation between religion and state in Israel (see chapter 3), women who do not allow the Rabbinical court to get involved in their marriages are excluded from their civil right to register their correct personal status. Given the secular character of our sample, seventeen of these women got married in non- Orthodox ways: six out of the nine retainers; nine out of the twenty-two hyphenating participants; and two of the five who took a new name together with their partners; Interestingly none of the six women with the conventional patronymic naming practice did. Thus for seventeen among our respondents, the religious aspect of

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citizenship is contested, while at the same time they realize their right to name themselves. Namely, they refrained from Orthodox marriage and challenged the patronymic convention. It is further of significance that eight of these seventeen women, who married in non- Orthodox weddings, insisted on naming their children in nonpatronymic ways. The children of one of these eight carry their mother’s birth family name and four other women in this category negotiated for their children a family name different than that of their father. Thus, from a practical point of view, ideal citizenship is constituted around secular resistance for seventeen women in our sample. In this context, three themes emerge in women’s talk, indirectly implicating how women negotiate the subject position of the ideal citizenship through their naming practices: one is organized around secular resistance; another is organized around the attempt to give citizenship a neutral, nonpolitical meaning; and the third is organized around military aspects of citizenship.

Secular Resistance or the Questioned Citizenship A strong connection exists in our interviewee’s world between naming practices and marriage arrangements: the right for self-naming and the right to perform a non- Orthodox wedding are regarded as two corresponding forms of resistance. Apparently, there are additional ways to associate these two acts of resistance. One of these ways is particularly surprising: not marrying in the religious- Orthodox way, which in Israel means not being registered as married, becomes an incentive for following the bureaucratic procedure of naming. Excluded by the secular wedding, women may try and compensate or negotiate inclusion through self-naming. Self-naming in this context becomes an act of claiming citizenship, even at the price of submitting to controlling practices of questioning and exclusion exerted by administrators: H’agit: eh . . . . [a sigh] I believe I thought about it when I was pondering then before the wedding the idea . . . all ideas, but . . . eh . . . . But I do want to be, I mean, I want to be part of, I do want it to be registered that . . . that we’re eh . . . connected. I mean, that we’re a family. Particularly because I didn’t marry in an Orthodox way, and I’m not considered married, and I don’t think, I’m going to go abroad in order to marry. We may perhaps one day make it a part of a trip or something, but even if not, I don’t mind it’s not that important to me.

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Michal: So what happened when you registered your name? H’agit: I was told by conservative 4 friends not to tell the people at the Ministry of the Interior that I’m married Michal: Why? H’agit: Because at times they may give you some trouble to prevent subversive processes in their registers. But at one point, I mean, there was a very nice female clerk there that was really nice and I said to her, listen, I did get married, but eh . . . eh . . . I wasn’t by the rabbinical court—it was through the conservative movement. Eh . . . so she said, well, you should write it down, that you ask to add the name of your partner to your name, but you are registered as single. Michal: And that is what you did? And did she say anything? H’agit: No. She just asked: are you are both of you Israeli citizens? She couldn’t grasp the idea of citizens not registering through the rabbinical court, it usually a procedure meant for those who marry inhabitants of the territories under Palestinian authority or the labor migrants or anything of this sort, I mean, people who are inhibited by law of walking the main road. (H’agit Vilkomirsky-Ravid, 31, originally Vilomirsky, hyphenated her partner’s name with hers; he did not change his name)

Struggling for her right to have some administrative recognition of her family status despite her secular resistance, H’agit seeks the appropriate registration of the name she chose for herself. The “ritual” that is expected to render her registered turns into an encounter with the fact that she is part of a list of excluded populations. Like her, they have to follow the procedure targeting outsiders: migrant workers; Palestinians, who are not citizens; and other excluded sectors. Like in their case, the state does not undertake its responsibility for proper registration and does not consider her a married woman. Instead, the state demographically defines her children as growing up with a single mother. Even though she longs for a proper signification of her connectedness to her partner and attempts to use the naming process as measure to achieve this goal, her citizenship still is directly questioned: “Are both of you Israeli citizens?” In this way the state not only prevents her access to the status of a married woman, owner of the appropriate family, but also, more importantly, questions her citizenship status. Access to the path to fully recognized citizenship is limited to those following the normative imperatives.

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Being a Patriot: a “Nonpolitical” Meaning for Citizenship The standards raised in the discussion of the aesthetic dimension of the cultural loading of the name as reflected in the “name of a pilot” that was presented in the previous chapter appear in interviewees’ speech as defining standards for the ideal citizenship. In other words, Hebrew language and its dispositions link the proper name and the loyal citizen. In the following quote, this relationship is exposed in a mother’s reflection on the meanings of the beautiful name. Her pride in the careful process of consideration regarding her daughters’ first names reproduces the position of the ideal citizen. Michal: What’s the importance of the beautiful name in daily life? Ayelet: It plays a role before you see the person . . . you must have heard of this experiment they conducted showing that it shapes one’s perception of who that person is. Michal: So how would you define beautiful names? Ayelet: These are Israeli name, I means, this type of being Israeli that is Sabra5 . . . eh . . . for me this is part of the issue, I mean, part of my idealism and all that . . . it is a part of my personality and also patriotism and my connection to the land of Israel . . . and also that it is a name that cannot be distorted, I really thought about all that when I picked their names, I told you I worked a lot on it. (Ayelet Hashah’ar6 Kraus-Atias, 34, originally Kraus, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his birth name; the children carry their father’s name).

The standard of the beautiful name becomes in speakers’ speech a path generating the right type of being Israeli—the Israeli, who is connected to the land and to images of “authenticity” rather than to any aspects of the Diaspora or the past. The emphasis on the beauty of the name rather than other lingual aspects such as meanings or semantics deproblematize citizenship. It renders the citizenship accessible and safe for all Hebrew speakers, who are willing to take Israeli names in the sense of names that have a meaning in Hebrew. Embracing this standard enables the interviewee to produce her citizenship as positioned beyond any doubt or questioning.

A Militaristic Ethos for Family Life Since ancient times into late modernity, the mythical answer to the question of the historical survival of the Jewish people is often the intensity of Jewish family life (Cohen and Hyman, 1986). Within this

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intensity, women are expected to demonstrate an extreme form of loyalty to their families. This is mainly translated to adhering to the conservative gender roles of women as caregivers and men as soldiers. Therefore, while men are expected to be loyal soldiers or otherwise, their citizenship is being questioned, for women, it is their loyalty to the family. In other words, being part of an appropriate family is perceived as the high moral standard for women’s citizenship (Berkovitch, 1999). Producing the ideal citizen in this context occurs through the satisfaction that speakers take in presenting themselves as sacrificing individual preferences, for the sake of the “one-big-happy-family” dream. Sacrifice is enabled by the belief that “the family” is the most important thing in their world. Further, family making as a standard of citizenship requires that the produced family follows a military ethos: For instance my friend Anat, who changed [took her husbands’ name], although leaving her own name was very important to her, comes from a family that is very similar to the family I come from. Very familyoriented, really cohesive and . . . you know of the kind of one for one, so that they only need to whisper that they need something, and immediately all the family is there for them. It is like that in her family and in mine as well. And I think that each woman creates a family, and I really want to, I mean I speak for myself here, I desperately want to see my family like that as well. Very much so. I mean let’s say [my partner] would call from the end of the world – I shall immediately go and fetch him from wherever he is. And my children, the children I’ll have . . . it’s so clear that what I want is a unified and fused together family cell . . . eh . . . I don’t know how to say it, but I want it to be totally symbiotic. A family in which we all feel like one weaved into the other’s life. (Maya Sade, 28, originally Eytan, adopted her partner’s name)

Positioning is a process of narrating one’s positive value through the employment of positively loaded categories that are central to the hegemonic discourse. Alternatively, as Hajer (1995) explains, positioning is about accepting discursive silences, including the avoidance of topics that may remind the audience of any doubts or possible conflicts related to the hegemonic images. Maya’s talk reiterates the harmonious image of the good family as one, in which separate selves, conflicting needs or antagonistic views do not exist, or if they do, they do not constitute a part of the family. Her positioning emerges as a process of gaining for herself the ideal citizenship by actively making

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a family that is similar to the one she believes she and her friend grew up in. She is confident that such an ideal is realistic in the sense that it already exists taking the form of unconditional support and reciprocal help. This image resonates with military expressions, which were commonly used during the years of nation building: “one for all and all for each”—in stark contrast to the individualist spirit of the present. By speaking in this way, Maya reveals the self-scarifying type of family that responds to the local standards of citizenship. Within the storyline that she so fully embraces, she cannot imagine that driving to the end of the world to fetch her partner may not be consistent with a simultaneous need to respond to the children’s needs or her sister’s need. Adhering to the ideal of the noncontradictory person inside a consistent storyline, she revives the most salient standard of Israeli women’s citizenship: the importance of the family stands above everything else. And indeed, her pain of giving up her birth family name, the name of the tribe she was born in, that nurtured her need for belonging for years, is understood as necessary, if she wants to attain the right family, one that has one name and covers all differences.

Discussing Naming Positioning Analyzing the discursive order, it appears that the dominance of familism in Israel is supported by four main processes: the ambivalent constitution of the ideal femininity; an individualism-based constitution of the good wife; the ideology of motherhood as focused on an allegedly agreed-upon “children’s good”; and the constitution of citizenship as familycenteredness. We discuss each of these processes to clarify their role in the active marginalization of feminism in women’s daily lives. What ideal feminine selves are discursively supported in Israel? Our interviewees did not connect themselves to the form of traditional obedient femininity whose negotiation with daily encounters is typically characterized by pleasing others and immersion in relationships. Neither did we find traces of the dictates of liberal feminist discourses focusing on individualistic self-fulfillment and the denial of interpersonal needs or dependencies. Instead, “the ‘brand’ of egalitarianism” (Lazar, 2005: 158) that we found was “far from subversive” (ibid), one that can be nicely incorporated into the familist discourse. The local egalitarian way of speech incorporates the feminist interpretation of identity as connection with experiences accumulated throughout women’s lives. However, the incorporation of this interpretation

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can easily be translated into the familist prioritization of marriage over women’s other experiences. One interviewee was particularly helpful in demonstrating this specific type of incorporation, by equating between the importance of marriage in her life and other previous experiences. Marriage becomes a significant turning point representing a woman’s choice, while justifying its signification by a patronymic name practice. The power relations between familism and feminism can be mapped in four components of the appropriate ways of speech used in women’s narration of their feminine selves. Firstly, adopting the mature positive evaluation of the ability to compromise on principles; secondly, the constitution of the woman as a “nice girl” through correspondence to traditional emotion management, requiring her to suppress her feelings in order to avoid conflict; thirdly, the constitution of the assertive woman through correspondence to an emotion management that requires the presentation of women’s authentic feelings, while prioritizing the preservation of the relationship; and finally, the use of direct attacks against feminism, presenting feminists as irrational. Thus, the local ideal femininity does not require women to accept obediently their marriage as more important than other parts of their identity, but they may see it as equally important as occupational achievement and social networks. The local ideal femininity, as we elicited from our analysis above, is both about insisting on authentic expressions of the self that derive from feminist interpretations of good relationships, and about not acting upon the disappointing realization that reciprocity does not really appear in the way it was hoped for. By relying on conservative representations of marriage and stability in marriage, it becomes possible to avoid acting upon such realizations. Exploring the images used by the participants, we found ambivalence in their storytelling of managing their relationships with their male partners. The appropriate wife resembles the appropriate feminine subject in nurturing self-narrations that reflect a reluctance to be identified as a feminist. Women prefer to be defined as egalitarian, and accordingly, they take pride in their egalitarian cooking and careoriented partners. In this sense, the ambivalence between egalitarian/feminist interpretations and conservative/familist interpretations, pointed out by Lazar (2005), is typical. However, the ambivalence here reflects an important power base of the patronymic imperatives: the discourse of romance. This discourse can be seen frequently to offer women several categories to lean upon in their justifications of

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their prioritization of a sense of closeness to their partners. At the same time, the individualist categories prove instrumental as well. It is the appropriate wife’s concern to ensure that her partner’s rights as an individual are protected and respected. Subverting his rights in any way, due to momentarily lapses of rationality, is defined as unfair by the appropriate wife. In the same vein, she undertakes to protect her in-laws from any violation of their respectability, so that her family as a whole is protected from devastating consequences. It is also her concern to ensure that she maintains a sense of familial closeness in their lives, without imposing on him requirements that he or his parents will not be able to face. After making her choice to enter marriage, she is the only one responsible now for avoiding recurrent conflict that may disrupt the good relationship. These requirements imply that the good wife is required to navigate wisely between any feminist concerns she may have and the “rational” way of doing things that tends to be accepted as the familist way. The ideal mother is primarily concerned with any difficulties a child is expected to encounter, if her/his mother decides to carry a last name different of her/his own. The ideal mother shoulders the normative imperative to protect her child of the continuous questioning of the family unity that is likely to be raised by the collective gaze. As a mother, the appropriate mom acts in her child’s best interest, perceived as agreed upon and known to the collective as a whole. The child should not be confused with complex naming issues; such confusion is seen as an illegitimate difficulty, although facing complexity could be perceived as facilitating the child’s development. A discourse of good motherhood provides women with categories that they can use in reproducing themselves as the good mother. However, these categories can only be utilized as significant resources, if the speakers accept their subjugation to familycenteredness. Children’s well-being as protected by patronymic naming practices appears in women’s speech as the most important category for reproducing the position of the good mother. We repeatedly found women justifying their patronymic practices on grounds of the children’s best interest. Moreover, we found that women felt considerably threatened by the ramifications of their optional rejection of patronymic practices. Several times we heard stories of children, who were neglected in this way and hence confused by their “abusive” mothers. These stories suggest that the greatest threat is a possible exceptionality of the children: the possibility that children’s needs of belonging to the community will somehow be jeopardized by their mothers’ irresponsible

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antipatronymic acts. The sense of threat is so dominant that for many of our interviewees the transition to motherhood constituted the crucial moment when naming decisions must be made. If women strive for a sense of belonging to the category of appropriate mothers, they will have to make patronymic choices. Any deviations might mirror the extent to which their membership in this category is practically flawed. Women’s decisions at this stage are decisive for the concurrent production of the healthy child; the healthy family and the appropriate mother. Family- centeredness appears in women’s talk as validating our analyses of the institutional familism: in women’s stories their families constitute their contributions to their citizenship. Without such a sense of belonging and approved citizenship, both appearing in women’s talk as contingent on the traditional patronymic practice, women cannot experience their personhood as valuable and rational. Thus, women’s sense of belonging to their families and to their national collective depends on their ability to tell the stories of their naming practices. These must be stories that position them as both appropriate members of the collective not questioning the required loyalties, and as free agents holding a power position that allows for autonomous steering and a range of independent choices. Practically, by using the forms of speech that we identified in this chapter, women strive to ensure a sense of belonging to the collective, from which they believe they and their children will benefit. By using individualist and romantic vocabularies as well as that derived from the “goodmother” discourse, these forms of speech also constitute a celebration of their autonomous power position. Subjugating the feminist subversive argumentation acquires, they hope, the benefit of secure belonging, while the kind of egalitarianism they adopt provides a sense of powerful self-steering.

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6 Time and Space Dimensions of Self-Naming

Introduction Feminist sociolinguists have rejected the dichotomy between “powerful” and “powerless” speech since long, showing how cooperation, adaptation, and resistance coexist (Clair, 1998). In processes of self-projection as well as in nurturing relationships, women find ways to signify hegemonic language as their own, while creatively negotiating new, sometime subversive, meanings for accepted ways of talking. In the field of naming practices, this coexistence is revalidated as women demonstrate how they act as active social agents in following either patronymic or feminist practices, or both. Though fully accepting the idea that meaning in women’s lives stems from a broad range of sources, it still seems important to pay attention to a specific source of diversity among women: that of differences in familiarity with counterhegemonic ideological sources. We therefore devote this chapter to mapping time and space dimensions as shaping the accessibility of counterhegemonic ideological resources. Our discussion in the two preceding chapters has focused on the ways patronymic practices are reinforced through the cultural loading of the name and through familist constitution of the feminine, the wife, the mother, and the citizen dominant subject positions. In light of these discussions, Israeli middle- class women might appear as a monolithic category unaffected by feminist achievements. To avoid such a misperception, the present chapter focuses on counterhegemonic ideological resources, analyzing resistance to patronymic practices, around three organizing principles.

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First, we explore the strength of women’s willingness to struggle and pay the social prices demanded by society for their nonpatronymic naming practices. We have noticed that for some women a patronymic practice was not the first choice and did not reflect their views regarding how naming should be done. Instead, their patronymic practice resulted from the gradual erosion of their energy to struggle against various difficulties. The discussion in two of the sections below, “a spatial/temporal perspective on naming work,” and “fading energy,” focuses on that erosive process. More practically, we distinguish between women, who gradually lose their energy to struggle for nonpatronymic naming practices in various spaces, and those women able to summon up the required energy. We aim to elicit the social process related to the conditions under which women manage to maintain their resisting energies over time. Second, we have learned that some women saw carrying their partners’ family name, becoming part of a new collective, often referred to as a “tribe,” as heralding new exciting possibilities. By contrast, others felt that the process of becoming part of a new social circle threatened to undermine their ties with their family of origin. Cooperation in a process entailing such a loss was unimaginable for them. In the section “Patrilocality and Ambivalence” below, we distinguish between women, who celebrated the patrilocal nature of patronymic practices, and those who oppose or suffer from those patrilocal aspects typical of certain familial spaces. Third, we address the question of ideological resources. As the women in our study continuously have to account for their naming practices on various occasions, it is interesting to ask on which discursive resources they draw in accounting for their names. The familist context often exerts a critical gaze on their naming practices, threatening to construct any nontraditional practice as awkward or irrational. Vis-à-vis this persistent obstacle, women have time and again to explain their names or why their surnames differ from those of their children and partners. We have attempted to map their ideological resources for facing this difficulty: Were they able to rely on feminist ideological resources? Were they familiar enough with feminist texts and argumentation to utilize them in defense of their practices? Or, were they limited to individualist justifications? Alternatively, does their language reflect a process, discussed by Lazar (2005), by which the hegemonic discourse incorporates oppositional or feminist categories, while somewhat twisting their meaning? Mapping ideological resources is particularly salient for our study because it highlights

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the power of “communities of practices” (Mills, 2003) in supporting subversive definitions of situations. Such support emerges from our analysis as facilitating women’s determination not to cooperate, for example, with the expectation that the proper family should have a unified surname for all its members. We perceive the three foci of our analysis as examples of women’s agency as shaped within time and space constraints and possibilities. Therefore the next section will introduce the importance of a timespace framework for the way we work with the notion of women’s agency.

A Spatial/Temporal Perspective The language and identity section of our theoretical framework proposed the conceptualization of self-naming as a moment, in which agency attains steering power, in the sense that an individual’s resources in evaluating an action and its meanings are brought into full expression. Women’s agency in their commitment to defending past, present, and future identities in diversified spaces, faces continuous struggles against the patronymic hegemony, while shouldering a range of negative repercussions. The dual commitment to feminist ideas of the self as entitled to voice and choice, on the one hand, and to sustained relationship over lengthy periods of time within changing spaces, on the other hand, generates ambivalence. Access to the power position acquired through entering a heterosexual relationship that can challenge the taken-for-granted power relations between manhood and womanhood, appreciated masculinity, and degraded femininity is one major privilege of some middle- class professional women. Lengthy consideration of a naming practice after marriage is one benefit of such power position. Nevertheless, women’s longing to fulfill their capacities as “nice girls,” who will undertake any required emotional work (Hocschild, 1983; 1989) in order to protect their kids, their partners, their parents, their in-laws, is also present and powerful. It emerges that a particular duality characterized the lives of contemporary young highly educated women in Israel: they are freer than other women to consider liberating options made available by the women’s movement; similar to other women, they find it difficult to contemplate that their dream of the appropriate family will be affected by such options or that any member of their families will have to pay a social price for them.

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While this duality may be seen as a fragmenting force, women live their daily routines in unified ways. As Giddens explains (1984), agency focuses on routinized practices and a careful search for conditions under which routines can be disrupted while the social order as a whole remains mostly unchallenged. Rosi Braidotti offers a poststructuralist articulation of this duality. She suggests that “Viewed spatially, the poststructuralist subject may appear as fragmented and disunited; on a temporal scale, however, its unity is that of continuing power to synchronize its recollections. [ . . . ] A subject thus constituted inhabits a time that is the active tense of continuous ‘becoming’ ” (2006, p. 151). In our exploration of how individuals develop routines of practice, which fit their everyday-world knowledge, we adopt the concept of “becoming” as developed by Braidotti (2002). In her conceptualization of the process of becoming a woman, she investigates emotional motivations (e.g., longing for home) as intersecting with specific connections anchored in spatiotemporal meanings (e.g., home as an embraced identity vs. home as an identity to distance oneself from). Braidotti explains: “The process of becoming-subject requires sets of cultural mediations; the subject has to deal with material and semiotic conditions, that is to say institutional sets of rules and regulations as well as the forms of cultural representation that sustain them. Power is negative in that it prohibits and constrains. It is also positive in that it empowers and enables” (p. 21). The focus on becoming in our analysis of naming practices refers to the constant negotiation between the two poles of power that emphasizes continuous development and change in practices and in consciousness. The notion of becoming emphasizes the processes through which women adopt lingual routines of practice, such as naming practices as expressions of their relationship with complex forms of participation in their communities (Boxer and Gristenko, 2005). In Braidotti’s articulation, each such naming practice should be examined as a specific combination of subjugation and resistance. Once women draw on their resources to struggle against the takenfor-granted expectations of their social location, they have to bear the social consequences of the struggle for their familial ties. The discursive order within which they operate may forcefully suppress attempts at resistance or, perhaps, support them. In exploring the becoming process, we analyze one most intriguing aspect of naming practices, namely, naming fluidity. Naming fluidity refers to the women’s changing responses to specific spaces that are discernable in naming practices. That is, using a combination

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of two forms of naming: (a) using the patronymic practice in places particularly intolerant for resistance, as for example spaces where the children’s benefit is at risk; (b) using variations of nonpatronymic practices when the space seems more tolerant, for instance, the workplace. Women’s evaluations of their workplaces as more tolerant were recently empirically supported by the findings of a Dutch research showing that students believe a woman adopting her partner’s name to be less competent and likely to earn a lower income in comparison with those keeping their birth family names (Noordewier et al., 2010). The emergence of differentiated routines is more characteristic of the early stages of the process of becoming a married woman in the sense of a wife and mother, who is devoted to what DeVault (1992) conceptualized as the process of producing the appropriate family. Whereas in DeVault’s study the daily production of the family emerges as enabled by the social organization of care and feeding practices, in our study, the production of the appropriate family is enabled or threatened by naming practices. For many of our interviewees, differentiated routines regarding their names will disappear over time, gradually subjugated by the patronymic practice. Nevertheless they provide a valuable opportunity for the examination of the becoming process. Previous research already documented this mode of self-naming, which encourages women to use one family name at a specific time and space, and different family names at another. For example, Sara Mills, who was the first scholar analytically to explore this phenomenon, called it segmented name usage (2003). For her, it relates to the tendency, found only among professional women, to adopt a segmented name usage, which she attributes to the specific discursive order, within which these women operate. Mills explains that since feminism may at social locales at a specific time and space be constituted as opposed to respectability, women are careful to limit the social price of the names they carry. She observes that “women stated that they took a combined name, but only used it in particular context. [ . . . ] This notion of using different names for different communities of practice was a common theme throughout these questionnaires, suggesting that these women are very aware of the pressures exerted by opposing discursive positions” (p. 100). A spatial perspective will enable us to examine the discursive order characteristic of specific communities of practice. Similar findings regarding the fluidity in women’s use of their family names were recently reported for American women as well (Scheuble & Johnson, 2005). Scheuble and Johnson suggest that the situational

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surname use that develops when various spaces validate different dimensions of the newlywed woman’s identity may be particularly telling for understanding the salience of work versus family identities in women’s lives. Present-time women respond autonomously to diverse spaces and their specific demands, but etiquette books in the 1970s still guided women to distinguish between professional and family situations (Vanderbilt, 1972; cf. Scheuble and Johnson, 2005). In 1973, Unna Stannard, an activist in the field of marital names, published an etiquette book called Married Women vs. Husband’s Names: The Case for Wives Who Keep Their Own Names. The book was dedicated to the memory of Ruth Hale, and its opening statement introduced it as a guide “for the relatively few women who want to keep their own name after marriage” (Stannard, 1973:1). In the following year, a women’s organization called the Center for a Woman’s Own Name (CWON) published The Booklet for Women Who Wish to Determine Their Own Names after Marriage. Such etiquette books were apparently directed at minimizing loss of resources embedded in the patronymic naming practice. Almost half (nineteen) of the participants in our study reported fluid patterns of naming that mean practically using different combinations of their names in different spaces. Four of them adopted the patronymic practice, twelve hyphenated their partners’ family names, and three chose a new joint name with their partners. Women’s reports of fluidity look as follows: There are places, or situations, in which it gets complicated, and I’ll take one of the names. (Nurit Dubnov-Hafner, 38, originally Hafner, married Tza’h’i Dubnov, hyphenated his first, he remained Dubnov, the kids got her hyphenated name) I sometime say, Inbal Shlyfe, depends on . . . well, it depends on the situations. (Inbal Doron- Shlyfe, 36, originally Doron, hyphenated his name) Michal: What other options do you use? Efrat: Efrat Hotzler or Efrat Mendelbaum (Efrat Hotzler-Mendlebaum, 37, originally Hotzler, hyphenated her partner’s name; her partner kept his name, and the children carry their father’s name) Michal: and you’re always Maya Sa’de or there are more options?

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Efrat: There are more options, there is eh . . . Maya Sa’de and Eytan in brackets or Maya Sa’de Eytan. (Maya Sade, 28, originally Eytan, adopted her partner’s name)

Women in our study report to hold a kit of three possible options, from which they select the name that is most spatially appropriate: their own birth family name, their partner family name, and a combination/hyphenation of both. Children-related and money-related spaces are the ones most demanding in terms of standing up against patronymic standards: Michal: Is that always the name you give? Ayala: No, No. I . . . give it according to the context. If it is something connected to the family, say my daughters’ registration to nursery school or things like that, then I’m Rinehart, I mean, I don’t want to complicate things for people. I mean, you know, various stuff, eh . . . money matters then I give the Rinehart. On matters which relate to my own life only, unrelated to my marriage then I’ll either say Moriella or Moriella-Rinehart. (Ayala Moriela-Reinhart, 33, originally Moriela, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his name, and the children got his name)

When women themselves remain attuned to specific spaces in developing the most locally appropriate naming practice, they both minimize the cost and extract benefits. Not losing clients or classmates, who knew them in the past, constitutes a form of saving costs; presenting your kid and yourself with the same family name at school and at the pediatric clinic is a form of gaining pride and the benefits of appropriate parenthood or motherhood. Moving between locals appears in women’s experiences as a demanding job, and over time women tend to rid themselves of the burden by introducing themselves in more unified ways across spaces. Women, who present the naming work as the most difficult and demanding, are those carrying lengthy hyphenated names (Schueble and Johnson’s, 2005). Particularly when not shared with the male partner, but in some sharing cases as well, hyphenated names require an effort that, over time, women are reluctant to make. It is intriguing to watch the relative freedom acquired by those among our interviewees, who were very clear and felt strongly about holding their birth family names, while being indifferent to what for others seemed like “paying the price” for multiple surnames

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in the family. Retainers were the ones who could devote the least amount of work to the naming project. Their complete rejection of their partners’ birth family name as relevant to their lives as married women liberated them from the naming processes related to time and space. In many ways, these women adopt the male naming pattern (having one family name for their entire lives, regardless of the changes in their familial status). It is not a coincidence that only this pattern gives them the power to avoid what other women who embrace other naming patterns have to deal with, as shown in the fluid naming pattern. What Scheuble and Johnson (2005) regard as the importance of the last name to one’s self- concept may operate in distinct ways for women, who cooperate with the patronymic practice and hence are protected from the constant playing between options, and for others, who focus on which option entails the least social price or the highest gain. Celebrating one’s opportunity to finally adopt a man’s birth family name is clearly a different experience than insisting on retaining one’s own birth family name across spaces. These findings set the stage for analyzing the type of social knowledge, which women use in differentially applying their names. Thus our theoretical discussion of self-naming requires the elaboration of our understanding of agency and its particular expression in the context of changing social circles. For this purpose, we adopt the framework offered by Emirbayer and Mische (1998), which gives primacy to dimensions of time and space. We turn now to constructing our analytical framework.

Fluidity Fluidity in family-name usage mediates transitions across time and space in a manner that simultaneously demonstrates and realizes a stage of liminality (Turner 1967). Although this liminality may seem to disconnect women from their social resources and weaken their status, our research shows that most women are aware of the advantages of the liminal state and deploy it for self-performance that is expected to provide the maximum utility for them and for the members of their family. Conceptualizing naming practices as a basically spatial issue is supported by earlier evidence in the field. Particularly when women and indeed couples contemplate their children’s sense of themselves as belonging to a community, spatial concerns emerge. In the words of one of Mills’ (2003) respondents: “There was the added

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factor that we were living in Scotland at the time and [our child] had a lot of family living locally with that name so again it was a cultural issue in that we thought it would give him a sense of kinship and a sense of geographical belonging” (p. 98). The data presented in this chapter reflect a similar concern for strengthening the children’s sense of belonging to the extended family. In thinking about the encounter between women and specific spaces, we aim at clarifying how spatial specificity is of dual importance: on the one hand, it derives its importance from its ability to exert a set of social demands calling for the production of the appropriate woman, obediently responding to the normative imperatives relevant to certain controlling collectives. On the other hand, it is significant in hinting at potential opportunities to promote oneself in ways that are instrumental for future identities. A specific space, say, your daughter’s nursery school, is a space where the nursery school teacher’s gaze, like the gaze of the other mothers, demands that you show how you protect your daughter from the burden of a heavy long hyphenated name at a time when she has only reached a first understanding of who she is; concurrently, the specific space of the same nursery school also hints at an opportunity to reinforce your future identity as a caring mother whose account for her daughter’s lengthy name reflects an insistence that you and your daughter should carry the same name. Giddens’s studies have been among the earliest attempts to recognize that agency is constituted within time and space dimensions, and that the exploration of knowledge resources and reflexive evaluations of specific situations requires a discussion of temporality and spatiality. For him, the focal aspect of time/space analysis is the interpenetration of presence and absence (1991). As technologies of transportation and communication advance, bodily presence and absence generate new spaces of encounter. My mother-in-law can call, speak with me and make demands, even if we do not share the communities of practice to whom we perceive ourselves accountable. My bodily absence from her home does not prevent her from connecting to memories shaping options of pride and shame, respectability and humiliation. At the same time, easily surmounted distances allow for my frequent bodily presence in her home, intensifying and increasing our mutual disappointments and their public visibility. It is within this context that Giddens calls for an analytical emphasis on the “long durẻe,” through which local acts receive institutional meanings. Due to his emphasis on institutional power and his premise that movement in

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space is also movement in time, Giddens accords prime importance to routinized interactions. He sees them as shaped within daily, weekly, monthly foreseen encounters. An Israeli woman can rarely imagine that she will not regularly meet her (often traditional or religious) in-laws for Shabbat meals and on the holidays. At times routinized childcare support from grandparents adds further instances of intensified interaction. Such routinized foreseeable encounters are a major time/space dimension against which women have to maintain their feminist identities and practices. Frequent entries into in laws’ familist spaces demonstrate the salience of the temporal dimension of belonging to any specific community of practice. Elaborating on the temporal dimension of interaction, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) require that agency is understood as a temporally embedded process. They detail a portrayal of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment) (p. 963). Their elaboration of the notion of agency for its projective dimension is particularly relevant to the way naming decisions are entangled in optional future identities. “Hypothesization” of experience is a salient component of the process, in which “actors attempt to reconfigure received schemas by generating alternative possible responses to the problematic situations they confront in their lives” (p. 984). Not thinking about time, actors are nevertheless “immersed in a temporal flow,” which facilitates their ability to examine their feelings. Temporality is fascinating since future possibilities cannot be considered without drawing on memories of past experiences. A retrospective-prospective process emerges, by which possible future constraints are clarified so that individuals become well informed regarding costs and benefits of various paths. If the contemplated costs are high, subversion may easily disappear. Present social relationships are returned to the center stage by the continual reevaluation of possible future solutions. Corresponding with this conceptualization, we develop the notion of naming temporality as a good proxy for bringing together the three time dimensions, which operate in women’s evaluations of optional family names. Since they insist on understanding human agency within a structural context, Emirbayer and Mische propose the possibility to understand diverse social spaces as multiple relational fields. Thus we attempt to understand self-naming as responding to a naming

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spatiality through routines of practice that are adjusted in different ways to bureaucratic spaces (those encountered on diverse administrative errands); career-relevant spaces; familial spaces and sociability spaces. In Israel, explains Donna Rosenthal in her The Israelis (2003), “from births to burials, life centers around family” (p. 367). Familism in Israel means that life centers on a relatively intense interaction with the extended family: communication technology facilitates very frequent phone calls with parents and in-laws; improved transportation means that people travel over weekends to see their extended families in diverse family gatherings. Consequently, women encounter a relatively frequent demand to enter spaces dominated by familism and its patronymic normative imperatives. Surely, women who obey the patronymic imperatives have a far higher chance of experiencing extended family gatherings as spaces of belonging and support. Women who resisted patronymic practices are exposed in such gatherings to sanctions and even hostility. It is also important to bear in mind that on traditional occasions for extended family gatherings, often both families of origin demand that the couple will join them— social control is exerted against daughters-in-law who are perceived as not balancing properly between the couple’s familial obligations. Presence in spaces dominated by familism, bureaucratic spaces, familial spaces, and sociability spaces suggests the need to explore what we call naming spatiality. It refers to movement between social spaces, attributing various meanings to specific names. Each type of accessible space sets its own normative requirements regarding the name: in bureaucratic spaces (e.g., at the bank), refusing to cooperate with such requirements may mean an additional chain of forms; in career-relevant spaces, disregarding normative requirements may mean losing one possible path of glamour reserved for career women; in familial spaces a daughter-in-law may be expected to respect traditional codes; and in sociability spaces, other women’s patronymic practice signifies one’s exceptionality (if not madness). Our data presented below enables us to follow the shifting patterns of agency enactments, while crossing boundaries and moving in between spaces. Within specific spaces or communities of practice operating at a specific historical point, specific contestation of naming norms invites women to develop emotions as temporally and relationally embedded in the social situation (Denzin, 1984). It is important to see that women’s emotional responses to the specific constellation of naming

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norms emerge within their actions and negotiation experienced over time. Emotional responses to naming expectations, demands, or possibilities cannot however be examined outside the group processes that constitute and sustain them. It is the web of imagined or concrete social relations that enable women to allow their emotional responses to be introduced as considerations into their reflective processes. Any specific emotion that evolves around the naming dilemma is temporally weighted against a relationship. Rage, for example, can be extremely high at the time of realization that one’s opinion is ignored by authoritative family codes of conduct. In this sense, the feeling of rage provokes reflection and allows the enraged woman to consider her position within her relationship: with her partner and his family. Whatever the space may be, whoever may participates in it, a woman’s contemplation of her future steps connects her to an understanding of her present as evaluated against the future. The rise and decease of emotions at a specific point of the process give naming practices their temporal nature. Understanding women’s agency in the naming process thus implies examining emotions as inviting appraisals of here-and-now experiences as well as reconstructions of the past and projections of hypothetical futures (Mattley, 2002). Our empirical evidence draws particular attention to the gradual process of the adjustment to changing one’s name, carrying another person’s name, and accepting the social significations embedded in it. Moreover, the data points to the transition to motherhood as the crucial event that delineates this time span. In times, when cohabitation replaces marriage, children become the signifiers and creators of the new family (Ermisch, 2008). The family name that they are to bear becomes the catalyst to the decision making process. The birth of the first child motivates and/or intensifies couples’ naming negotiations in cases, in which these take place.

A Spatial/Temporal Perspective on Naming Work Nonretainers who opt for other nonpatronymic naming practices have to devote quite a bit of work to manage the diverse spaces through which they travel. We already touched upon aspects of this work as a part of their family work: work done as part of women’s caring responsibilities for their children and kin. In the next chapter we deal with the work, sometimes immensely consuming, sometimes

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minimal, that tends to be devoted to couples’ negotiation over the issue. Here we begin our exploration of naming temporality by focusing on the fading energy to undertake naming work; the changing willingness to deal with bureaucratic demands; and the changing ways of accounting for nonpatronymic practices. We then turn to our exploration of naming spatiality as reflected in women’s treatment of the patrilocal roots of patronymic practices. We trace the foot prints of a fascinating ambivalence in women’s lives organized around the oscillating movements between celebrating the entrance into another family’s space symbolized by the patronymic practice, and refusing to become a part of their partners’ families’ spaces. Our discussion of time and space, however, is primarily an analysis of agency that focuses on the possibility that women derive their power to account for nonpatronymic practices over time and to reject patrilocality from feminist ideologies and identities. Michal: So, let’s begin with what is your full name? Yael: Yael Snir. Michal: Is this always your answer? Yael: Yes. I don’t get confused. Michal: What do you mean? Yael: Because we changed it just recently, so at times, I still say Shfetzler eh . . . truth is that I also introduce myself as Shfetzler to people who know me as Shfetzler. Michal: So they can ask you and you’ll say Yael Shfetzler? Yael: Yes, but it takes a few seconds to think about it and say eh . . . Michal: What, a few seconds to think of what name to say? Yael: Yes, yes. I mean, until a few months ago I would automatically say Shfetzler, now I automatically say Snir, but there are contexts where I hesitate for a minute, today for example I met someone from my previous job, and, I mean, I spoke with her on my cell phone and we said we would meet. So, on this phone call she asked me when she picked it up: who is it? Then I tell her I’m Yael Shfetzler so she immediately got it and understood who I am and all that . . . it’s a bit schizophrenic, really. (Yael Snir, 28, originally Shfetzler, married Tomer Balulu; they both changed to a new name, Snir)

What emerges powerfully from this excerpt is the mapping process in which the space is studied: In “a few seconds,” Yael examines potential participants in the situations, future implications, past baggage, and whether the matter is family-related or work-related. In a few seconds, she fully maps the space within which she has to position

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herself so that she will not lose any relevant resources. The process is easy, but the temporal dimension raises questions and generates awkwardness: And it’s very strange with our kid who is Liran Snir, and both are new names which entered our lives together, I mean, both his name and our name, so until now it sounds very weird, very eh . . . he had to undergo a small surgery three months ago and we were sitting there in the waiting room and a nurse comes out and calls us and she calls aloud: Liran Snir and none of us gets up, none of us didn’t, I mean, we didn’t, I don’t respond to this name Snir, I still don’t respond to Snir, it’s just so weird, eh, it’s eh . . . it’s a very awkward kind of feeling that you’re carrying a name with which you don’t identify yourself, or not eh . . . (Yael Snir, 28, originally Shfetzler, married Tomer Balulu; they both changed to a new name, Snir)

Time must pass in order for the new name to be experienced as relevant to the self. During this period, naming work has to be done that consumes energy/resources. Some of the women glorify the process as that of “becoming” of a family: I’m still in the process of getting in touch and connecting with this name, I mean, it’s not, it just doesn’t yet come very naturally to me, but eh . . . I mean, perhaps you could look at it as the becoming of a family identity or something like that. (Tamar Cohen, 27, originally Nah’many, adopted her partner’s family name)

The passing time is experienced as the awkwardness of the new name that does not come out naturally yet. Tamar, who struggled fiercely against taking her husbands’ surname, but was defeated by her own father and her father-in-law, seems to use her energies to facilitate her efforts to adjust to the new name by framing the process positively. The process of gradually losing the energy available for the continuous struggle to extend possibilities for oneself and other women ends for some women before it even begins. The energy required constitutes a threat to the women’s world, and they prefer to avoid the negotiation all together. In specific situations when I have fights with Yohav’s family, I . . . suddenly say, I’m not Buka’i, I don’t want to belong in this family, then eh . . . then I begin thinking of how it’s going to be and how everybody is

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going to ask me, what had happened, and had we got divorced or what, and how I’m going to have to explain so many things to so many people, and I have no energy for that, and in the end I’m through with this . . . (Daniel Buka’i, 35, originally Swartz, took her partner’s name)

The visibility of the nonunified name invites intrusions to the extent that a collective scrutinizing gaze is imagined. A fear arises that “so many people” will demand accounting for “so many things,” turning the expected justification work into a tedious nightmare. Avoiding the negotiation seems a lot smoother; it seems so much more logical and attractive in terms of saving the trouble. It is likely that the normative patronymic option of adopting one’s husband’s name will raise far less demands for justification: Thus, at times, already at the contemplation stage of the process, the anticipated difficulty to present oneself as normal defeats any advances of nonpatronymic naming options. Analyzing the last excerpt in this way, it seems that three subcategories with regard to “how long the energy for accounting will last” may be discerned in a way that demand separate analyses: (1) the fading energy—the process in which women increasingly feel that they have had enough of being signified as an exception; (2) the energy to encounter the demands of bureaucratic spaces; and (3) the way in which women’s accounting for the awkward name changes.

Fading Energy The discussion in this section begins at the point where some women have a lot of energy to explain their naming practice time and again. Anat: At the university I was still Anat Miller, and since we got married I was always correcting them. I would say I’m Miller- Gabay and would get a form to change my personal details. I was very glad when my student card arrived with my new name on it. And if they would put Miller, I’d say: No, It’s an hyphen and Gabay You know, I’d always insist that they’d change it, no matter how stubborn they were. Michal: You insist on the hyphen as well? Anat: Yes. But you know how it is with people, they always go like what? What? Just a moment, what Miller? What? Gabay? How? What? You know . . . Michal: Yes, complicated. Anat: It’s probably too complicated. I tell them it’s Miller- Gabay and they go again: How? What?

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Michal: How do you feel when you have to explain again? Anat: Well, It’s their problem really. Michal: Isn’t it irritating? Anat: No. There are plenty of other things annoying me (laughs). No, I explain again, I have no problem with it. Michal: Yes? Anat: Whoever doesn’t understand, I explain, there’s no shame in that. Michal: And people ask? Anat: Well, I mean, not in formal places. But if there’s someone who asks, then I’ll explain. I’ve got the explanation I gave you. (Anat Miller Gabai, 34, originally Miller, married Nir Gabay, hyphenated his name, he didn’t change his name, and the kids got his name)

One could ask where the energy to explain her name time and again comes from, and one possible answer is the insistence on feminism as independence. And indeed, when asked what feminism is for her, she answers “It’s independence; it’s about fulfilling myself and going beyond the rubric of home, kids, walking boobs.” She goes on to explain that feminists are women who do not talk about feminism, but live and do feminism primarily by being strong women. In some cases, the energy lasts for a while but gradually fades away with the feeling that the cost involved in carrying a cumbersome name requires a lot of energy, patience, and the management of frustration. Michal: Is that always your answer? Do you always respond like that when asked what your name is? H’agit: I, when I sign letters . . . well, to begin with, it’s all very new, because I’m only married for four months. Since the beginning of October—October, November, December, January, February, wow, it’s over five months already. Five months and . . . and it is something that I’m exercising now and I don’t have yet any fixed patterns but eh . . . at my work place, where I write, I write letters at my job, then when it’s like a formal letter I write my full name H’agit VilkomirskyRavid, and when I go and get myself eh . . . let’s say a membership at the local DVD library which is something that belongs to both of us and I don’t have the energy to begin the spelling of my lengthy birth family name V I L K etc then I already say H’agit Ravid. (H’agit Vilkomirsky-Ravid, 31, originally Vilomirsky, hyphenated her partner’s name with hers; he did not change his name)

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Maintaining her birth family name is a burden, and she seems to search for spaces where it can be skipped. These spaces provide opportunities of exploring the togetherness of the unified name—“something that belongs to both of us.” The trade off is striking: if she is willing to benefit from saving herself the tedious spelling session, she can enter the game of doing something together as a couple. The only loss is shouldered by the political action for expanding the spaces in which hyphenated lengthy difficult-to-spell names are heard and accepted. Where does the energy for the persistent political action come from? H’agit, too, is committed to her feminism. I haven’t even defined myself as a feminist. But—I guess it’s quite clear that I have to call myself a feminist because . . . because that’s it, because if eh . . . twenty years ago during the previous century women didn’t even have yet the right to vote, and women struggled and went to jail, and today I reap the fruits, I mustn’t turn my back on them . . . Feminism is about your right, it’s about the option to do what you want. It’s about opening up options. (H’agit Vilkomirsky-Ravid, 31, originally Vilomirsky, hyphenated her partner’s name with hers; he did not change his name)

Her feminism does not imply that she will not get tired of insisting on others spelling her Vilkomirsky-Ravid properly. It just means that in places she considers important she will go on insisting on acting upon her option not to follow automatically the normative imperatives of the good wife.

The Energy to Encounter the Demands of Bureaucratic Spaces The bureaucratic space appears in women’s experiences as pressing hard on women to give up their naming endeavors. At the time of the study, Israeli interior bureaucracy determined a tedious procedure for the changing of a minor’s name. It involved an application to the family court, the payment of a fee, and an appointment with a social worker. Those acquainted with Israeli bureaucracy tend to prefer avoiding any interaction with it. The ponderous procedure becomes an obstacle that requires a particularly high level of perseverance on the part of those who intend using the bureaucratic option. Most people are not familiar with the procedure involved; and when they

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learn about it, they very often give up, without even beginning the process. Since many of our respondents were students at the time of marriage, the university administration comes up time and again as exemplifying the difficulties typical to bureaucratic spaces. Michal: When do you use this name? Maya: Eh . . . because I haven’t formally changed my name at the university and I’m still Maya Eytan there, the secretary said to me (mocking in ridicule) ‘don’t you dare mess with me and your name, eh . . . I know how it’s going to be, you’ll mess it all up by not changing your name, and then I don’t know how to find you, and then I won’t know who you are and who the other is. Michal: When did she say that, before you got married? Maya: After I got married, after I got married, she said to me that I shouldn’t handle this as that other student did and completely confused her, and so I decided to stick with the Maya Eytan, and I’m a teaching assistant now, so if students are looking for me, they can only find me as Maya Eytan, let’s say they’ll find my pigeon hole by using Maya Eytan. So when I go into class at the beginning of the year I tell them: I’m Maya Sade, and then I put Eytan in brackets. And of course there are always a few students who couldn’t understand it the first time, so I have to repeat it and explain again. (Maya Sade, 28, originally Eytan, took her partner’s name)

The secretary demanded in a rather threatening tone that Maya will save her the mess and the confusion and will shoulder them herself. Out of consideration for the secretary, she herself undertakes to remember where she is who. Our empirical material exposes a somewhat different type of naming work; the work involved in justifying nonpatronymic practices in three distinct spaces. First, the space of the ministry of the interior is important for allowing naming practices to be validated for all other spaces. There, naming registration takes place and two types of practices encountered institutional procedures: the naming of married women and that of children. Thus women have to engage in naming work. They describe the persistence required vis-à-vis formal procedures and the negotiation with individuals in the administration involved in reinforcing the procedures. Second, the space of their work places requires from women to adopt naming practices that allow preserving resources related to birth family names. And third,

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women describe how almost any interaction in public spaces requires explanation and justification. In the following quote, the interviewee points out her anticipation of the persistent demand to account for her exceptional naming practices. Dafna: . . . it was clear that I’m not going to be Gany-Naftaly, if he is not hyphenating Gany. Michal: Why? Dafna: Because why should I hyphenate Naftaly, I mean, the only possible reason is that he would want us to be like our children, even though it’s not the most important thing in the world . . . you know how it is, today perhaps they give you less trouble if you do that, but a few years ago, less than ten years ago this was a source for so many confusions in the mother-and-baby centers, banks, the interior ministry, everywhere, and you don’t always have the energy to start explaining all day long and justify and come up with excuses on why did you choose and how did you do that in front of any clerk. Michal: What needs explaining? Holding two names or . . . ? Dafna: No. That your son is this way and your husband is that way and then it . . . I, many times, I begin explaining, usually I begin by myself, I don’t even wait to be asked. Michal: Why is that? Dafna: Eh . . . I learned it is better that way. I learned it is better, if you want to prevent confusion and misunderstandings. (Dafna Gany, 35, married to Elad Naftally, each kept his/her name, and the children got the hyphenation of both, hers first)

A learning process takes place, and women begin accounting for their exceptional naming practices even before the demand is raised. In time, enough knowledge is acquired to facilitate the understanding that unless a detailed account is provided, the price paid for the nonunified naming practice would be higher. There are two ways of lowering the price charged by the bureaucratic space: either you give in and adopt the patronymic practice or you have to summon all your energies and explain your naming practice in details. What Dafna Gany is describing is how the fluidity of her naming practices emerges as a path in-between: not giving in, but at the same time, saving energies by introducing herself in certain places as carrying her son’s name. The expression “you don’t always” indicates the fluid usage that enables energy saving. Over time, various moments arise characterized by various levels of energy and the

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will to persist in the subversive task of getting people used to cases like your own. Dalit: Did you change your family name? Michal: No, I haven’t changed it. My son got both names. Dalit: So I, at this point I had nooooo energy to struggle. Michal: but what happened before that point? Dalit: I was confident, I don’t know why, that they won’t change my name unless I asked them to, but soon after the wedding my driving license arrived with my husband’s family name, I didn’t even understand who is Dalit Nah’um. I was sure it was some kind of a mistake. It took a long minute to realize that, well, who asked you to change my family name? and then I had to go and begin filling forms and ask them to change my name, I had to undergo a procedure of re-taking my maiden name. They were so quick that they managed to change it in my passport as well. Michal: So how did you act when your son was born? Dalit: Well, I said to Eran (her partner) we’ll add both names. So he said sure, no problem. But . . . eh . . . well, I’ll do it. Really, I’m going to do it on one of these days. It’s just another bureaucratic procedure, and I just have no energy for it. (Dalit Avra’ami, 37, married Eran Nah’um, kept her birth family name, the kids got their father’s name)

Dalit’s experience herself as defeated by the continuous need to make sure that one is in control and that no procedure takes place against a woman’s will. Despite the mutual agreement that the child should have two names, the bureaucratic procedure is a lot more powerful. It institutionally places the child in the patronymic tradition, as initially carrying his/her fathers’ name only. The situation is unlikely to change as energies remain scarce. Not all women experience bureaucratic spaces in similar ways. While some report overcoming the confusion and forcefully manage to change their naming practices, others tell stories of confusions and insecurity. There are places where I say I have to repeat my name and then I say well, it’s either under Ayelet Kraus or under Ayelet Atias which extremely irritates me, and raises questions such as what the hell do I need all this mess for, I can’t even remember what was the name I used last time I was here. I mean, what was the name I said; I think I used Kraus at Diada [mother and child center], I believe there I’m Ayelet Kraus . . . And then at times I can’t remember because usually I try that on matters related to the girls I’ll be Atias, I do that in order to

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remember that it’s there, do you see what I mean, I sometime really get into trouble with all that and then my family physician says well, give me your identification card (laughing), she already knows of the situation, and the moment I call she asks me to bring my identification card with me as I can never remember where am I [called what]. (Ayelet Hashah’ar Kraus-Atias, 34, originally Kraus, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his birth name; the children carry their father’s name).

The hard work of using diverse naming is expensive in terms of self-ridicule and embarrassment. All the positioning efforts are falling apart against the naked truth of a woman who does not know her name, implying she does not know who she is. The experiences described by Ayelet, incidents when she cannot be found, moments when she gets lost, because she cannot remember which of her names is the right one for her repeated participation in the specific social or bureaucratic space have also been reported by several other interviewees. The refusal to suffer self- erasure under the identity of your partners’ family name causes a constant trouble of getting lost in various bureaucratic spaces. Over time, the irritation, the mess, the failure to generate a kind of systematic distinction between spaces will push women to long for the patronymic orderly unified tradition.

Changing Public Justifications for the Awkward Name People who knew me before had to make comments. All kinds of comments: what? People who knew me were practically frantic and shocked about it. I had phone- calls from people who didn’t even tell me who they were and immediately start questioning: what’s this name? Eh . . . I mean . . . eh . . . nobody could understand how you go from Iris Levi to Iris Elkayam-Lotan. It really is a bit weird, isn’t it? So, eh . . . in the beginning I used to tell the whole story, and later on I wrote it down in an e-mail message and I would forward it again and again to whoever asked me. And today, I already say: believe me there’s a story behind it, and I just don’t have the energy to go into that and that’s it. And I don’t tell the story anymore. But I have told it in the interview, haven’t I? (Iris Elkayam-Lotan, 32, originally Levi, married Yeh’ezkel/H’ezy Elkayam. She took her partner’s name and added a third new name sharing the hyphenation Elkayam-Lotan with her partner and the kids)

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Where did Iris have the energy from to tell the story? For her, it was not feminist ideology. Iris defines herself as a lot less radical than feminists are and see herself as equality oriented. She tells of a feminist friend who told her she must not give up on “Iris Levi” as it is “recognized as a brand name in the industry.” Still, she explains: “the truth in my case is that I just didn’t like the name ‘Elkayam’; I just couldn’t bear the idea that I’m going to carry a name that I dislike so much.” Meaning, she just couldn’t bear the idea that she and her future children will carry an ethnically signifying name that might have the effect of stigmatizing and devaluation (see chapter 4). More feminist participants were likely to resort to humor over time in managing demands for accounting: Michal: Would you give me an example? Perhaps you remember the last time? Amit: I don’t remember the last time but I can say that it eh . . . that it tends to happen as with other topics that have wider social implication . . . usually I won’t begin eh . . . I won’t begin a scholarly feminist lecture. Michal: Why? Why not? Amit: Because I already realized that . . . it is just a waste of energy, that I’m losing my energies . . . so I do talk about these things, but more through humor and jokes. Ha and I do, if somebody is interested then I invite them for a somewhat more serious discussion on the matter and after that, they mostly drop it. Michal: what kind of humor? Amit: You know how it is, people are looking to tease you and, let’s say somebody begins going on and on about how miserable my daughters are, then I’ll say, well, I don’t have to solve the worlds’ problems and laugh and they will drop it. (Amit Tal- Cohen, 40, married Ran Cohen, both hyphenated, giving the kids the hyphenated name with her name first)

Using humor appears as a last resort for avoiding the words that would identify Amit as a feminist, the words that would position her as somewhat outside the consensus and, on top of everything else, would come through as convincing. Amit sounds like someone who already experienced this sequence of wasted words too many times, and humor comes to her rescue. Instead of confronting the social gaze, she attempts to constitute herself as the neglecting mother, who does

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not care about her daughters’ well-being. This way she increases the volume of the silenced message by others in the interaction according to which she is the immoral person, who exempts herself of solving the problems of others. Exaggerating the social negation buys her the peace of mind she longs for.

Patrilocality and Ambivalence In Israel like in the United States, UK, and quite a few other countries of Western cultures, women who change their birth family name to their husband’s last name cooperate with a longstanding marital naming practice. As shown in chapter 5, taking the husband’s name is a source of pride, when a specific social space evaluates women’s worth from the knot between self-identity and being a wife and a mother. A sense of pride emerges from the social signification of oneself as achieving the expected standard. At the early stages of the marriage, changing a birth family name can be also experienced as a gesture of love and celebration of the relationship. Early studies in the area of intimate relationships and naming practices (Scanzoni and Scanzoni, 1988) mentioned the possibility that there are women who feel they gain prestige and value through the achievements of their husbands and are therefore proud to adopt their husbands’ names. At the same time, a sense of pride echoes ones’ belonging to a social circle and a locality. When the sense of belonging to families adhering to ancient traditions is prioritized, pride, and satisfaction are extracted of maintaining and reproducing the collective boundaries and heritage. While early feminist scholarship often conceptualized the patronymic naming practice as a vestige of the notion of “women as property” (Weitzman, 1981), subjective meanings elicited from women’s speech suggest alternative directions. Particularly strong is the experience women describe of moving into a different territory, gaining the identity of the new territory’s inhabitants. In other words, the phenomenon we witness resembles a process of patrilocal marriage customs rather than experiences of being purchased. Patrilocality may at times in itself be experienced as a basis for pride, the pride of a new sense of belonging. Nevertheless, quite a few interviewees indicated that irrespective of whether or not such pride emerged over time, partilocality was initially experienced with reservation and sometimes even resentment. Participants emphasized the extent to which they did not share values or code of conduct with

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their partners’ families, and how differing world views generated tension during their visits to these foreign communities of practice. The major tensions tend to stem from the clash between authoritative family manners that accord a father-in-law’s views overriding power and feminist expectations that one’s own views should be considered as equal. In this sense, our study echoes Boxer and Gristenko’s (2005) comparison of American and Russian women’s naming practices after marriage. Some of our respondents resemble the participants in their sample, who adopted their husbands’ name but were longing for their birth family name, saying: “his family did not welcome me in the family with open arms” (p. 6), or “I associate my new name with my husband’s relatives, whom I dislike” (p. 7). We showed in chapter 4 that women disliked their partners’ surnames because of the cultural loading, rendering them as inferiorizing for themselves and for their children. Here we discuss the cases, in which the dislike of the name is simultaneously a dislike of partners’ families. Very similar to Boxer and Gristenko’s findings, our respondents expressed a sense of moving into a new space, a space dominated by new practices and codes of appropriate conduct: One of the reasons I didn’t take Tomer’s surname, is that it seems, it felt, like moving from one family to another, I mean, it eh . . . , suddenly to move from my family to his family it felt strange. (Yael Snir, 28, originally Shfetzler, married Tomer Balulu; they both changed to a new name, Snir)

“It felt strange” suggests the surprise emerging in the encounter with the emotional and cognitive gap between thinking of a marriage as an act of bonding between two individuals and the realization that the process is something a lot more significant in the sense of leaving a family and entering another. You enter a new family and you then belong to that new family, eh . . . when I say belong I mean belong, not today, but if you . . . if you think of the origins, that’s what used to come up in my head. I mean, clearly, you are being transferred to a new county and that’s it, now you’re there. (Gili Kfir, 30, married Ran Liman, kept her birth family name)

Gili is connecting to the experience of past generations of women leaving the area where they were born, the kitchens where they watched

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their moms cooking and managing their family matters. It is a powerful expulsion, which forces them to leave against their will and disconnects them from their families and sources of support. Lilian Abu-Tabichk (2009) has recently published a scholarly account on the experience of patrilocality among Israeli-Palestinian women. She sheds light on the complex institutional constraints and emotional conditions within which patrilocal culture is reinforced. By uncovering women’s struggles against patrilocal expectations, she clarifies the extent to which the experience of patrilocality is about a sense of disinheritance and being banished from familial assets. Surely, women in our study do not have to practically abandon their families of origin and childhood homes, they do not necessarily lose their rights of inheritance by taking their husbands’ birth family name. The spatial crossing is nonetheless striking, and the powerful emotions correspond to a sense of becoming uprooted and displaced. Ta’hel: This thing of suddenly belonging to this tribe . . . like, I mean, I felt that there’s something to the . . . all of a sudden you’re not only with your husband, all of a sudden you took on his all his family. Michal: His name is the name of his family? Ta’hel: Yes, I mean, I, what really triggered my allergy is that his grandmother, she was still alive then, since the moment she realized we’re going to get married, she would always say to me: soon, you’ll become Mrs. Weinberg, soon you’ll be a Weinberg; Thank you very much! I’m not sure I really want all that. (Ta’hel Rimon, 28, was Rinzler, married Idan Weinberg, both took a third name: Rimon)

Relating to a family as a tribe is not uncommon in Israeli daily language. The term is often used in large family gatherings for families with four or five children. Nevertheless, it is a use enabled by the allegedly obvious distance between such families and tribal culture or life style. More recently, new age culture revived the use of the word tribe by its call for recognizing the human need of belonging, hence facilitating a set of new utilizations for the word (Pike, 2006). It seems that the notion of tribe, when used for a specific family, includes a set of typical dispositional characteristics of those recognized as members of the family. Such recognition usually elicits warmth and empathy even toward such negative conduct as being stubborn or irascible. My thoughts are primarily that I’m too . . . I mean, right, I belong to the Rosenman tribe, but I also belong to his family, I mean, I belong

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to many circles, to my mothers’ family as well, and first and foremost, I mean, the thing that represents me most, when I feel that I need to introduce myself to someone who doesn’t know me, then I’ll use Meira, direct, simple and real. It seems natural to introduce all my dynasty in formal bureaucrat settings. But elsewhere, my first name is my best representation. (Me’ira H’ajby-Roseman, 31, originally Roseman, married Uri H’ajby; they both hyphenated the two names)

Here, in our spatial analysis, we interpret the use of the notion “tribe” which appears as disconnected from any specific dispositions, as insinuating the patrilocal meanings embedded in the naming experience. It seems that in the current cultural context the reappearance of the “tribe” in women’s talk points to a sense of ambivalence. On the one hand, there is the awkward sense coming from the individualist culture that “militates against acknowledging help or human interdependency” (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003:4). On the other hand, there is a longing for closeness produced by the familist culture, in which daily gestures of love and connection build warm family ties that continuously reinforce obligation and control. Well, I came from a relatively small family, so most people who are Shfetzler are relatives in one way or another . . . his relatives are also kind of connected, even if they are more in number and are spread around the country . . . in my family we’re like one whole tribe. All of a sudden when I introduce myself as Snir and people ask about others connected to Snir, I can’t relate to that: no, it’s a new name that I just invented, and people raise their eyebrow wondering what’s going on. (Yael Snir, 28, originally Shfetzler, married Tomer Balulu; they both changed to a new name, Snir)

The ambivalence appears to be fed by longing to be part of a tribe, a tribe whose members share a sense of meaningful belonging and celebrate the relatively close connection with all members. At the same time, the ambivalence is nurtured by accepting the possibility that a sense of belonging will develop over time within the husband’s family that is also large and maintains its interconnectedness. Even if the speaker is clear about not being able to regain what she lost when changing her name, and even if she feels exposed to the controlling gestures of others, she benefits from the pride involved in bridging her past and her present in a new name of her choice.

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Maya: Replacing the name, I think, it is the greatest difficulty, more than other things that you could think are going to be difficult. For me it was, in a way it still is, it’s a part of the difficulty of moving out of your own family, the family of your mother and father, you know, leaving them and saying goodbye eh . . . you know, you don’t really need to say good-bye as they still are here, yes? But eh . . . and that’s how it is, you need to say now I’m here, now all my priorities, everything needs to change, and for me, all this process was particularly difficult. I’m very . . . I think, I mean, part of it is changing your name and all of a sudden there isn’t going to be Eytan at all in the . . . in my name eh . . . but it’s, overall it’s difficult to think about it, that all of a sudden eh . . . that’s it, now your family is your husband. Michal: And where do you see the issue of the name coming in? Do you feel that giving up on it made the process more difficult? Maya: I gave up on the name . . . and I gave up on my family in a sense . . . that’s it. They are no longer in the first place, my parents, my sisters, my nephews, all of them can no longer be in the first place. Michal: And who is in the first place? Maya: My husband of course. Whoever is now the Sa’de family now, he is in the first place now. I join the Sa’de family, I join his parents and his family too. I am part of them which is very easy for me as they are an amazing family . . . but, I mean, when I look back, I feel like, hey, wait a minute, I don’t even want to part from my Eytan, I’m Eytan with all what it means to be an Eytan with all what it says, with all our family values, with all what we believe in, it’s all included in the Eytan, the moment I take it and I remove it from my name . . . then what am I left with, then who am I among all this stuff? (Maya Sade, 28, originally Eytan, adopted her partner’s name)

A sense of emptiness replaces the fullness of being part of the Eytan tribe. Not using the word tribe, Maya Sade unfolds all its meaning, exposing the family of origin as a spatial community of practice in the full sense: shared values and beliefs, and a set of known dispositions “all what it means to be Eytan.” Dealing with the supposedly required change in one’s priorities so that the husband’s family would come first, Maya is reiterating the meanings of patrilocality: even though no institutional arrangements are explicitly imposed, a pressure operates for accepting instructions from the mothers-in-law. Some women feel that taking the name of the men they just married, instead of their own birth family name deprives them of a sense

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of belonging. Women are faced with a new situation, which defines them as a foreigner, who arrived from nowhere and is not connected to anything. The new name constitutes the gender hierarchy organizing the relationship between a powerful well- connected local man and a dislocated, detached woman. Women’s detachment in the wake of marriage entails a loss of resources. The loss of the social network and the loss of the reputation embedded in a woman’s birth family name. The current section deals with a third lost resource, which appears to be the social power position established by the parents’ household. Some of the women are reluctant to forgo this resource and embark on yet another positioning process: one that signifies their familial circles of belonging. Furthermore, the positioning process as worked out through selfnaming, shapes the interrelations between the parents’, the in-laws’ and the women’s own procreative familial circles of belonging. The main theme emerging in this section is “belonging” and the importance of a name as a device signifying belonging. A woman’s social position is defined by the name she carries, in ways that are relevant both within the nuclear and the extended familial circles. In this context, women repeatedly use the word “tribe.” Their reference to the notion of “tribe” illustrates the extent, to which family is important in their world. A sense of being part of a “tribe” reveals that for some women, belonging means an emotionally intensive bond to an extensive network. Such networks become particularly visible in family gatherings that remain a solid foundation of Israeli familism. Women sometimes use a family name as an adjective, a noun or a verb, for example, “it’s ‘Weinbergous’ to do that,” to signify the meaning of belonging to a “tribe,” in their words, “of being a Weinberger.” Practically, it means that belonging is being, in the sense of sharing personality, dispositions and manners. When the signification of a family name is assumed to be as deep as personality is, the meaning of adopting a new family name implies moving into a different personality, a different identity. An expression such as “I have developed an identity that is Noymanist enough for the name (Noyman) to stick better” demonstrates the experience of the huge transition in life related to a change of the name. The family name glues somebody into a familial circle, but the gluing does not always work successfully, hence a woman’s need to develop a new identity as a way to facilitate the process. In some cases, the transition is described as radical, and women report a total transition that involves distancing themselves from various manners and

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ways of speech which they perceive as typical to their families of origin. In these cases, they do not just speak of themselves as belonging to two familial circles, the husband’s family and the birth family. Instead, they speak of clearly belonging to the husband’s family. Local familism demands intensive participation in family gatherings, and the precedence set by the established practices of the husband’s family implies a powerful routine, which may translate into an intensified process of becoming, in which women are recognized as members of new communities of practice. The fundamental transition consists of two distinct processes, which in some cases exclude one another: (a) the development of a sense of belonging to “his family” as oppose to “my family” and (b) the development of belonging to the couple’s new family, in the interviewees’ words, to “our family.” Even if women do not actually move to spaces owned by their partners’ families, and even if women are not necessarily separated from their families of origin by long geographical distances, some of the meanings of the patrilocal custom seem to persist. For example, women describe themselves as passive in the process: “you feel as if you were transferred.” The passivity echoes times, in which women were parts of men’s possessions: “they managed to appropriate me.” Participants, who undertook to obey the patronymic tradition, explain that by way of changing their family names, other aspects of their identities have been transformed: different priorities in the allocation of time, particularly regarding time spent with the family, distancing herself from her family by spending less time together and a change in practices oriented towards the value of daily life. A substantial identity crisis ensues: “so, it’s unclear what is left of me, really; where am I in all this stuff.” Therefore, it seems that while operating in a cultural space, which demands that women constitute their independent identities, women may suffer identity loss as a result of the need to change their family names.

Naming Spatiality and Naming Temporality as Analytical Measures Resistance acts require high levels of courage. When bell hooks asks, “Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination?” (1996: 49), she characterizes a possible starting point in which one does not dare to resist. Moreover, Echoing Aptheker (1989), who insists on the political importance of women’s

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resistance whatever the gains and costs might be, bell hooks recognizes the possibility that resistance may lead to isolation and marginalization. Isolation is a particularly high price to pay for young women longing for belonging and approval. What the discussion of naming practices as resistance acts adds to the common understanding of resistance is a salient temporal dimension. Naming practices are not acts of resistance, but a project of life long resistance. Consider McFarland’s definition of resistance: “ . . . a type of nonconformist behaviour that questions the legitimacy of the current social order. Resistant acts challenge the definition of the situation and, in more dramatic instances, attempt to supplant it through appeals to a different normative or cognitive framework of interaction” (2004: 1251). Indeed, naming practices fit in with the aspect of challenging the dominant/patronymic definition of the situation, they further fit in with the appeal to a different/feminist normative framework, but they seem not to be dramatic but continuous. Rather than examine resistance as a dramatic one-time act, we point out a life-long resistance that time and again requires courage, persistence, willingness to explain and justify, and a preparedness to be signified or labeled as the Other, who attracts attention. Not all women, who intend to resist naming practices, are aware of its life-long nature. Not all of them manage to summon up the persistence required, and some definitely are defeated by the easy path offered by the institutional context. Mills (2003) already suggested that in the UK women are reverting to the patronymic practice, hoping to reinstitute stability and permanence into their romantic relationship. To support her argument, Mills cites a piece from The Observer Magazine, in which Madonna among other celebrities and professional women is said to return to the romantic dream of the appropriate stable marriage (Hughes, 2001). For some women, however, this path of returning back in time, is unavailable. Laskowski (2006) suggests that in the United States, highly educated women treat the retaining of their own birth family name as the taken-for-granted practice. In our-sample of Israeli women that responded to an Internet advertisement that invited those who consider the naming dilemma as central for them, next to women adopting patronymic naming informed by traditionalist communities of practice develops egalitarian feminist naming enabled by radical men; men accepting a change of the family name so that the couple and the family can have a unified name. These Israeli middle- class highly educated women who partner men who belong to a range of communities of practice cannot return to the romantic dream. These

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relatively feminist women, must continue and strengthen the different normative framework of interaction. The phenomenon of men changing their birth family names in heterosexual relationships, to be introduced in the next chapter, was rarely reported prior to our Israeli study (one of Mills’ interviewees described this pattern). To summarize, in this chapter, we attempted to synthesize the understanding of belonging in communities of practice with the literature on time and space dimensions of agency. We showed how parting from a birth family name resembles departing from home. The space of a house, our home during our childhood, is known as a unique space, a place that plays a particularly significant role in the forming of memory. Our birth family name is loaded with the emotional experiences we had at home throughout our childhood, and it symbolizes “where we came from.” It is loaded with memories of experiences and of the people and relationships that were part of our childhood. Memories turn our birth family name into a representation of the time and space that used to define who we are. Childhood/ youth/young adulthood memories as forming women’s sense of who they are emerged powerfully in the analysis of women’s ambivalence toward the patrilocal roots of their naming practices. Metaphors of separation from the space we call home, those of displacement, dislocation, uprootedness, exclusion, and a search for shelter are used by Zigmunt Bauman (1993) to describe the current human existential longing for a home and a homeland, even when we are not forced to distance ourselves from the name we grew up with. Longing for a home and particularly feeling alienated from your own name is potentially enhanced when women undertake such separation. Discursive resources taken from feminism enable a few women to spare themselves such alienation. Imagined feminist communities of practice supports their struggle against being disconnected of past identities. In a spatial perspective, the constraints and opportunities of a specific space facilitate the development of spatial identities, says Susan Stanford-Friedman (1998). Identities understood within social spaces are for her “crossroads of multiply situated knowledges” (p. 19). Women’s knowledge emerged, indeed, as crucial for the mapping of processes, in which they engage while entering a situation that requires introducing themselves by one of several possible combinations of names. Such a focus on mapping territories and boundaries emphasizes, according to Stanford-Friedman, the lack of solid ground, the ceaseless change of fluidity. We interpret this fluidity as a response to contingent nature of belonging into communities of practice.

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The temporal dimension emerged as inseparable from the spatial one. Our bodies do not forget the first house we encounter (Urry, 1995). Thus, separating oneself from the birth family name is a prolonged process, which requires a gradual adjustment to the new identity, its potentials, resources and limitations. Moreover, different naming practices differ in the length of time that women may need until they are comfortable using their “solution” in various spaces. From an interactionist perspective that focuses on the salience of time to the shaping of our emotions, Christine Mattley says, “emotions are implicated in both shared and common pasts and therefore are important for the activation of social pasts as well as projection of shared futures” (2002: p. 368). It appears that, when women struggle to preserve their premarriage past they activate their responsibility for what pasts and what futures would be collectively shared in their present communities of practice . Our data clearly shows, however, that this continuous struggle requires persistence and a willingness to engage in various types of negotiation and accounting. Moreover, many women, particularly those devoid of feminist discursive resources, give up on naming work (i.e., the overall work they must do in order to preserve their naming choices) even before they begin shouldering it. Others allow their energies to fade over time, and some, particularly those who worry about the ramifications of alternative names, manage to change its form into a “lighter” shade, by using humor as an energy-preserving mechanism. Women manage the task of facing the multiplicity of positioning processes through applying their old and new family names, while differentiating between time and space sequences. To adopt Susan Stanford-Friedman’s guidelines and map the ceaseless fluidity, we have undertaken the task of unveiling women’s awareness of spatial constraints and opportunities as developing over time through a slow, or perhaps fast, learning or becoming process. As we have shown, it is a continuous process involving detailed learning of the possibilities and demands raised in specific spaces. Thus, temporality in our analysis emerges as the processual dimension of resisting naming practices, in which the hard work required is gradually revealed and dealt with. It is the process through which women are developing as repeat and experienced players in specific spaces, knowledgeable of possible gains and costs, increasingly more sensitive to the requirement and possibilities. Understanding the fluid nature of name usages as emerging within time and space dimensions is yet another project of diffusing the

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boundaries between adjustment and resistance. Historian Bettina Aptheker has been among the first voices demanding a distancing from the dichotomy between resistance and adjustment in women’s lives, focusing on how their responsibilities for those they care for, circumscribe the price they are able to pay for resistance. Aptheker’s view is important in conveying the dual nature of women’s resistance: maintaining the routines of daily life as safe and appropriate for their families, while constantly working to push back the limits imposed on them. Aptheker’s concept of duality corresponds to an earlier feminist attempt to deal with the concurrent nature of continuity and change—adjusting to constraints, while exploiting opportunities for resistance: Gerson and Peiss’ discussion of boundaries, negotiation and consciousness (1985). Providing a basis for the idea of spatialized identities, Gerson and Peiss offered the idea of boundaries as central to women experience. For them, boundaries refer to the distinctions between spaces, in which women experience themselves as operating freely in friendly, perhaps even feminist environments, and hostile spaces, where feminism is primarily a cause for ridicule. Both Aptheker in her historian account and Gerson and Peiss in their sociological distinctions, focus on moments of negotiation as the measure for expansion. These authors write from a perspective recognizing women’s efforts in specific spaces, enhancing the visibility of the hard work involved in the continuous expansion. It is hard work that not all women are equally eager or able to shoulder for the sake of the required negotiation. As daily encounters reflect a painful lack of intelligibility, the hard work of introducing meaning has been so consuming for some of our interviewees that they gave up on it and repeated the theme of “I had no energy for the fight.” No energy, we interpret, for undertaking the project of creating shared intelligibility that will render their naming practice meaningful. The temporal dimension of resistance thus emerged as the length of time over which energies for the struggle are available and the ways in which accounting and negotiation across specific spaces changes over time. The salience of temporality and spatiality reappear once the notion of “hard work” receives centerstage. There is the hard work of mapping a specific space and the extent to which it is dominated by a ridiculing or otherwise controlling atmosphere—i.e., finding out about the nature of belonging offered if at all; there is the hard work of accounting for one’s exceptional practices, normalizing them, hoping to load them with a positive meaning—i.e., generating intelligibility under the condition of a discursive order which subjugates feminist meanings;

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and there is the hard work of the encounter with the cost, one’s own encounter, and the real or imagined encounter of one’s children—the future hypothesizations of relationship loss. If the hard work becomes too energy consuming, if the pressure of visibility involved becomes too heavy, then time is important for the question of how long these energies will last, and who will give up first: the participants in the specific social space or the struggling women. When women had little ideological resources, institutional practices often overwhelmed their attempts to resist the patronymic tradition. In contradistinction, those who saw themselves as feminist and did not refuse utilizing feminist ideology as a resource persisted and continuously negotiated in unfriendly spaces until their naming practices were accepted and understood. In some cases, women did not feel the need to justify and explain anymore and resorted to humor among other measures in order not to treat social questioning in any serious way. Those at ease with the measures that they have developed over time are those who manage the project of lifelong resistance even if at the point of choosing a nonpatronymic practice they had no idea they will have to protect it all their lives.

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7 Name in Relations

Introduction In this chapter, we turn our focus from the communities of practice within which women negotiate their identity and social value to the intimate sphere of couples’ relations. The discussion of the broad institutional context remains relevant for analyzing the constitution of women’s subjectivities, while power hierarchies embedded in the cultural loading of the name permeate marital power relations. Here, however, we present a discussion of the feminine self in the context of issues specifically arising from the dimension of women as wives and partners. In the area of couples relations, feminist research indicates how different contrasting ideal models of intimacy rise in the sociohistorical specificity of cultural dimensions (Cancian, 1987; Jameison, 1998). The current structure of gender and its related expectations and values shape current couples’ relationships in such way that ambivalence and contradicting expectations are heightened (Risman, 1999). The powerful cultural trend of divorce, argues Hackstaff (2000), simultaneously emphasizes marital contingency and marital work ethics. Hackstaff’s findings are considered to be relevant here as, unlike other cultural niches in Israel, the middle-class professional, secular women in our sample tend to position themselves against first-world trends. These trends include the following: lengthy premarital cohabitation, postponed transitions to parenthood, and high expectations for a continuously passionate and satisfying relationship (Benjamin and Tilustan, 2010). Couples, and especially women, Hackstaff shows, search for strategies to reconcile the desire for an enduring and gratifying relationship with a belief in marital contingency. Within this cultural

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context, studies have shown, the ideal models of intimacy are closely monitored by specific feeling rules, which consist of genderspecific expectations of emotional management (Hochschild, 1979, 1983; Shields, 2001). Specific feeling rules may limit women’s participation in marital conversations, particularly when they wish to maintain the stability of the relationship (Askham, 1985; DeVault, 1999). Elliott and Umberson (2008) managed to collect empirical data, however, in which individuals described how they engage in marital negotiation around issues of sex and the delicate exchange between sex and housework. It seems that emotion work aimed at protecting partners’ feelings facilitates couples’ ability to speak explicitly about sensitive issues. The authors explain that their respondents “perform desire” by raising open conflicts in the context of emotion work that secures the stability of the marriage. Analyzing the impact of enhanced individualism on intimate relationships, Giddens (1992) introduced a distinction between the ideal of “romantic” love and that of “confluent” love, which is close to his notion of a “pure relationship.” In Giddens’s view, romantic love is futureoriented and connected to a sense of stability of the relationship because it provides the psychological security perceived as necessary for rearing children. By contrast, the pure relationship or confluent love is present- oriented and based on intense communication so that the partners’ identities are revealed, and their passionate attraction to each other is validated. The same focus on intense communication attracted Bauman’s attention, who suggested to understand it as a response to contemporary potential marital fragility. As Bauman (1993) explained in his account of the privatization of ambivalence, the fragility requires a continuous willingness to engage in marital negotiation. Otherwise partners cannot feel “at home” in the relationship and are left longing for a cure for the omnipresent rootlessness of modern life. In other words, both Giddens and Bauman analyzed marital communication as a discursive process of authentic self-production. Naming practices consist of an integral aspect of this process, necessitating their exploration in the context of marital negotiation. Thus, the current chapter discusses women’s attempts at negotiating their family names with their partners in light of major discursive influences. In addition, we aim at presenting a framework for analyzing the interplay between speech and silence in marital relationships regarding naming practices and couples’ basic definitions of who should bother about the family name.

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Marital Expectations and the Contestation of Patronymic Practices Feminists have pondered over the issue of marital negotiation for quite some time, noticing its intensification in peer marriages where gender hierarchies dissipate (Schwartz, 1994). For Cancian (1987), this process indicates the emergence of a feminist blueprint of marital life. Calling “companionship” a relationship based on the images identified by Connell (1987) as dominant masculinity and emphasized femininity, Cancian distinguished two additional blueprints in current romance: the blueprint of “independence” that fits in well with Giddens’s individualist pattern of “confluent love,” (1992) also noticed by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995); and a blueprint primarily committed to the feminist marital ideal of “interdependence,” which is egalitarian and based on mutual care. An Israeli study of couples’ relationship showed recently that the blueprints observed by Cancian as typical for American heterosexual relationships coexist in Israeli society. Local family sociologists tend to argue that although the dominance of nationalistic familism secures the prevalence of “companionship” (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 1999; Lavee and Katz, 2003), its position is contested by both traditional and egalitarian images (Benjamin and Ha’elyon, 2004). But can the contestation by the egalitarian marital blueprint in the current local context against more traditional blueprints be translated into active marital negotiation on naming practices? Couples holding expectations of marital togetherness consistent with “romantic love” and “companionship” are expected to adhere to patronymic practices. Drawing on essentialist notions of femininity and masculinity, expectations fed by “romantic love” restrain marital negotiation and prohibit or silence the discussion on nonnormative feminist practices. In this context, family names, organized within the patronymic tradition of women taking their husbands’ family names, are a taken-for- granted custom that requires no speech. Jamieson (1999) has added a point of salient importance for understanding men’s refusal to regard naming practices as a topic for marital negotiation. Accordingly, male entitlement for self-fulfilment is not new: the same standard characterizes older blueprints of marital relationships. Thus, men holding images of companionship and of independence similarly benefit of traditional patriarchal privileges.

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The expectation that men’s patronymic privilege would be protected may translate into an expectation for very little speech on the topic of names. Such an expectation was indeed powerfully echoed in the interviews that we analyzed in our study. Women described their (omitted) attempts to discuss the issue of the family name with their partners. When women attempted to raise the topic in their marital conversations, quite a few of these attempts were silenced, either by their partners or by the women themselves through the management of emotions. Thus, our material sheds light on the relevance of the barriers to communication, described by Stanley Deetz (1992) in organizational contexts, to marital relationships. Particularly his arguments regarding topic avoidance and subjectification of experience appeared in our material. An enormous effort was reported by several interviewees who managed to pursue a particularly lengthy and persistent negotiation process, with various outcomes. In this sense women in our study rarely influenced their partners’ co-operation. Only a few resembled women holding egalitarian expectations, who married men adhering to the new forms of caring masculinity. Such women were found to benefit from intense negotiation of various aspects of their egalitarian relationships. Coltrane (1996) contributed to the reemerging interest in the condition of these women’s open marital conversations. He elicited the criteria of practicality and flexibility as central to the daily routines of egalitarian couples, and in an 1989 article on the topic he showed how an open marital conversation is crucial for these two aspects to materialize (Coltrane, 1989). Daily routines may depend on continuous negotiation, thus enabling the discussion of who is doing what, but naming practices do not necessarily enter the same category. As we saw in previous chapters, like household tasks, naming practices touch upon women’s identities (as feminine, as a good wife, as a devoted mother). Unlike household tasks, around the transition to parenthood, naming practices reach a point when they have to be resolved in ways that are going to shape family members’ public selves; afterwards, they are rarely open for renegotiation. For analytical purposes, we raise the general question of who, in a couple, perceives naming practices as his/her own business. Alternatively, the same question can be articulated as “who, among our study participants, managed to convince her partner to perceive the issue of naming practices also as his own?” By phrasing our question in this way, we correspond to Jamieson’s argument above according to which both “romantic love” and “confluent love” images

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(Giddens, 1992) allow men to keep patronymic privileges. Since only the subversive image of “interdependence” (Cancian, 1987) maintains a norm of reciprocity that is actually more powerful than the gender hierarchy, our question will allow us to map the emergence of interdependence as a significant discursive resource in the local context.

Analyzing Naming Negotiation Many among the women in our study postponed the decision, undergoing a complex process of decision making over the family name. Our starting point for the analysis presented here is the question of how marital conversations on the issue developed following women’s initiation of name-related speech. We examined whether any form of significant negotiation emerged or whether silencing mechanisms marginalized the initiative. Interviewees’ narratives of naming as a topic for marital negotiation distinguished between two types of partners: there are the men, whose birth family name is kept, in line with the privilege accorded to them by the patronymic tradition; and there are the men, who are open to reflexive consideration regarding their birth family name, often because of its cultural loading, and take an active part in shaping a family name that will reflect the fact that they got married. Table 7.1 presents the complexity of naming practices resulting from the interplay of silence and speech in couples’ relationships. Table 7.1

Categories of couples’ negotiation

Women’s whose husbands’ family name remained unchanged (N = 22)

Women’s whose husbands’ family name was subject to reflexive considerations (N = 11)

Patronymic practice (7)

A third name in response to a negative cultural loading of birth family names (5) Ta’hel, Ya’el, Irit, Rinat, Dana

Maya, Elinor, Daniel, Tamar, Neta, Na’ama, Iris Hyphenation practice (15) H’agit, Nurit, Inbal, Efrat, Ayala, Gal, Anat, Ayelet, Amit, Dafnit, Efrat, Vered,Varonique, Dafi,Lital Retainers (9) Yuval, Dafna, Adi, Gili, Meyrav, Dalit, Maytal, Galit, Michal

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A third name in response to the insistence on a joint name (2) Li’at, Ariel

Caring manhood (4) Me’ira, Noga, Amit, Hila

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We organize the presentation of our analysis of marital negotiation over naming practices around six sections, each taking up an emerging theme in our material: the first section presents the motivation behind quite a few of the marital dialogues, namely, the belief that a couple’s naming practice reflects the quality of the relationship. This belief appeared in women’s narratives as a major incentive for initiating marital negotiation over the family name. The second section presents the emotional entry point of the negotiation process that often involved issues of men’s honor almost hermetically blocking the chances for effective negotiation. The section unveils the nature of naming practices as epitomizing discursive contestation and its emotional anchors. The third section focuses on minor attempts to raise naming practices for marital dialogue that were quickly silenced by men. The fourth section analyzes attempts to negotiate naming practices that were met with firm reactions by men defeating women’s resisting spirit. The fifth section indicates the conditions of successful negotiation. The sixth section discusses caring masculinity as the emerging theme in the narratives of women whose partners felt that naming practices are also their issue.

Marital Names as Reflecting the Quality of the Relationship In the course of the history of romance, cultures have endlessly invented significations of unity and true love (Jamieson, 1997). From the legendary killing of a dragon to the Hollywood-style notion of a soul mate, people in intimate relationships are always in search for signs and indicators for the extent to which their partner and their relationship is the one that is meant to be. In her conceptualization of naming practices as taking place within communities of practice, Mills (2003) refers to the possibility that increasingly more women feel that they might gain something by going back to taking husbands’ birth family names. Women are developing such preconceptions despite the fact that a more systematic empirical examination of the association between the quality of relationships and the naming practices indicate no such connection. Kline and her colleagues (1996) state that their finding “debunks the belief of some American males that women who adopt their husbands’ surnames are more committed to their marriages than women who keep their birth names” (p. 610). In their study, women who changed, retained, or hyphenated their surnames did not differ in their evaluations of the quality of their marriages. Nevertheless, quite

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a few of our interviewees’ accounts reflected the idea that there is some kind of additional significance in the family name, particularly in the unity of the family name. A joint family name is often perceived as a relationship indicator, practically, a mirror for the level of togetherness. For the sake of the discussion of the mythical status of “one” name as the appropriate way of “doing intimacy,” it is of course necessary to connect to the structural dimension of the name discussed above in chapter 4. Clearly, the patronymic tradition of men’s privilege for transferring their family birth name to their children draws support from the requirements of one name and a one-word name. Efrat: . . . the topic came up in social gatherings where we sat together with other couples and their kids, where [the hyphenated name] came up as a difficulty, and what I see is that men do not manage to understand the . . . the fact that there is some kind of an emotional issue here. You know, the fact that your kids’ family name is different than yours. They can’t relate to this emotional difficulty, that because it was important to you to keep your birth family name, you’re somehow disconnected from your kids Michal: So do you ever see conflicts arising around this issue of women understanding and men don’t? Efrat: I always tend to think that the conflict is sitting on another topic. That’s how I see it. For each couple it’s something else. So I can think specifically of each of the couples who sit around and think of what it is sitting on. (Efrat Hotzler-Appleboim, 37, originally Hotzler, hyphenated his name second, he shares his family name with the kids)

Apparently the interviewee is orchestrating two separate issues in her talk. One issue is why men do not understand specific experiences; there, her answer is straightforward: because they are not faced with the same issues, they have difficulties understanding them. As they are not faced with the threat of being disconnected from their children by a separate family name, they cannot relate to the emotional issue embedded in the experience. However, Efrat described herself as someone who devotes thoughts to other couples’ relationship, making an effort to understand a second issue. She believes that it is possible to connect between the way couples solve their naming dilemma and other aspects of their relationships. She does not demonstrate how she makes such connections, but it is clear that she relates their “issues” to their family names. Indeed, a joint family name emerged as signifying

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romance and togetherness, and more generally, men’s ability to relate to women’s suffering that is caused by carrying a family name that is not shared by their families. Women who accepted the patronymic option were saved from this suffering and did not have to enter marital negotiation; but for the others, equating naming with romance became a major catalyst of negotiation. In the following, the emotional dimension of naming emerges as crucial for the feasibility of negotiation.

Honor: The Entry Point to Marital Negotiation Emotionology is the whole set of cultural standards embraced by social institutions and organizations for how an emotion should be evaluated. Those positioning themselves as appropriate members of a specific community of practice are required to embrace the relevant standards and evaluate emotional responses accordingly. Stearns and ZisowitzStearns (1986) coined the concept of emotionology explaining that it is central to the understanding of the historical nature of emotional codes that govern key institutions or practices. Throughout history, powerful social forces have engaged in changing perceptions of specific emotions, including hurt, shame, and anger, enlisting the forcefulness of these emotions as reflected in formal and informal human activity, to their benefit (Barbalet, 2001). Thus, to distinguish between professed values and emotional experience as well as to understand how the emotionology of a specific time and space generates the distinction between emotional standards and emotional experience, we need to look at local emotional standards. Earlier, we mentioned Kamir’s account of the local patronymic tradition as just another demonstration of the deeply rooted religious-national expectation that married women will sacrifice their well-being, their rights, and their human dignity in favor of the “new Hebrew man’s honor” (2007: 277, and see chapter 4). In this context, we propose our interpretation of women’s accounts of honor as a major discursive resource operating against women’s attempt to negotiate their naming. Some communities of practice’s emotionologies still allow honor concerns to enter marital conversations and to block the negotiability of naming practices. Paying respect to men’s honor emerges as a primary requirement of the appropriate wife. In articulating her concern with honor, Inbal sounds like someone who speaks within a discursive ambivalence that makes her quite confused about what is the appropriate way to speak about such matters: eh . . . yes. I don’t know. I didn’t have enough time to develop emotions for that. It . . . I don’t know, I felt that in places where . . . in places

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connected to . . . in places in which they haven’t known me through my birth family name, I can also . . . well, I’ll add it as a kind of paying respect to Amit, to my husband, Amit, even though it’s really not important to him, to pay respect to him, to his parents, to his parent, I think it’s important to them. (Inbal Doron- Shlyfe, 36, originally Doron, married Amit Shlyfe, hyphenated his name)

The interplay between past and present emotionologies is apparent. It seems absolutely standard for the man’s family of origin to value the transference of their family name to their son’s family of procreation. Inbal’s evaluation is not undermining this past-rooted standard. It is legitimate in her world, and she presents herself as happy to respond to the standard. The interesting interplay relates to her partner’s emotional response. She undertakes to respect him, to underline his honor, while being aware that given his presently molded masculinity he can no longer regard his honor as important. She cooperates with a pattern of masculinity that is anchored in the past but still shapes present evaluations although on an implicit level only. Thus, Kamir’s proposition that women are expected to sacrifice their concerns and well-being is concurrently supported and negated. Our point is that middle class/ professional Israeli couples operate within a multiplicity of emotionologies. Therefore, the specific power relations between the requirement to hold on to past imperatives to pay respect to men’s honor and the present imperative to drop men’s traditional privileges have to be explored. Clearly, past emotionologies benefit from the moral weight of respecting the feelings of the families of origin. In contrast, the option of hyphenation is treated in the following narrative as violating a man’s respectability: Nurit: My real need was to keep the name Hafner, and he really had the need to keep the name Dubnov. I mean, if he would compromise on a third name with me, I would be OK with it . . . but also, we didn’t feel it was satisfying because, here I had this thing of my brother who got killed and I think that this fact that my brother got killed meant that it was mainly my need to make sure the Hafner stays around somehow . . . Michal: And the option that he will also be Dubnov-Hafner? Nurit: I actually came up with this demand and he just fiercely refused. To him it seemed like the most awful humiliation. Michal: Humiliation? Nurit: That’s right. Michal: Did he actually say that?

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Nurit: Eh . . . he said something like . . . he didn’t say humiliation, but he said something like . . . that I wanted to castrate him or something like that (laughs). I mean . . . you know, to him it meant taking his masculinity away and . . . I don’t know what, cancelling it, erasing it . . . that was his feeling, I mean, that’s how he felt about it. (Nurit Dubnov-Hafner, 38, originally Hafner, married Tza’h’i Dubnov, hyphenated his first, he remained Dubnov, the kids got her hyphenated name)

Hyphenating his wife’s name symbolized for Nurit’s partner the end of his masculine self. Hyphenation as a “doing gender” act (West and Fenstermaker, 2002) is clearly an act signifying one’s femininity. In patronymic cultures in recent years, it has become an act of celebration of women’s marital status (e.g., Chiles, 2003). Carrying hyphenated names is more powerful than carrying a ring. In her partner’s world, Nurit was asking way too much. She interpreted his reaction as a struggle against public humiliation, namely, as a fierce struggle for honor. Once his behavior is interpreted as drawing on the honor standard, negotiation is blocked to the extent that his family name is left in place, and she hyphenates her name second. Her powerful fight for distancing their future family from the patronymic tradition has been defeated once honor enters the game. The fact that Nurit’s achievement of both hyphenating is uncommon demonstrates that “the Israeli honor feminism had achieved significant gains for women in Israel . . . but there are important feminist goals which it cannot serve: . . . it cannot dislocate the Israeli masculinity rite and the honor mentality anchored in it” (Kamir, 2007:80). Next to the honor emotionology, a liberal feminist emotionology gradually permeates Israeli reality. Here is a narrative in which its imprint can be traced: Hila: I’m amazed to hear how he proudly tells other people of his hyphenation. Michal: What, what does he tell? Hila: He says, no, we went to the Interior Ministry and we’re both Cohen- Sela in our ID cards. Michal: And what are people saying to that? Hila: Wow, really? Splendid, what a liberal man, what a progressive man you are. It’s shocking really, like what? What happened? Did he give up on his honor? People are so conservative, it doesn’t matter how liberal we think our society is. (Hila Cohen- Selah, 30, originally Selah, married Omer Cohen, both hyphenated)

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Hila’s partner is exceptional in the Israeli society, and other people still evaluate his action according to the honor standard. The positive response described in the excerpt is a sign of the growing power position of feminist emotionology, but Hila interprets it differently. To her, as her mocking of people’s responses shows, the honor standard is here, still in its traditional power position, and her partner is appraised for giving it up. Clearly she is devastated by the public appraisal, while at the same time also celebrating her partner’s uniqueness.

Marital Negotiation The concurrence of speech and silence is a well-developed argument. Many agree that each attempt at saying is simultaneously an act of silencing the marginalized and the Other. Clair (1998), in particular, shows the importance of tracing what is not said, in what is said. Feminist scholarship has explored marital silencing as a process, which concomitantly marginalizes women’s needs and elicits the effort of unsilencing (DeVault, 1999; Benjamin, 2003). How does silencing in the area of women’s family names work? It appears that the gendered dimension of the cultural loading of the name discussed in chapter 4 is operational. As women accept the construction of their family name as their own issue, they perceive it as unrelated to others and, thus, avoid discussing it. Very few women find it important to actually state their naming intentions to their partners prior to the wedding or even shortly afterwards. A detailed narration of the early days after marriage shows that sometimes women feel that not raising the topic is in their best interest: Michal: Did you speak about naming options with your partner before getting married? Neta: No. No. Certainly not. I just added another name. I used two names. The truth is that it took me a long while before I added my new name. I just continued to sign as Neta Gross. People always knew me as Neta Gross. You see, there are plenty of people out there in the world that still today do not know that I’ve got another name. I was always Neta Gross. Michal: So it wasn’t a decision like “I’m going to stay Gross”? Neta: No. I guess I had some kind of a general idea that I’m going to use my name, and later on, once I had no other choice, because of the bureaucracies of the banks and the new ID etc., I had to begin signing by my new name as well . . . you know, stuff arrives in the mail and gradually it becomes a fact.

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Michal: So people around you? Your partner? Did he say anything? Neta: No, No. Certainly not. It never became an issue around which there was any hassle. To me it was . . . I didn’t turn it into some kind of a subject because I don’t think it should be like that. It annoyed me that this is how things turned out to be, but I wasn’t going to make a fuss over it. Michal: So you didn’t speak about it with your partner? Neta: It wasn’t . . . No, it really wasn’t an issue. Michal: And how did he treat the fact that you haven’t changed your name? Neta: No . . . You know I think that it becomes something that you need to relate to only if you make a big deal out of it. I mean if you bother to speak about it, then there’s no choice, and others around you must speak about it. If you just continue naturally to use your name, and let’s say sign somewhere with your new name, it really stays out of sight, and no one will ever say a word until when? Until you’ll decide to turn it into something complicated. Michal: So what would you say was you’re partner role in the process? Neta: None (laughs). It didn’t seem important to him or interesting (laughs) No, no, I don’t think that he was part of any relevant discussion. He treated it as a functional matter. Once, I remember us sitting in the bank, opening a joint bank account, so of course we used Noyman and for a minute I was hesitating, “wait a minute, and what if I want to keep my Gross, how exactly do I do that,” and at that point he said, it was simply bothering and superfluous. Yes. Michal: And how did you feel about it? Neta: I gave up, I didn’t even have the energy to begin explaining why that was important to me. I didn’t want to shoulder is re- education, you know, just another sign of the endless stuff, men aren’t aware of things happening to their wives and not to them. Michal: So you didn’t want to begin talking about it with him? Neta: He wasn’t open to deal with this issue, which made it a lot easier for me just to give up and forget about it. He didn’t put any pressure on me to change my name, so there was no cause for a fight, and he would just ridicule the whole thing, if I had brought it up, like it happened at the bank when he said: “what? . . . leave me alone, will you drop it?” (Neta Noyman, 42, originally Gross, married Dani Noyman, adopted his name)

Within a specific socioemotional context, both Neta and her partner make efforts and build up justifications for avoiding naming practices as a topic for the marital conversation. The silencing mechanism defined by Deetz as topic avoidance (1992) appears in Neta’s story of

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opening the bank account as powerful in constituting the boundaries of the marital conversation, leaving the name outside the talkable zone (Benjamin, 1998). For a short moment, negotiation seems relevant: Neta describes herself as interested in finding out how a joint bank account can be managed with two different names. Facing the momentary threat, her partner quickly restores topic avoidance by breaking the silence and introducing his definition of the topic as useless (“bothering and superfluous”). Neta accounts for her acceptance of her partner’s inability to enter negotiation over the name by several justifications. Firstly, she argues that avoiding talk is better for maintaining her control over the pace of the change—because they avoided the talk, she could refrain from changing her name for a while, begin adding the name at some instances, until she was ready to completely drop her birth family name, Gross. Secondly, she explains that he was not open for such a discussion; so she benefited twice from not insisting on the talk: she gained the option not to undertake the hard work of negotiation, and she gained a shield against his ridicule of things that are important to her. Finally, she explains that men cannot understand “things happening to their wives and not to them.” Marital negotiation emerges as hard work, involving fights, demanding persistence against the low odds for success. Studying marital negotiation on the basis of interviews with professional women in the UK and couples experiencing job insecurity in Israel, Benjamin (1998, 2003) argues that women are likely to enter marital negotiation under three conditions: (1) development of a shared belief that change in the relationship implies improvement; often women feel that change will come at a cost and a variety of unintended consequences and therefore prefer to avoid negotiation; (2) development of a shared language regarding processes of change, where both partners can be trusted to accept a slow pace of change rather than expecting immediate results—couples enter negotiation when they can trust a partner to be patient even on times of intense stress, when patterns tend to withdraw into past forms; (3) development of alternative “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1983) for the emotional management of the relationship. Here, women’s anger is particularly important in changing its meaning into a positive signification of routines that require joint reflexive decision making, and men’s anger changes its meaning into a legitimate form of response, rather than a sign of violated honor. From this perspective, marital negotiation depends on preconditions for its facilitation. Neta above cannot trust her partner with regard to any of the three conditional processes and therefore

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resorts to justifying her preference to cooperate with the silencing of her concerns. In the following section, we discuss negotiation attempts that persisted despite quite firm male reaction.

“Losing the Battle”: Defeated Feminism—Failing in Negotiations In this section, we concentrate on the experiences of women who after struggling with various alternative naming practices went back to adopting their husbands’ birth family name. The discussion of their naming stories is sociologically significant since these women reported a lengthy reflexive process concerning their family name after marriage. What was the process through which they learned that they will not be able to resist the patronymic tradition? Were they able to discuss the issue? How were they convinced to let go? Our analysis shows that the most powerful silencing mechanism that defeats feminist reasoning with regard to maintaining extramarital identities is the requirement that women respect the feelings of the patriarch—a position ascribed to their partners’ fathers rather than their partners themselves. Daniel: I got very angry, yes, because it isn’t like him, I mean, he’s really . . . he didn’t give, he didn’t give me an excuse. Other than that’s how people do that or my parents will be insulted, which is really not . . . it’s not a convincing argument for me, I got quite angry . . . Michal: And this didn’t turn into a discussion. Daniel: No. Michal: And you didn’t say, why are you behaving like that? Daniel: Yes. I probably said to him, why you are like that and why you are like that (laughing) I ain’t the type to miss the opportunity (laughs), but um . . . as you can see, we’re still married, we didn’t get divorced. (Daniel Bukay, 35, originally Swartz, married Michael Bukay, adopted his name)

The fact that his parents will be insulted seems sufficient to silence the topic as Daniel’s partner is determined to prioritize his parents’ honor, even if that means marginalizing issues of importance to his partner. Despite the attempt to continue discussing the issue and raising alternatives, the discussion remains blocked. Previous research has shown

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that men’s insult is a boundary-setting mechanism within the marital conversation, indicating the prohibitions in the marital conversation (Benjamin, 1998). In other words, insult signifies topics as triggering an emotional price when brought up. Here we see that under the stated egalitarianism that characterizes contemporary secular JewishIsraeli middle- class couples, the male partner’s feelings have lost their silencing power, and the mechanism relies on his father’s feelings, practically on familism and family centeredness. Father’s feelings benefit of such an authoritarian position that they are present and powerful, even when the couple had already gone through a process of self-naming. Fathers’ honor is a major concern for the husbands: throughout their upbringing, they were prepared for moments, when they will have to pay this respect. In Iris’s story, the couples’ decision making, which was aimed at taking together a third new name for both, was rewound, once her partner’s father discovered their plot: We were both very emotional about it, very, me even more, maybe. Because I felt a lot of the time that, especially after he changed his mind without talking to me about it, I felt, because of the responses around me, that so few people were practically with me. Because my parents were with me, but they were with me in silence. And those who were against me, made a terrific noise, and . . . and I felt as if I was raped, that practically I’m made to swallow something that I refuse to. I felt it physically, and this generated in me awful lot of resistance. So I was very emotional. We had rows with crying and . . . there were very difficult things. We reached conflicts where I swore and shouted at him, I really felt that I am being cursed, and that I have to respond as violently as I can, because I’m basically attacked . . . there was no way he was going to ignore his father’s feelings about his birth family name, and he became defensive and aggressive, and I couldn’t accept that I was forced to accept his father’s feelings, and I switched between being rational about it and then becoming very emotional again and again. (Iris Elkayam-Lotan, 32, originally Levi, married H’ezy Elkayam, adopted his name, and they both hyphenated a third name with his birth family name first)

Iris is using the ultimate violence metaphor for her encounter with the forceful presence of her father-in-law’s feelings: the metaphor of rape. She describes herself as publicly isolated and becoming emotional in the situation to the extent of feeling attacked. Her emotionality, her shouting, the many rows were altogether too weak to overcome the patriarchal imposition. The most powerful process in raising and

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substantiating the dominant definition of the situation was the son’s devotion to protecting his father’s feelings avoiding a violation of his honor. The one option Iris had to regain her power, the option of not entering the marriage, was not raised in her interview. In a familist context, this option is silenced by even more powerful social forces. Indeed, Israeli couples in specific communities show almost European rates of divorce but for the majority, naming practices are not yet recognized as an appropriate reason to threaten the stability of the relationship. What can be said about the emerging pattern of masculinity that develops in the context of honoring the previous generation, while reproducing male honor that women must respect? We know from the interviews that these men hold a perception of relatively active fatherhood, and that they cooperate with some level of negotiation on issues related to care and domestic tasks. Thus the private sphere allows them the freedom to cooperate with their wives’ expectations for progressive marriages. In the public sphere and against their communities of practice’s controlling gaze, the ambivalence of the discursive contestation constrains the possibility for subversive actions. Within the circle of the family of origin, these men are obliged to (re)produce masculinity in traditional terms, primarily based on the principle of not being controlled by women. Women experience this imposition of tradition as an individual failure that given the societal and the marital silencing, they are unable to perceive as institutional. The following section reinforces these insights.

“Not So New”: Dominant Familism—Maintaining the Patronymic Tradition In this section, we concentrate on the experiences of those women who hyphenate both names putting either hers or his first, while their partners did not do the same. Their subjective understanding of their marital conversations tends to reflect the old notion about the interplay of speech and silence: “the word not only brings the things out of silence; it also produces the silence in which they can disappear again” (Picard, 1948: 141, cf Clair, 1998). As a process, hyphenation as an Israeli naming practice takes place within a cultural context where women seem to be aware that their husbands are unlikely to respond positively to a request to change their own family names. Women a priori assume that the family name issue is their own private/personal matter (see chapter 4), and that

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men cannot do anything about it: “I didn’t even think of raising the possibility that he would give up his name” (Ayala Moriela-Reinhart). In her interview, Ayala described how she just announced the fact, and that no discussion developed around her intention to hyphenate. The possibility that the hyphenation could have any implications for her husband was not even raised, as is consistent with the interpretation that she herself accepts the nature of the issue as hers. Once raised within the marital conversation, the hyphenation takes the shape of an announcement. I probably just said it, and he accepted it, I mean, it didn’t seem anything exceptional, so it stayed like that, it wasn’t an issue at all. (Gal Shah’ar-Moyal, 33, originally Shah’ar, hyphenated her partner’s name; he kept his name, their children carry his name)

In the narrative unfolded by hyphenating women, the name issue is defined as their own by the little response with which the announcement was received, as there is nothing exceptional about it. Hyphenation develops in the context of gender differentiation that allows no place for conversation. As partners accept that that is how women do selfnaming these days, the only boundary which they protect is that of delineating the name issue as irrelevant to their lives. I said, it won’t hurt you would it? And he said, what do I care? Do what you want; I don’t mind. (Inbal Doron- Shlyfe, 36, originally Doron, married Amit Shlyfe, hyphenated his name)

Raising the possibility that hyphenation might hurt his feelings, Inbal tries to be sensitive to the questioned privilege, but such sensitivity meets with aggression. The option that her name might be in any way relevant to his feelings appears to be completely unconceivable for him. As constituted by the gendered dimension of the cultural loading of the family name (again, see chapter 4), the name choice can only be of concern to women, as men benefit from the obvious hegemonic solution. Within the framework of “independence” as an individualist marital blueprint (Cancian, 1987) or the expectations related to the image of “confluent love” (Giddens, 1992), her name must be perceived as her business; her self-fulfillment is her business, and these matters are irrelevant to him. As the individualist and separated self-fulfillment is the

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organizing principle of his expectations of the marriage, she cannot even approach him for conciliation or compromise. Consistent with these individualist guidelines, silencing is rapidly reinforced, establishing the irrelevance of her name. One step up on the scale of aggression, Inbal’s partner fights the hyphenation; he ridicules the allegedly feminist practice, reinforcing his lack of involvement in the move toward the hyphenated name: Now, there are situations, say among friends . . . in which . . . when . . . when he can sometime make a joke over the issue of my name and then, in those instances I wonder between me and myself: what is that? Are these just jokes or are these some kind of under-the-belt beating. (Inbal Doron- Shlyfe, 36, originally Doron, married Amit Shlyfe, hyphenated his name)

The social jokes may be seen as acts of restoring men’s honor perceived as violated by the hyphenation. But, if Inbal’s partner, Amit, experienced the hyphenation as a violation of his honor, why did he not enter a discussion on the topic in order to convince Inbal to drop the idea? An interesting ambivalence emerges, suggesting the simultaneous presence of two emotional guidelines. Within individualist expectations, honor cannot be an issue. A man is supposedly free of the public controlling gaze assessing his respectability. At the same time, within the traditional expectations of companionship or romantic love, a man’s honor is still a dominant criterion for social worth. Inbal’s partner holds on to social mocking corresponding with both emotional guidelines without being identified with either. A possible explanation for this emotionality borrows Barbalet’s (2001) discussion of fear as “an emotional apprehension of a negative prospect” (p. 156). In his analysis of the fear of social change experienced by those in privileged social positions, Barbalet proposes that under the condition of a shift of power relations, relatively increasing the power of a subordinate, a power deficit may be corrected by “channeling the direction of the other’s power away from self” (p. 162). Replacing a direct marital dialogue by a social embarrassment for his perhaps “too feminist” wife may provide the channeling required for protecting oneself from further losses of power. It is possible that realizing the social cost, Inbal will learn to interpret the statement “do what you want” differently. Perhaps, “do what you want” actually means wanting “what I want” in the way Komter (1989) defined the third dimension of power. This analysis validates Jamieson’s observation

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regarding the reproduction of the gender hierarchy performed by individualist and traditional men alike. The silencing takes the form of an aggressive closure of the conversation, not when women insist on challenging men’s will, but when they attempt to challenge the boundary of the irrelevance of the name issue to men’s lives. This is when they encounter other forms of silencing that are not necessarily consistent with their partners’ conduct on other matters. Consider the following story of a woman who thought that the decision making process on the family name topic should be based on reciprocity. H’agit: I wanted to add his name and I hoped he’ll add mine. Michal: And did you ask him to do that? H’agit: Of course. Michal: And how did he respond? H’agit: That he refuses. There’s nothing much to talk about. He doesn’t agree, and that’s it. We spoke a lot about it, and he said “I’m not calling myself Vilkomirsky” [her birth family name]; he didn’t agree at all, he wasn’t even prepared to hear about it, and let’s say all kinds of creative options like to take a third family name for the kids, he was completely unwilling . . . it frustrated and frustrated and frustrated me for a while, and finally I came to a compromise with myself, that we’ll give the kids his name; well, there was no chance he’d accept any thing else; No, because there are things that I know that we strongly disagree. And there are things that I know that that’s who he is, and I can’t change that; I could really say to him, listen, if you don’t add my name to yours, then I don’t add yours but um . . . I didn’t want to play with principles and I did want to add his name . . . He is . . . he is very conservative on matters like that. It’s also as if, like it’s clear that that’s part of his masculine role, and what, why are you taking away from me this thing . . . like . . . this thing that is supposed . . . like . . . supposed to be mine. (H’agit Vilkomirsky-Ravid, 31, originally Vilkomirsky, hyphenated her partner’s name with hers; he did not change his name)

More than one discursive mechanism operates in the story to protect the hegemony of the patronymic tradition. As shown in our discussion of the cultural loading of a name (chapter 4), a name related to Jews in the Diaspora has a negative loading. Vilkomirsky is clearly an Eastern European name, whereas Ravid is the Hebrew word for a choker and a very Israeli name meeting all the local aesthetic standards. In his view, it is uncalled for that he should attach himself or his children to such a

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negatively loaded name. Moreover, his stance is well-anchored within the gender differentiation of the marital relationship. Despite her persistence, his masculinity is performed through a stubborn refusal to let go of his privileged position, reinforced by the Hebraized beautiful appropriate Israeli name, Ravid. H’agit is aware of his gendered game and explains it through her feminist lens, but her understanding of his struggle does not give her the tools she needs to undermine the collusion between nationalistic and gendered hierarchies. All her efforts leave her no choice but to accept his ability to silence her attempts to make the family issue as much his as it is hers. Silencing appears to operate through talk, through open conflict by rejecting the possibility of even considering any of the options she raises. A similar form of silencing is used by another man, with less success. Again the narrative is that of women not accepting the boundary of leaving the men’s privilege in place. My partner made it very clear that his name is our name. And he knew that there are these funny or ridiculous women, who sometimes take both names, and that’s fine. But my idea that the kids will have the hyphenated name was going too far . . . And I was surprised to find out how passionate and energetic I became about it, why is it that I got on the barricades, I didn’t know where it came from, but I just felt that it simply outraged me in a very exceptional way, and he responded by becoming increasingly more fixated and rigid about it all. He was holding on to something in a very strong way; and yes, I was very surprised by it all . . . it was exceptionally difficult for him, and in fact he faced an ultimatum as I wasn’t going to get married without it, and that’s how we finally got to the agreement, which was followed through, despite my suspicions, when the children arrived. (Nurit Dubnov-Hafner, 38, originally Hafner, married Tza’h’i Dubnov, hyphenated his first, he remained Dubnov, the children got her hyphenated name)

The patronymic custom dictates that men pass on their birth family names to their children. Eagerly protecting this privilege, young Israeli men express attachment to their gendered entitlement. Despite his egalitarian attitudes, Nurit’s partner experiences the naming privilege as significant in his world. Only by threatening to call off the marriage, Nurit was able to force him to waive his privilege. Clearly, ridiculing the idea of women hyphenating names, struggling against hyphenation, rigidity, all are effective silencing practices. They worked effectively for many other women. What is exceptional here is Nurit’s

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enormous energies of resistance and her courage to risk calling off the marriage. Distancing resistance, her refusal to legitimize his difficulty, and persisting resistance, her stubborn engagement with the topic1 (Clair, 1998) play together to enable the narrator to win the battle. Nevertheless, it is evident that despite their overall acceptance of feminist conduct, quite a few men cannot accept the possibility that their own names will be affected in any way, and they struggle fiercefully to render any such attempts irrelevant and silent.

“Unsilencing”: Maintaining Her Birth Name Without Negotiations Unsilencing occurs when women develop an alternative meaning framework within which they develop alternative definitions of situations, definitions not shared by others in their immediate social environment; unsilencing further depends on the development of alternative guidelines for emotional management, guidelines inconsistent with the gendered emotion work (Benjamin, 2003). It is fascinating to examine the stories told by those interviewees who kept their birth family name, and observe the clarity of their own will, even if realizing that they are unable to draw their partners into the resisting practice. He said it would be awkward, if I’d changed. I didn’t have to convince him. I didn’t have to explain to him, I had to explain my choice to his mother . . . it wasn’t an issue. (Meyrav Sold, 36, married Tal Galon, retained her birth family name, their children carry his birth family name)

Unsilencing develops in a supportive environment, in which men already realize the boundaries of their privilege. Even if clearly protecting their own names of being affected by the antipatronymic trend, these men accept women’s separate definition of the situation. Their responses to issues of naming contrast those of men determined to define naming as an issue that is not their own. Women married to these men do not report any mocking or honor-related insinuations. Meyrav’s experience is one of full cooperation despite potential criticism from familial communities of practice. The social environment is treated in this context as though they should not be taken into account or affect the decision-making process.

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It was there in a way, but it wasn’t an issue, I thought about it and shared my thoughts with him. (Gili Kfir, kept her birth family name)

Gili describes raising the issue but in the form of sharing her own thoughts. A conversation does not develop, and her decision is not undermined. The unsilencing becomes possible, as the decision is guided by separated thoughts and not by the couples’ interaction. None of them has to sense the thoughts or the feelings of the other, as these are unable to alter the decision. Unsilencing may also occur when practical attempts are made to negotiate the boundaries protecting men’s privileges. . . . no, not in any rude way. He told me that . . . as a matter of fact he tried to mislead me a bit and perhaps mislead himself . . . he tried to make the case that he’ll be willing to consider that . . . no, he didn’t say he’ll take my name, he never said that, this he never implied. Like . . . and then I tried to offer that perhaps we take a third name um . . . and then he said that perhaps, that he has a real problem with his father and that his father will be horrified, if he, like, had changed his name and so on, but perhaps, if he hears a really good name, if I had a really good idea . . . that was bullshit. (Yuval Schiller, 34, married Yaron Ben-Yzri, kept her name, their children carry his name)

Unsilencing emerges as the ability to maintain one’s own definition of the situation despite the partner’s maneuvers and efforts to reject the possibility of turning the name issue into an imperative for him. Throughout telling the story, the narrator is definitely aware of the possibility that her partner did not share her hopes for a joint family names, and that he was only playing with the idea. Significantly, she does not appear to need his approval for her decision to reject the patronymic tradition, and she is very clear that as a couple they do not discuss her own practice but rather his practice. It is her gaze on him that is emphasized in her story, even if she is unable to affect his decision. However, it is also important to take into account that the ethnic dimension of the cultural loading of the name supports her power position. She carries an Ashkenazy name whose prestigious loading undermines the option of considering his typical Mizrah’i family name. In the next section, the cultural loading of the name permeates marital negotiation more profoundly.

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“Negotiation”: The Successful Challenge of Familism Men, who agree to adopt a third name, find losing the resource of being known at work and in various social circles by their birth family names, harder than they thought. Many men use their surnames as their nick names in various activities, and they practically experience the request for changing their names as forcing them to lose part of themselves. Hence a lengthy struggle against taking the third name occurs. Excessive negotiation, raising the topic time and again requires enormous power resources from women, and it seems that these are drawn from the negative cultural loading of men’s birth family name. All instances of persisting struggles in our study involved family names that women saw as reducing their social prestige by violating local esthetics in ways that hindered the accumulation of social capital–related resources. These continuous private struggles provide empirical support for arguing that feminism becomes a discursive positioning discourse, if additional discursive resources support it. Feminist argumentation in itself can rarely sustain a definition of naming as a men’s concern. In the next section, we deal with the relatively rare situation when feminism becomes a discursive resource, not for persuading men to take women’s views, but rather for allowing men to position their manhood within alternative discourses.

“Men, Who Care”: Dominant Feminism? Some women manage to marry feminist men, who insist on hyphenating their names in the same way done by their wives. The exceptionality of these men is demonstrated primarily by the fact that they initiated discussing the name issue and continued discussing it in detail until a solution was formed. They then accepted the solution that involved signification of their own identity and the complete distancing from their privilege. Interestingly, the idea of one name for the family received romantic meanings in the men’s world, and women were not left alone to worry about it. The experiences of the four interviewees married to partners, who perceive the name issue as their own receive attention in this section. First we focus on the secular nature of the marital negotiation: searching for an alternative wedding ceremony provides an opportunity for an alternative naming arrangement; then we turn to analyze men’s active part in the

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process of the search; and finally, we return to the social environment to examine the type of feedback this form of caring masculinity receives in the real world.

Secular Identities The four women who married feminist men are radically secular refusing to cooperate with the religious regulation of marriage in Israel. They would rather stay in long-term cohabitation than go through the rabbinical process imposed on all Jewish citizens on their way to institutionally recognized marriage. These are women with a high sense of individualist liberalism, allowing them to remain reluctant toward any type of regulation that blocks their freedom of choice in any way. Noga Marom-Vilchek, for example, told us that she was initially against monogamy, attempting to convince her partner to enter a polyamore-based relationship with her. After a series of powerful rows between them, she accepted monogamy, but not marriage and wanted to stay in a long-term cohabiting relationship. Assaf, her partner, convinced her to agree to marriage as well. Going through the interviews with these four women, it felt as if there is a gap between women and men here. The women, who tend to hold liberal attitudes, confine their willingness or sensed necessity to connect with tradition, whereas the men are searching for ways to maintain their sense of belonging to the national collective, albeit their rejection of the normative prescriptions. To preserve this sense of belonging, the men tried to somehow introduce additional meanings, for example, a national meaning into the patronymic tradition. It is possible that this gap echoes the dynamic presented by other couples that focused on men’s upbringing and their resultant obligation to pay respect to their fathers’ honor and to follow other accepted honor codes. As women saw themselves as more secular than their partners, secularity emerges as an important justification structure in their talk. Omer Sela- Cohen, Hila’s partner, liked the name Sela, but could not drop the Cohen. Hila made sense of her partner’s attachment to his name by explaining his somewhat dubious secularism: Omer is very secular. Completely secular, but at the same time strongly connected to Judaism, not as a religion, but more as a group, as a tradition, as . . . you know, eh . . . you could call it evolution, because he is strongly connected to how Jews as a people have developed over the generations and survived, and the fact that we’re here isn’t just obvious, there’s something to that, and after going on and

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on over these issues, he’d say: “and I want to preserve this thing that I’m a Cohen.”

Although Hila is secular and has no intentions to maintain her own connection to local traditions, she accepts her partner’s way of working around the national issue and does not object to his considerations. The respect that she has for his type of considerations leaves her in a situation where she trusts the options that he brings into their conversation. Had he raised more traditional options, she would have had no ammunition, no discursive resources to negotiate her own way. Given that Cohen is a very common name in Israel, the hyphenation marks his uniqueness in a way that culturally loads the Cohen with the high prestige of the Hebraized name Selah (a rock in Hebrew and also a religious reference to God). Hila’s few discursive resources and dependency on her partner’s willingness to “upgrade” the Cohen suggest that feminism permeated specific communities of practices so that several men are able to use its resources. In other words, feminism gains dominance over familism in specific circles particularly given that the cultural loading of the specific names under considerations does not harm self-presentation.

Men’s Active Role in the Process Speaking of their caring partners, our interviewees emphasized how important a unified name for all family members was to them. Men insisted on the idea of a family name as the name of all family members as a gesture of romance, and women could appreciate the great value of this gesture. However, the principle in itself did not help finding easy solutions. What to us was the utmost feminist achievement, namely waiving the privilege of leaving their names intact, was apparently a burden for an interviewee or two. Noga Marom-Vilchek, who used to be Noga Marom, until they agreed on hyphenation, is not really happy with the change of her name. She said: There’s a place in me that is always busy with calculations regarding where should I say my full name and where should I introduce myself as just Noga Marom, and it is often operating to disadvantage Assaf and leaving his name out. At other times, other places, it is working to his benefit, and I say my full name. He . . . He says Assaf MaromVilchek everywhere he goes, it’s very important to him, it’s very important to him, so I have to do it, and if he hears me introducing myself

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as Noga Marom only, then he’d say something, like, he’d say, “but our name is Marom-Vilchek,” I wish I were Noga Marom.

The feminist achievement is experienced as too heavy on women’s shoulders. The short and familiar version is tempting, as it is a lot more convenient. In clarifying the type of pros and cons she considers before stating her full name, Noga explained that she does not trust people to get Vilchek without distorting it. Once she says her full name, she has to enter a series of correcting acts regarding spelling and pronunciation. With her old Hebraized name, Marom (a literary word for sky, heaven), she never had this kind of trouble. The positive cultural loading of Marom practically prevents her from celebrating the name-based togetherness that was so important to both of them. Men’s families of origin are also important in enabling the process by letting go of their emotional attachment to their family name. Hila Cohen-Selah quoted, for example, her mother-in-law, who considered together with her the possibility of her son Omer Cohen adopting “Selah” as his only name. Selah is the outcome of the efforts of Hila’s father to disconnect from the heavy Mizrah’i name “Assulin.” In this historical context, her mother-in-law said to her: “Selah is really beautiful. I wish Omer could take Selah; I would take Selah and forget about Cohen.” In contrast, Iris Elkayam-Lotan’s motherin-law, whom Iris had expected to support her efforts to eliminate the Elkayam, took instead pride in resisting her husband’s intention to Hebraize Elkayam. The difference between the mothers’ attitudes is reflected in the difference between Omer Selah- Cohen and H’ezi Elkayam. Both hyphenated their wives’ names, but operated completely different on the issue throughout the process. Partly the difference can be explained by the fact that Elkayam is culturally loaded as a Mizrah’i name. Cohen is ethnically neutral, but cannot meet the aesthetic criterion, as its loading embeds no uniqueness. What turned the marital negotiation into a different experience for their wives was, however, that the cultural loading of the names was experienced in the context of H’ezi Elkayam’s religious family and of Omer Cohen’s secular family. Both reached hyphenation as a solution, but Iris was attacked by her husband’s family, while Hila was supported by her husband’s family. Given the visibility of hyphenation, which for quite a few women serves as a wedding ring, signaling the achievement of marriage (see chapter 5), men apparently must reach a point of

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total devotion to the issue in order to shoulder the social cost of the hyphenation process: I think that he was the first one who really identified with that, because . . . he is very . . . he is a total kind of person. The minute he makes a decision, the minute he makes a change, he is with it. I’m like . . . I need to get used to things (laughs) I need to understand what’s going on. To see how things are . . . . Um . . . you know, he immediately went and changed his name in all the places, at the university, here, there, in the office, he directly acted . . . directly acted and changed everything, and I’m like . . . I wanted a minute to get used to it and then changed. And . . . he changed his e-mail and . . . it really hit me, I was shocked by his willingness to make the change and turn into . . . . (Me’ira H’ajby-Roseman, 31, originally Roseman, married Uri H’ajbi, both hyphenated their names)

In Me’ira’s story, it is the man who practically cares about resisting the patronymic tradition, and who is determined not to allow any bureaucratic context to block his resisting practice. Characteristic of men in this category is their pride about their practice and hence the publicity and the changing of the e-mail address. Either for the sake of escaping their own birth family names or for the more general cause of defeating the normative imperative to marginalize women’s honor, identity, and feelings, these men take pride in their exceptional antipatronymic achievement. The silencing practices of the marital conversation disappear in their cases, and they boast publicly about their naming practice. After initiating the conversation and taking an active part in playing with the various options available, they perceive the achievement as theirs. These four caring men provide a contrast to husbands of other women. The latter used all available silencing measures to clarify that the name issue does not touch their selves or their self-presentations among familiar social circles. Perhaps it is more than random chance that their four family names do not carry a positive cultural loading. None of them is qualified to be what was called in chapter 4 “a pilot’s name” as the epitome of the local naming aesthetics. And it is possible that men who grew up with a name that accorded them its positive cultural loading would fight more fiercely to protect their assets. These are viable possibilities, even though it is unclear why these names induce a more intense effort to escape than others. We believe that focusing on these possibilities would be dismissive of the feminist subversive project. The feminist discourse

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enabled these men to position themselves as rational and as producing their selves within an appropriate way of talking. In this sense, whatever has been their “real” motivation, as a social phenomenon, they portray a real ray of hope.

Discussing the Negotiation of Naming Practices In this chapter, we have attempted to examine the phenomenon of marital negotiation over naming practices as a case of convergence between marital and societal silencing. Public discourses in Israel give little attention to alternative naming practices, reproducing their image as women’s issue. Hyphenating men are rare and thus hardly serve as public example for other Israelis. In this sense, societal silencing continues to support the hegemony of the patronymic tradition, isolating women who insist on remaining subversive toward its imperatives. Marital silencing derives quite a bit of strength from the societal silencing. Those women convinced by societal silencing that naming is only their problem, remain often outside the symbolic unity of the family, looking enviously at the sharing of a joint family name by their husbands and children. Other women, who do not avoid the topic of naming, encounter men’s very hard work directed at silencing any discussion on naming practices. For many men, the most important aim is conveying the message that naming is not their problem, and that they insist on benefiting from their patronymic privileges. Exceptional are the four men, whose wives described their caring for naming practices: they are exceptionally willing to waive their patriarchal and patronymic privileges. In addition, nine other men in our sample were willing to take a third family name, mostly as a way of escaping the negative cultural loading of their birth family names. We have analyzed these findings as reflecting the power struggle between feminism and familism in Israeli society. The four hyphenating couples benefit from the slowly growing power position of the feminist discourse in specific secular, less- collectivist circles of the population. Those willing to consider taking a third name or hyphenating a third name benefit from the feminist discursive resources particularly when these initiatives serve their and their children’s self-presentations. The rest of the interviewees provide descriptions of men still benefiting from three male privileges in society, which

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correspond to the gender dimension of the cultural loading of family names (see chapter 4), namely: (a) maintaining stability in the social presentation of the self—clearly, the respectable man is entitled to hold forever his family name as a social asset, protected from any changes through his life; (b) maintaining the irrelevance of the issue of women’s self-naming after marriage to his own life-trajectory— women’s nonpatronymic choices regarding their family names inflict the pain of isolation on women alone, men rarely seem to be affected; (c) maintaining the certainty that the children are going to carry their father’s birth family names. The isolation effect is reinforced by the fact that, even under the conditions of women’s nonpatronymic selfnaming, there are no discursive resources available to argue for a different practice. Various silencing mechanisms support men’s ability to protect their privileges. The analysis of the negotiation in more gender-differentiated relationships benefits from our theoretical framework: the interviewees provide an accurate picture of how precisely speech and silence coexist in contemporary relationships. By tracing what is not said, in what is said (Clair, 1998), we elicit the converging paths of social and marital silencing practices enlisted in the struggle to protect male privileges. Moreover, the empirical data clearly indicates that the ethnic and national dimensions of the cultural loading of family names form an inevitable aspect of marital negotiation on naming, limiting the negotiation to specific settings delineated by these hierarchies. Men with an inappropriate family name cannot demand that either their wives or their children carry it. Typically men, who agreed to adopt a third name, were nevertheless determined to protect their social capital and the stability in their own public self-presentation. They often struggled against their wives’ attempt to erase their birth family names, by continuing to use it in separate interactions (e.g., at their workplaces). Given these specific circumstances, the only measures of silencing available to this category of men are those of marital silencing: presenting emotional distress by either anger or insult, in an attempt to define the naming issue as loaded with conflict. Alas, in the face of women’s determination to save their children from carrying an inappropriate name with the wrong social positioning effects, such marital silencing practices appear as too weak. Over time, the men give in. The men in the study, whose wives cooperate with their patronymic privileges, are protected by discursive societal silences. Husbands are grateful for the respect that women show for their privileges and

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hence recognize the separate self-naming practice as legitimate. Once women’s emotion work itself is there to protect them, men do not have to utilize any marital silencing measures. For this path, individualism as embedded within the marital blueprint of independence (Cancian, 1987) provides one possible framework of meaning. If selffulfillment is a respected principle and is preferred over negotiation, the women’s definition of the situation is not challenged, and they are able to proceed with refuting the patronymic tradition, without it having any effect of their husbands. The price they tend to pay for this deal is that they can engage in marital negotiation over neither their children’s names nor the possibility that men too will undergo some revision of their family names. Even though hyphenation is often taken as a feminist practice, our Israeli sample suggests that hyphenation, when men do not share it, is often a response to familist constraints within which marital relationships may sustain a typically gender-differentiated division of labor and types of communication. Hyphenation is isolating and introduces no marital closeness or reciprocity. Very little talk characterizes the hyphenation, and it is mostly organized around men’s repeated emphases that the women’s family names do not matter to them. Marital silencing practices, including aggressive responses and other careless statements, overwhelm societal silencing, if women make any attempt to question the irrelevance of the name issue to their partners. Discursive silences are the most powerful in traditional environments, where respecting the values and emotions of the family of origin preserves broad community and extended family ties. Women, who dare to opt for an antipatronymic choice in such environments, pay the highest price, as silencing them takes the form of stigmatization and violent scolding. Moreover, the open conflict is resolved by the imposition of the patronymic tradition. Women may shout, may scream, may express their refusal in a range of vocal ways, but the traditional environment presents a powerful convergence of discursive and marital silences to the extent that her objection is simply ignored.

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8 Discussion

In 1988 Sharon Lebell proposed a bilineal solution to resolve the last name dilemma of married women. Accordingly, a person defines for herself a source name that may be her birth family name or any other name, to which she feels connected; upon marriage, she keeps the source name; as for the children, girls get their father’s family name as a middle name and their mother’s family name as their last name, while boys get their mother’s family name as their middle name and their father’s family name as their last name. Two important patronymic principles are challenged by the bilineal solution: the family does not have one family name, and the children are not automatically carrying their father’s family name. Women’s identity resources are not disrupted, and children’s names signify the family lineage. When they become adults and face the need to select a source name, they are able to choose whether or not to drop one of the names. The interesting question however concerns the familiarity of the bilineal solution and its chances of becoming a discursive resource. None of our interviewees mentioned this solution; nor was it mentioned in any of the 259 questionnaires that we collected as part of our screening process; and none of the recent studies based on interviews with feminists on their naming practices mentions it either as a concept, a category, or even as a vague idea. It seems fair to assess that most women around the world arrive at their conjugation ceremonies without this potentially valuable resource. Many among them have to struggle with their naming dilemma with little feminist support. While most unfortunate as a political reality, this situation turned out to be valuable as a research opportunity: it allows investigating the discursive practices and resources available to women while facing the option of naming themselves and their children or allowing others to do so.

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Contrary to the common understanding of women’s family names as an issue of work/home identity, self-naming is treated in this book as a complex mixture of identity politics, aesthetic tastes, attached values, family heritage, and sensitivity to the name as signifying social capital and as an expression of intimate togetherness. Once identity politics is recognized as the interrelations of national, ethnic, and gender identities, it becomes clear that the exclusive deployment of the gender perspective in this field is insufficient. Based on the stories told by secular Jewish Israeli women, we developed the concept of a multidimensional “cultural loading” of the family name. We claim that it is one of the central structures shaping women’s decisions regarding their marital names. Four dimensions emerged in our analysis of the cultural loading of family names that merge together into forming the appropriate name in these women’s world. It includes the ethnic dimension with its double standards (the Ashkenazi/Mizrah’i dichotomy and the Israeli/Diaspora-based dichotomy); the aesthetic dimension with its set of criteria that defines the “beautiful name”; the gender dimension constituting the man’s family name as the name of the family; and finally, the structural dimension reinforcing uniformity in the family name for all members of the family. Table 8.1 summarizes all the key issues that are taken into account, when secular Jewish Israeli women evaluate their options regarding their marital names. The emerging dimensions of the cultural loading reinforce our claim that the investigation of women marital names is ultimately an analysis of a society and the diverse cultural tensions and political power struggles in it. Women’s knowledge of their culture appears, yet again, to serve as a powerful resource in reproducing the intricacies of a society. Women’s knowledge of these dimensions does not necessarily mean that they are aware of all their implications. As we have seen, some of these implications derive from the specific social circumstances, in which the family name operates as an enabler or an inhibiter. These circumstances may be reflected in answers to questions such as: What are the couple’s ethnic origins? Have women managed to marry “upward” (with Ashkenazi partners), or did they marry “downward” (with Mizrah’i partners)? What does their taste tell about their class position? Is her power position so weak, that she had to accept a family name without negotiations? How strong is her position with regard to being a good normative wife and/or a responsible mother?

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The cultural loading of the family name in the Israeli context

Dimension Appropriate name

Inappropriate name

Organizing principle

Ethnicity

Israeli Ashkenazi “light”

Diaspora-based Mizrah’i

Disconnection

Aesthetics

Short

Long

Pleasant sound Meaningful

Foreign sound Meaningless

Class perspective of taste Orientalist aesthetics

Gender

Man’s family name

Woman’s family name Patronymic preference

Structure

One-word family name A common family name for all family members

Hyphenated family name Different family names for different family members

Uniformity

The information unfolded in a name, therefore, carries the potential to impose identity locations, which women would rather avoid. In this sense, the various dimensions of the cultural loading operate far more powerfully than what women can control. Despite the fact that Hebraization is no longer compulsory for membership in the inner elite circle of society, women concerned with the aesthetic of the family name suggest that they sense how it implicitly operates to question belonging. As a consequence, many women who feel empowered by the feminist achievement legitimizing self-naming impose Hebraization on their families rather than introduce any alternative aesthetic criteria. Basically, they try to use their knowledge to maximize their power to select, or shape as much as possible belongingrelated messages to be conveyed by their family names. Our findings strongly indicate that each of the dimensions of the cultural loading of the name may serve as a justification structure, in the sense that it may become a resource in facilitating identity performance. Through utilizing justifications women produce or negotiate their belonging to specific communities of practice, signifying their loyalty to their families of origin, to their partners’ families, and to the national collective. Furthermore, these justifications are crucial resources, when women enter conflict and negotiation regarding the name with their partners and their partners’ families. The performative power of these justifications is in the assumption that they

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are intelligible within specific communities of practice. To the extent that communities of practice maintain specific discursive orders, self-naming becomes a form of talk that relies on what women assume to be intelligible for their members. Interviewees often relate to the naming practices of women around them, exposing the limits of intelligibility. In other words, these justifications reveal the relative power position of specific meanings given to each of the dimensions in a specific cultural context. Particularly telling are women’s descriptions of the efforts invested in self-naming in bureaucratic spaces, where their justifications have to be transformed into publicly accepted accounts. These public accounts do not relate to the diverse dimensions of the cultural loading of the name, but instead rely on them. Thus, each of these dimensions is revealed as part of a woman’s cultural tool kit, assisting her in her continuous reflexive calculation and effort for positive positioning through and by her name. The local discursive power seems to locate highest the justifications of “disconnection” that is the need to break away from anything that is not considered “pure” or “authentic” Israeli. At the same time, it allows a class perspective of taste as well as Orientalist aesthetics to be used as the appropriate ways of talk through which “disconnection” of family biographies and roots can be legitimized. Although uniformity (as used in Table 8.1) emerges as a powerful justification in women’s talk, our empirical data shows that, for limited periods of time, women are willing to invest efforts and to pay the social price for transgression. The cultural loading of the name with all the various meanings it conveys establishes the basis for the process of positioning through the name. In other words, women introduce themselves by their family names, and by the same token, they reproduce various subject positions. Our findings discern several subject positions reproduced simultaneously in women’s daily lives, for which their family name is a major discursive practice. These subject positions are the person with a history, the responsible mother, the appropriate wife, and the ideal citizen. The tension between the extent of the control that women may have over their prospective names and the extent of information that the name communicates, sheds light on the significance of the subject position as a “person with a history.” In narrating the stories pertaining to their families’ histories, women often enjoy a power position reserved to the person, who selects the information to be remembered about a family. Moreover, they hold a power position regarding the extent of the significance that they attribute to the story. As informed narrators, they may include aspects in the narrative structure that

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they are able to construct as an inevitable requirement. Thus, due to the reciprocal support between the subject position of the “person with a history” and that of the “responsible mother,” women are potentially able to utilize family histories as armor against a loss of control stemming from the cultural loading of their names. Such arguments as “We are only daughters,” or “We have to connect with those who died in the Holocaust” present a history that potentially enables women to downplay antihyphenation rhetoric. In our study, however, participants employed the empowering potential of the “person with a history,” in order to add content to their cluster of produced identities and belonging to specific communities of practice. In the Israeli context, the position of the “person with a history” corresponds primarily to the subject position of the ideal citizen with its three central themes: secularity/religion, nationalism, and militarism. Family myths and loyalties provide resources through which women can connect themselves to dominant discourses defining the meanings of these themes, sometimes in ways that limit the range of naming practices available to them. As we have shown, the mythologizing process weaves together powerful emotions and family memories. At times, either through admired heroines or through the appropriation of national narratives, these emotions and memories form dense tapestries of valuable family assets, from which women do not want to separate themselves. Nevertheless, and against all odds, even when a specific family name benefits from a mythologized power position and presents for its owner a solid justification to retain her birth family name, the demand for family unity may force women back into the patronymic practice. We interpret these instances as demonstrating the unchallenged hegemonic power position of the local political familism subjugating all other discursive stances. Despite four exceptional cases, it is a fair generalization of the information drawn from our material that men have the ultimate privilege of being the dominant voice in the decision making process. This privilege becomes visible when men themselves are willing to give up on the intergenerational transmission of their birth family names, mostly because they as well have access to “knowing” the potential social damage that the names entail. It is the same damage that brings women to try and distance themselves from the patronymic convention. Like their wives, these men refrain from retaining the damaging name for themselves and from giving it to their children. In such cases, men may waive their privilege, especially if the women are able to exploit the benefits of the naming taste. In other words, women,

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who are able to use ethnic-aesthetic justification structures for connecting men to the implicit disadvantages of their birth family names, may accumulate the gender power that they need to negotiate their preferred naming practice. Overall our findings confirm the recent generalization by Davidoff and her colleagues that “we use names to create boundaries between belonging and not belonging” (1999: 92). Belonging to specific communities of practice is clearly at the center of women’s reflexive processes regarding their marital names. Thus we turn to discussing the way in which the discursive order shapes women’s sense of belonging and the role of their naming practices in generating specific forms of belonging. Our analysis of women’s reflexive considerations around selfnaming enables us to discern several sets of discursive resources embraced by specific communities of practice. Each of these sets represents a specific dynamic between several dimensions of ambivalence in the local discursive order. These dimensions result from the continuous political power struggle over the meaning of gender, ethnic and national identities. In this intricate context, we could not find women whose sense of belonging to concrete and/or imagined communities of practice was stable or obvious. Instead, belonging remained ambivalent, either because women felt that it is important for them and for their children to belong to several communities of practice, sometimes with contradicting demands; or because full membership was not offered to them, as members of the communities of practice refused to approve of their naming practices. Our analysis of the emergent ambivalent belonging identifies three paths available for those engaged in the process of self-naming. We present these three paths below as three modes of interaction between familism and feminism in Israel, reflecting the discursive order that ultimately maintains the power position of familism.

Retainers: The Discursive Production of Their Ambivalent Belonging Women retaining their birth family names and those negotiating the transference of the retained names to their children relied on subject positions elicited from the feminist discourse. They and their partners relied on feminism to legitimize an interpretation of appropriate femininity that positioned them as active, autonomous, independent

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subjects with a respectable history/biography. Familism could not subjugate their feminist categories, because they interacted with the following additional discursive resources: first of all, the couples in question benefited from a positive cultural loading of their names. The aesthetic dimension of the cultural loading provided them with the discursive resource of “uniqueness” that liberates retainers from the dread of being exceptional or of preparing an outsider position for their children. Note that there was not even one case among the nine retainers in our study, who retained a Mizrah’i name. Is it possible to find an Israeli woman, who retained a Mizrah’i family name? We assess that there are very few. Our research strongly indicates that more discursive support is required to overcome Orientalist evaluations. Secondly, the women in question, their partners, and their families of origin had strong secular identities, which meant that their families as their communities of practice were not emotionally attached to patronymic expectations. Thirdly, the prioritization of independence loaded by the individualistic discourse as self-fulfillment and an egalitarian intimate relationship enabled alternative definitions of appropriate motherhood without interfering with familycenteredness. Nevertheless, despite this powerful set of resources, retainers could not experience their belonging in any straightforward way, as for all of them, except one, retaining meant disconnection from their partner’s and children’s names. Consequently, their belonging is continuously questioned in bureaucratic spaces, and they have to develop rapid public accounts of their naming exceptionality to prevent harsh administrative responses and troubles. These women are willing to experience belonging side by side with their continuous signification as the exceptional—at times even on the verge of being recognized as “the mad” woman. Under the condition that women have the courage to accept exceptionality, familism loses its hold on their ways of talking. Thus, ambivalent belonging for them means the continuous experience of their membership contested by social questioning. This specific, relatively rare type of ambivalent belonging maintains a stable position within the feminist community of practice in Israel. Nevertheless, its rarity secures the hegemonic position of familism, as its framing of exceptionality/madness does not permit it to become a significant challenge to the legitimacy of the power position of familism. Under these conditions, retaining is a very difficult form of self-naming. While it is a source of pride for retainers, few women are able to engage in the continuous struggle required. This

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form of emerging ambivalent belonging points to a major aspect of the decline in the power position of feminism in Israel: the ethno/class prerequisites for becoming appropriate members of the national collective are also necessary as sources of power to realize feminist principles in private and public ways. Without them the energy to resist familist imperatives rapidly fades. Many who have access to these prerequisites, however, do not hold feminist values other than the incorporated slogan of gender equality. Those who embrace feminist values are often lacking the ethno/class prerequisites, thus they have to gain their belonging in one of the two forms described below.

Temporary Ambivalence Both hyphenation and innovating a new third name1 are generally thought of as feminist naming practices. Indeed, both categories reproduce the historical feature of women’s names as unstable and require explanations and justifications. Moreover, both express selfnaming as the realization of a woman’s right to engage in the decision regarding her surname. At the same time, both categories are of a certain conservative nature: (1) Innovating a third family name relies on extracting the most of all dimensions of the cultural loading of the name, primarily because the new chosen name tends to be picked on the basis of the dimensions defining the appropriate family name. In this sense taking a third name is revealed in our research as the ultimate subjugation of feminist ideology, even though this practice involves convincing men to waive their patronymic privilege. In many cases, men agree because of the negative cultural loading of their surnames; the new name enables them to pursue positioning in familist conservative ways. (2) The conservative nature of hyphenation concerns its signification of the achievement of marriage in combination with specific occupational careers. Furthermore, women, who hyphenate new names, seem to aim at using feminist justifications for the purpose of positioning themselves in familist ways.

Thus, we found that women in these two categories experience ambivalent belonging similarly, and we discuss them together, despite some differences in their narratives. For women, who insist on naming themselves through hyphenation or by a new third name (henceforth, innovating participants), ambivalent belonging to their communities of practice is enabled by

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a discursive set containing mainly hegemonic discourses. The most important set of the discursive practices is that embedded in the cultural loading of the name. Furthermore, the individualistic discourse focused on competition, consumption, and ambition permits women to focus on their own and their (future) children’s best interest; and the egalitarian discourse reframing of feminism mainly in the context of a work/family dichotomy (i.e., equality is regarded as women’s success in occupational life and some participation of partners in household tasks and caring) is responsible for women’s ability to insist on self-naming as a solitary or as a family journey. We discussed above the power of the “name of a pilot” as a signifier of belonging. Its value is derived from the local militaristic culture, in which combat careers pave the way for management, leadership, defence-related expertise, authority, and rationality. Thus those with combat careers, most of them if not only men, come closest to unconditional citizenship and belonging. For women, the path to the position of ideal citizen is that of the “responsible mother,” who provides familial support for the male good citizens. Innovating and hyphenating women seem to translate their commitment to supporting future citizens into a struggle of self-naming through which they claim their own and their children’s citizenship. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that women’s most intense struggles for self-naming with their partners occur in cases concerning foreign (Diaspora-related) or Arabic sounding names. We interpret the discursive resources provided by aesthetic criteria for names as a disguised form of the Orientalist exclusionist gaze. Indeed, many women among the innovators and hyphenators want for themselves and for their kids, a “name of a pilot.” The ambivalence of belonging in the case of hyphenating and innovating participants is best illustrated in the fluidity of their name use. The reflexive process through which women have constantly to consider the relevant entry ticket to specific communities of practice reflects this ambivalence. We described a trade off: the right to selfnaming at the price of being a “bad bride” is traded for the right to escape the stigmatization of an “inappropriate” name. This trade off precludes the option of being simply accepted as the good family woman succumbing to the patronymic practice. Years of fluid usage of their surnames have to pass before these women may gain a stable family name. Once the initial fluid period is over, hyphenating women are always reminded of the struggle by their children’s family names, thus repeatedly returning to ambivalent belonging. Women

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adopting a new third name have a better chance to gain a sense of belonging that is not ambiguous vis-à-vis the national community of practice, whereas their belonging remains ambiguous in the communities of practice of their husbands’ extended family. As it turns out, these women’s version of feminism cannot provide them with discursive resources equipping them with alternative images of appropriate femininity, wife-hood, or motherhood. Consequently, they are completely exposed to the categories and disciplining criteria provided by familism.

Not So Ambivalent Belonging: The “Becoming” of Patronymic Practices Women, who adopted their partners’ family names and also met our selection criterion of attributing importance to their surnames after marriage, narrate the widest discrepancies between officially registered names and women’s experiences of their names. Their narratives demonstrate processes of “becoming” that often begin in the contemplation of feminist naming preferences. Thus, they provide us with the opportunity to trace the process, in which a patronymic practice evolves by gradual surrender rather than by any normative routine. The investigated becoming of patronymic practices operates in a discursive order based on a vivid power struggle: feminism has to be directly negated as foreign to the egalitarian relationships that women have with their partners; at the same time, feminism is also annulled as if separating women from their positions as responsible family members and rational wives. Hence, this category of women speaks in ways that rely on an ambivalent discursive order consisting of three main discursive resources. Experiencing themselves as members of a tribe represented by their families of origin, these women are reluctant to give up on their birth family names. For a long period, they use them as a discursive resource constituting a subject position of assertive femininity. In this way, they maintain both names without turning their naming practices into a matter requiring a firm decision. In addition, these women interpret familycenteredness according to the familist normative imperative embedded in the gender and structural dimensions of the cultural loading: they deeply believe that a family has to have one shared name. This discursive practice tends to block all feminist considerations and is further supported by hegemonic

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perception of the good relationship: good relationships are not supposed to have problems, while awkward naming practices are taken to indicate problems. Moreover, the aesthetic dimension of the name’s cultural loading supports the patronymic practice as both their birth surnames and their partners’ surnames usually do not interrupt their appropriate appearance. Thus their potential to become members of the national community of practice is protected. Finally, these women rely on the hegemonic definition of rational behavior, and thus they cannot allow for any incoherence or irrationality in their public behavior or naming. Egalitarianism, supported by the requirement for rationality, takes the shape of a direct attack on feminism as a general tendency to wave empty flags. Not surprisingly, the egalitarian discourse when combined with an attack on feminists does not provide any discursive practices for resisting patronymy. Given this specific set of discursive resources, it appears that the rational subject position becomes available to women in this category through cooperating with patronymic practices. Ambivalent belonging for women adopting their partners’ names corresponds with familism and with its persistent constitution of the appropriate mother. It is based on the practical daily requirement to secure both the children’s present-oriented well-being and their futureoriented social capital. Women gain safe entry to two communities of practice—the imagined national community and their partners’ extended families, by accepting their codes of rational behavior. They nonetheless remain ambivalent about this belonging as they have to live with the gap between the way they wanted things to be, and the way they are; the ways they thought they would be able to practice the ideal of liberated self-naming, and the reality that defeated their endeavors. Why were they defeated? What enables familism to maintain its power position? Their caring responsibilities seem to play a major role in the process. Historian Bettina Aptheker (1989), among the first to question the utility of the dichotomy between resistance and adjustment in women’s lives, focuses on how women’s responsibilities, for those they care for, circumscribe the price they are able to pay for resistance. The distinction between the three categories of women and their specific modes of ambivalent belonging points out the potential of this notion. Recognizing that we all join specific communities of practice for specific matters and withdraw from them in favor of other communities of practice suggests that membership in such communities is the contemporary form of belonging. Unlike membership that covers

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all areas of daily life, the new sense of belonging is about a partial, ad hoc form of participation in joint practice. But, if that is the new “belonging,” what is the analytical value of “ambivalent belonging”? Our analysis of the empirical material adds the current inability to draw the boundary between belonging and not belonging; Women’s voices prevent us of drawing a boundary between the will to belong and its refusal. We can certainly observe the imprints of relational agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998) in the continuous process of assessing the hazards for the self or for children in belonging and not belonging. But this process of assessment and hypothesization in the sense of evaluating future prospects hampers belonging rather than facilitates it. The emerging form of belonging is ambivalent in the sense that women seek ways that necessitate only a minimal tribute to shouldering the expected practice, while securing for themselves safe ways out. Moreover, women’s negotiation of principal indicators/signifiers of belonging, including the appropriate femininity, wife, and mother, suggests that the essence of ambivalent belonging is gendered. Even with regard to citizenship, it is about gender in the sense of self-sacrifice and emersion in familycenteredness. As past discussions of disciplining have already argued (Davies, 2000), such subject positions can never be assumed, but rather have to be continuously reproduced, if rational social appearance is to be maintained. Since new possibilities are generated, once broader intelligibility can be attributed to any specific community of practice, women refrain from the obedient position by carefully engaging in such production. And here the crucial role of ambivalent belonging becomes apparent—while hazard assessment remains constant, the price is not very high, making disciplining less intense. Self-validation is not dependent on any specific approval gained in any specific community of practice. Fighting against a kindergarten teacher or other bureaucrats determined not to respect the effort of self-naming is tedious and unpleasant, but it is not perceived as necessarily hazardous. The validation of the self is not dependent on such interaction. Ridicule can become a source of pride rather than shame, even if the pride were defined as an outlaw emotion (Jaggar, 1989) by the social gaze. Women are required to become mature and responsible by communities of practice around them, and naming practices indicate that they do succumb to social demands, particularly when the names potentially benefit children’s future social capital. This raises two sets of questions for future research on communities of practice: The first set concerns the constitution

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of social demands. Who are the members that get to pose demands? Do women get to be those who pose demands on others? When and how does that happen? What resources are required for this purpose? What resources are required to legitimize new standards and load them as producers of worth and rationality? It appears from our material that middle- class highly educated women are rarely able to use feminist categories as a discursive resource. The presence of feminism as discourse is still very weak and fragile. Therefore, women are usually unable to rely on it for claiming a demand-making position in their communities of practice. The second set of questions concerns the issue of resistance. Who are the women who are able to refuse to succumb to demands made by communities of practice? Who is the woman who can accept that her motherhood is questioned and insist on giving her child a cumbersome name? The material we analyzed suggests that these are women who benefit from the support of familial communities of practice around them. Such support, backed by a range of discursive resources, including those provided by specific ethnic and class dimensions of higher social worth, gives women a significant degree of freedom. For them, as well as for other women with less access to such resources, ambivalent belonging enables women to lead their families in the pursuit of opportunities, while minimizing risks. They engage in such leadership while paying attention to their own ability to maintain routines that suit their authentic selves. Ambivalent belonging also sheds new light on the issue of the contingent and basically temporary nature of women’s family names—the feature called by Sara Mills (2003) segmented name use; by Scheuble and Johnson (2005) situational use of the name; and by us fluidity as the intersection of naming temporality and naming spatiality. Ambivalent belonging is not a temporary stage, and it appears that the instability in name use is not necessarily a temporary stage that is going to be erased by the patronymic social order. Thus, women should not be stigmatized as immature and irrational until a later stage, when their name becomes one. Instead, we probably need a book entitled This Name Which Is Not One. This suggestion stems from our realization that naming practices reflect a complex layer of identity politics that any woman reflexively processes along her life. Such a perspective suggests that feminist theory must begin conceptualizing the multiplicity of space-specific family names, as an alternative to the standard of the single stable name. People need more than one name, if contemporary life is about multiple ambivalent belonging.

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We need names to signify the communities we came from and their heritage, and we need other names to signify the positions we want for ourselves in the professional still distinctively racist occupational world. We need our children to carry local names, and we need them to connect to potential names of potential citizenships, to which they may be entitled. Once borders of all naming types are transgressed, the imposed naming singularity including its social and emotional prices, looses its rationality. We need a celebration of multiple names for future generations. To conclude the discussion, we want to answer four questions. The first is our initial question: Why does the majority of women not use the legal possibility that currently exists in quite a few countries to name themselves? Then we move to two other questions: What did we learn about feminism from our study? What kind of feminist study is presented in this book and what future feminist projects does it entail? Why do women not use the option of naming themselves? Why are numbers of nonconventional usage declining (Gooding and Kraider, 2010)? We have a short and a long answer. The short one is that selfnaming is a lifelong difficulty that requires much energy, justifications, and the willingness to bear a sense of isolation once the family name separates between a woman and her children. The long answer begins with the fact that the patronymic custom is one of the salient foundations of patriarchy. In specific social circumstances, when other resources are unavailable or are uncertain, women—as in previous generations—practically need their husbands’ family names as a social capital asset. The hegemonic status of the patronymic custom as natural, moral, inevitable, has not yet weakened enough. Familist culture reinforces the hegemonic position of the patronymic beliefs that “one joint name” is an indicator of a healthy romantic relationship, and that a family name after marriage is a matter of women’s concern only. Moreover, it actively engages in stigmatizing women, who dare to raise questions regarding their children’s family names. Moreover, self-naming is a privilege, as it consists of a process that requires a range of scarce resources: persistence, time, working days to be devoted to bureaucracies, a supportive community, and a willingness to engage in a potentially lengthy marital negotiation. Since feminism as a toolkit, as an interpretative framework, as a pool of discursive resources, constitutes a particularly crucial deficiency in this list of required resources, we deal with it in detail in our answer to the next question.

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What did we learn about feminism from our study? As a state, Israel aims at international recognition and interrelations on a variety of levels. The policy stemming from this orientation has given priority to a range of legislative commitments. As a result, gender equality is supported in Israel by a range of laws, even if practically, they contribute little to defeating intersectional gender/class/ethnonational oppression. When it comes to self-naming, the situation resembles other areas with regard to taking advantage on existing legislation. Feminist practical support is needed if women who were sexually assaulted are to seek legal aid; It is needed in cases of sexual harassment or labor market exploitation. Likewise, practical feminist support is needed for self-naming. Alas, we find that women are extremely isolated and have very little if any feminist support on the matter. It is a known fact in feminist praxis that unless the women’s movement is there to protect past achievements, these are bound to demise. At the moment, women in Israel are not working politically very hard to protect the right to self-naming, and naming practices are conceived as apolitical matters to be solved in the private sphere. Little is done to maintain and legitimize public discussion of the issue and to break with the custom of topic avoidance in this area. When legislation enables women to name themselves a “no problem” impression is generated with the consequence of silencing of the matter and keeping it in isolation. Local feminists, particularly those at the Tmura Center, have only recently begun to search for ways to intensify women’s reflexivity on the issue and confine automatic conservative conduct. In this context, we turn to our third question. What kind of feminist study is presented in this book and what future feminist projects does it entail? We think of this book as a feminist project that follows previous projects of moving away from hierarchical dichotomies: we undertook to present a less dichotomized perspective on belonging (not either-or) and to follow Bettina Aptheker (1989) in her journey toward less dichotomized perception of resistance. Both these tasks allow a wider audience to become familiar with women’s voices and daily struggles. Both of them symbolize for us the struggle toward valuing women’s efforts, knowledge, and capabilities. Both aim at unsilencing the care, worries, and work embedded in women’s naming work. Using the notion of unsilencing, we refer to our commitment to move away from the myriad social mechanisms involved in silencing women’s self-naming as a political issue. As part of this commitment, we are currently engaged in writing an accessible self-naming guide for women in Israel. It is our

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goal to redefine the issue of family name as a family matter, as men’s matter and to encourage men to see their new manhood as enabling reflexive consideration of the family name as an integral aspect of caring for children. We hope to generate new feminist naming standards for local communities of practice and to add our project to an ever growing repertoire of resources for women struggling for their self-naming.

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I. Michal’s Naming Story As someone who regarded herself highly conscious of feminism and held extreme egalitarian views on couplehood, marriage, and relationships, I experienced the patronymic tradition as a violation of my fundamental right to be in a position fully equal to that of my spouse. The fact that my name served in many cases as a brand name since I could remember did not make it easier. I was always known as “michalrom”: one word pronounced in one breath. There were always many more Michals wherever I went, as this was a very popular personal name in the years I grew up and the places I’ve been. Hence, for me, the family name was a fully integrated part of who I was. Together with my first name, it made a beautiful name, one that people always had good things to say about. I loved my name; it made me proud. Or in other words I benefitted from its highly positive cultural loading, although at the time I did not know how to frame it as such. The thought of breaking off a part of my name was unbearable. Then there was also the fact that my husband- to- be was a member of the family Grinbaum. Losing my beautiful short Israeli name in favor of a long German Diaspora name was out of the question. The fact that my husband-to-be has a sister called Michal, and his brother was already married to another Michal, made the entire matter quite grotesque. I had no intentions of playing any part in this game. At the same time, I was not fully satisfied with what I saw ahead of me. Assuming I was going toward the point of having children of my own, I was anxious to find a way to bring all of us together under one unified family name. It felt awkward not to do so. Moreover, it felt wrong in so many ways, although I was not really sure why exactly. Nevertheless, I started a campaign in favor of a new name for both of us. I argued we should symbolize the making of our new family with a new name. I claimed my equality. I negotiated whenever I could with any arsenal in my reach, and eventually, I succeeded. I made my husbandto-be agree to what seemed to me at the time the one reasonable thing to do, only to find out later it was me who could not go through with it. I had filled all the forms, I stood in line at the registry of the ministry of interior affairs, and while waiting for my turn, staring at the new name we, together, had chosen

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for ourselves, I realized I had no idea who this person was. It had nothing to do with me; I just wanted to leave my name as it always had been, so I turned away without making the change I had fought for so insistently. I told myself it could wait. There’s no rush. A few years later, when I gave birth to our first son, it was clear to me that I would never use the name we chose for ourselves. Our children got both our family names, while their father and I carry our respective birth family names. So yes, we do not have one unified family name for all our family members. And yes, our children have two family names (or one hyphenated name, depends on your perspective). So far it seems that they are proud of their two names, and mostly they are even prouder to explain its origins. I can only hope that when the time comes, they will appreciate the wide range of opportunities we opened for them, and at the same time find the strength to do not what they are expected, but what they feel is right for them.

II. Orly’s Naming Story When we first started working in the field of women’s marital names, I found myself reflecting on my longstanding routine of replacing my birth family name with my husband’s name. Something felt wrong about the young woman who 25 years ago gave up so quickly on the way she got to be known by then, Orly Berger. At the same time, something felt right about the way she gave up on what was in part a monument of a father she did not want to remember. I was happy to get rid of his name and I was happy to adopt my partner’s family name. The patronymic practice had for me the meaning of replacing the name of a man I didn’t choose, with the name of a man I did choose. This intense reflexivity that Michal’s pondering over her name triggered in me had a practical effect when I buried my mother and shaped her gravestone: from the four family names my mother carried in the course of her 81 years, none is carved on her gravestone. Her first family name Pinku was the name her Romanian father gave her, an awful man who refused to allow her to graduate high school despite her being a very talented student. She never forgave him for that. The only thing Sandu Pinku, my grandfather, bequeathed to his daughter, my mother, was his poverty. Hence, it was not surprising that she hurried to get rid of his name and authority: at the age of 18, she was already married to Miku Almaru, who liberated her of her stingy father, and she escaped with him to France. Nevertheless, he is the one to blame for the fact that my beloved sister and I never had the same family name. It was when my sister turned five, when a third man and a third name entered my mother’s life. My mother fell in love with Ephraim Berger, the person who gave me and my brother our birth family name. He was her second husband who gave her his name as did his predecessor, but this too did not last for too long. To explain the way romance failed her, my mother used to say her second husband was destroyed by the war (the Second World War). He abandoned us in 1965 and left my mother to look for a new husband. When she finally found one, David Loker was his name. She struggled hard to marry him and was therefore eager to take a new

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family name, one more time. Well, I wasn’t going to put any of these awful men’s names on the one stone that was left for the memory of my emotionally intense relationship with my mother. My mother, Henrietta, was married three times, had four family names, and a whole world of suffering and laughter in between them. On her death, I buried her as “Yetti bat Fanni,” that is, Yetti, the daughter of Fanni, her mother’s name, as she was the one who gave my mother the loving nickname that she carried all her life.

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The research presented in this book is designed to examine the nature of interrelation between Israeli women’s practices regarding their family names and various aspects of their identity. That examination provides an opportunity to explore women’s perspectives on the positioning power of the family name, the option to contemplate the name, and the ability to choose a name (i.e., the self-naming process). From a poststructuralist point of view, the interrelation between family names and women’s identities provides an opportunity to conduct an analysis of the discursive order and, more specifically, to map the power position of specific discourses. In particular, we are interested in knowing how the power relations between familism and feminism operate, and which other discourses are involved in mediating these. Moreover, we are also keen to learn about the multiple and diverse meanings attached to such processes in the social world of women. This wide definition of the research purpose is employed on three different levels of inquiry: (1) exploring the naming decision as an act expressing the power of human agency, understood as constrained within ongoing relationships; (2) exploring the extent to which women are able to use feminist discursive practices in the process of the naming decision; and (3) exploring women’s accounts of their self-naming processes as an act of identity performance and positioning within a discursive site of struggle. We begin our account of the methodological aspects by elaborating on each of these three levels of inquiries. Then we portray the central aspects of the research plan and its final execution: the research questions, the interview used as research tool, the methods applied to screen, filter and sample the interviewees, and finally the research population and its characterization.

Research Purpose on Level 1: Agency in Relationships Based on Giddens’s (1991) concept of identity as a reflexive project of the self, we examine women’s practices regarding their family names after marriage in relation to their overall lifestyle decisions. For our methodological considerations, we employ agency as a woman’s diverse lifestyle choices. This allows

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us to follow our theoretical understanding of agency as constrained by a range of relationship issues and routines. Giddens defines lifestyle as a “more or less integrated set of practices which an individual embraces, not only because they fulfill a utilitarian need but because they give material to a particular narrative of self identity” (p. 81). As he describes lifestyle decisions as decisions that are “Not only about how to act but about whom to be” (ibid), it appears that a women’s decision about her name may be considered, among other things, a lifestyle decision. This raises the question how it is related to other lifestyle decisions that she makes, for example the decision on the form of the wedding ceremony. Therefore, on the first level, the research has the purpose to examine how the decision to retain a family name is organized around other daily routinized practices in a woman’s life. In other words, our research aimed at uncovering the ways in which alternative naming practices express a woman’s power position in terms of independence and liberation, and at learning how this power is exercised in designing her lifestyle and cultivating her and her family’s social position. From another perspective, the concept of lifestyle as a form of activating agency within relationships recalls Bourdieu’s definition of habitus as a cognitive scheme created in childhood and designed later by formal and informal social institutions that construct taste (Bourdieu, 1986). The importance of taste is indispensable, when it comes to issues of personal choices in general and more specifically in name choices. The discussion on names via the aesthetic dimension is central. It uncovers the taste mechanism and its role in designing lifestyle choices and social positioning. This leads to the first research questions: How do women in Israel perceive their current and potential family names? Which meaning and significance do they ascribe to these names, pre-, post-, and extra-marriage? and more specifically: Which meaning do they ascribe to the possibility of choosing a name for themselves? Clearly women’s agency is central to these questions, in the sense of allowing a deeper understanding of how agency operates in the context of women’s responsibility for maintaining their relationships with their children, partners, families of origin, workplaces, and the community at large. In the words of Giddens and Bourdieu, the question is about the act of choosing a family name as part of the reflexive project of the self or as an act of lifestyle decision designed by taste for the purpose of social positioning.

Research Purpose on Level 2: Feminist Discursive Resources The history of antipatronymic movements in France and in the United States reveals a close connection between the women’s movement and critical voices and actions challenging patronymic traditions (for elaboration, see introduction). Thus we wish to ask: Does this historical connection tell the whole story? How is this story relevant to Israeli society? Are local unconventional naming practices derived from a feminist critic of the patronymic custom? To what extent are they loaded with meanings of resistance and commitment to undermine women’s

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oppression? On this level of inquiry, we combine two aspects of the naming dilemma: an exploration of women’s practices and the meanings attached to them, and investigation of the women’s movement in Israel and its ability to insert relevant issues into the mainstream public discourse. As Mills points out in her study on feminist women in the UK (2003), the naming dilemma serves as a key discursive site of struggle in which the connection between feminist notions and alternative naming practices is highly visible. In the Israeli context, the question focuses on the encounter of the hegemonic discourse and its normative imperatives, with the feminist discourse that, among other things, is symbolized through the names issue (as reflected by the fact that a common symbol for a feminist women in Israel is her separate surname; one not shared by her partner). Women’s family names allow us to explore claims regarding the place of feminisms and the feminist movement in Israeli society. Therefore, on the second level of inquiry, the research has the purpose to investigate the extent to which women can rely on feminist discursive resources in their accounts of self-naming. Is the issue of women’s marital names in Israel loaded with feminist meanings, as in other places? If so, what are the consequences of relying on feminism for day-today live and beyond?

Research Purpose on Level 3: The Name as an Act of Identity Performance and Positioning within a Discursive Site of Struggle Based on the premise that identity is constituted within discourse along with the known nature of the interrelations between hegemonic and alternative discourses (Connell, 1987), and the understanding that interaction between discourses appears in “proper ways of talk” (Hajer, 1995), it becomes clear that identity research in this field has to begin by mapping the discursive order in a manner not limited to the dimension of gender. In other words, in addition to the power relations between the feminist discourse and the familist conservativepatriarchal discourse, the discursive order constituting other dimensions of identity, such as the ethnic or the national, have to be mapped. Such complex mapping appears necessary in order to understand the processes, in which women’s family names are formed not only as a performance of gender, but also as part of the constitution of other dimensions of their identity. Therefore, on the third level of inquiry, our study has the purpose to examine how power relations between discourses that take place within a specific social- cultural space, permeate the name issue and shape the reflexive world of women, on the one hand, and their praxis of identity performance, on the other. Following Michelle Lazar’s approach of critical feminist discourse analysis (Lazar, 1993; 2000; 2005), we aimed at tracing the vocabularies of familism, nationalism, orientalism, individualism, and feminism in women’s accounts. The ambivalence resulting from the concurrent presence of these contesting discourses in these accounts is conceptualized as relations of dominance and subjugation constituting the discursive order.

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The Research Design We have designed an interview-based study to generate women’s talk on their experiences to be subjected to our discourse analysis by the method of positioning. For that design, we follow the constructivist paradigm (Guba & Lincoln, 1994) that aims at a holistic understanding of human experience in its contextspecific settings. It allows the researcher to capture a complete picture of individually lived experience, as close as possible to the way it is experienced. One basic premise of that method is the understanding that people construct meanings for their lives on the basis of their experiences and relationships. Once women’s accounts of their attempts at self-naming are elicited, we can focus on women’s words and on their ways of talking. Constructivist research does not usually develop in a linear line (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), hence the need for maximum flexibility. Changes may be required in some, if not all aspects of the research plan. The research questions, definitions of the research population, decisions regarding sampling methods, and relevant literature are all subject to change as the research proceeds (Jorgensen, 1989; Marshall and Rossman, 1989). Indeed, we had to change various aspects of our research plan along the process. In the following section, we present the somewhat wiggled path we followed and the obstacles we encountered as we tried systematically to investigate women’s marital names in Israel, for the first time.

The Research Tools Feminist researchers find interviewing appealing for reasons over and above the advantages noted by social scientists, who defend qualitative methods against positivist criticism (Reinharz, 1992, p. 19). More specifically, feminist researchers widely use semistructured interviews, as they offer access to people’s ideas, thoughts, memories, and real-life experiences in their own words, rather than the researcher’s words. It enables the use of open questions, encouraging participants to give lengthy and full responses in their own words. Unlike other qualitative research tools, the semistructured interview allows the researcher to gain meaningful insights regarding specific issues in the interviewee’s world, without having directly to observe her life over a long period of time (Patton, 1990). It enables the exploration of issues raised in previous studies. Furthermore, the semistructured interview facilitates a relatively free interaction between the researcher and the interviewee, hence allowing them to establish a rapport that is necessary for the success of the interview and the research as a whole. Therefore, we used semistructured interviews as our main research tool. A semistructured interview has characteristically an interview structure that serves as a central guideline to explore several issues, while the order and the pace may vary in each interview. This enables high flexibility on the part of the researcher conducting the interview and, more importantly, opens the door for new unanticipated issues to arise with in the interview

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(DeVault, 1990). The interview structure we used in our research on Israeli women’s marital names was constructed around the following four groups of questions: a. Names in general: The interviews usually began with the same two questions: “What is your full name?” and “Is this how you always use your name?” Those who gave a negative answer to the second question were then asked about all other alternatives used and the differences between them. Then we moved to discuss the interviewee’s relation to her name in general, whether or not she likes it, what it means for her, whether or not she feels that it symbolizes her or who she is, etc. b. Family names: In this section, the interviewee was asked about her attitudes toward the concept of the “family name” in general (how it differs from her personal name, how the two are interrelated, etc.). Then we discussed her feelings and attitudes toward her own family name and other family names in her world. c. Family names after marriage: This was the main section of the interview, in which the interviewee was asked to tell her story regarding her family name after marriage. Then she was asked several questions about the story and issues raised by it, as for example: When was the first time that she thought about the issue? How did it happen that she ended up with the name she has? What part did her partner play in this process? Were there any difficulties? What affected her most? With whom did she discuss it? Did she consider other options? Is she happy with how things are today? d. Demographic details about the woman and her family: This section closed the interview and was conducted like a joint filling of a questionnaire, in which the interviewee gave sociodemographic data on herself, her husband, her children, and her parents.

As the guideline shows, two types of empirical data were collected in the interviews: the first type is a reflection of what in the interviewee’s world is perceived as the appropriate way of talking, enabling her to position herself as a moral subject in an interview situation. The second type is the interviewee’s report of her current and past naming practices. Through a combination of thematic analysis and discourse analysis, the two types of information are analyzed in a way that sustains two separate theoretical discussions: the first type of information feeds into the discussion of the process of reflexive positioning as reflecting the discursive order and the power relations within it; the second type serves as raw material for a discussion of identity performance within concrete social circles.

The Exploratory Stage of the Research Nine Israeli women were interviewed at the exploratory stage of the research. For several reasons, some of which are discussed below, our research question in the exploratory stage focused on the ways couples resolve the issue of family name, that is, how they decide on the name of the new family they create together. At that point, we assumed that a woman’s marital name is attached mainly to the more general concept of “the family name,” in the sense of the name of the family as the literary meaning of the concept suggests. Soon after the first few interviews

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were completed, we realized our mistake, facing a cultural and societal reality, in which marital surnames are merely an issue of women and for women, with little, if any effect on men. Later on, this aspect would become a component in the gender dimension of the cultural loading of the family name as portrayed in chapter 4. Following the findings and feedback from the first explorative stage, several aspects of the research plan were gradually redesigned: we found that men and women use their names in different ways and that there appears to be a complex setting of multiple meanings connected to the category “family name” and therefore to the dilemma of women’s marital names. Consequently, the research questions were rephrased to focus on exploring more specifically these multiple meanings and their interrelation with the multiple positions and identities of Israeli women. Another aspect of the research extensively revised following the findings from the explorative stage was the profile of the research group. Initially we had planned to interview only women, who resisted the widely accepted custom and did not take their husbands’ names. This was based on the assumption that a minority that has chosen to deviate from the norm is most likely to shed more light on the personal and social processes involved. The fact that literature review showed that almost all empirical research in this field has focused on this group seemed to support our plan. Soon it became clear that such a research design would lead to the loss of important data in significance aspects of field, at least for the Israeli case. One of the most striking phenomena revealed in the interviews at the explorative stage was the situational use of last name (Scheuble and Johnson, 2005). Almost all of the women interviewed at the explorative stage reported to use different last names depending on the social situation. This made using their formal decision regarding marital name an inaccurate factor in defining the research group. It became obvious that the name choice itself cannot be used as the criterion to profile the research group. Instead, it seemed that a reflexive criterion is needed, one that would reflect a woman’s attitudes and relations to the issue of marital names and more specifically to her own family name. We built the reflexive criterion based on three factors: (a) the extent to which the interviewee considered the name issue as central to her at the time of marriage (on a scale of 1 to 10); (b) whether she considered other options apart from the one she adopted (yes/no question); and (c) the duration of her pondering (on a scale of 4 degrees from “no time at all” to “more than a few weeks”). Considering these three factors as mutually coexistent, we defined women as suitable for the research, who (a) considered the name issue as central to them at the time of marriage; and (b) considered more than one option; and (c) contemplated the issue for any amount of time (meaning, they answered anything but “no time at all”). Apart from the need for a reflexive criterion, the exploratory stage led to conclusions regarding the demographics of the research population. We decided to limit the research to Jewish, secular, and heterosexual Israeli women, who were married for the first time (to a man, also married for the first time). Though this meant excluding various groups, we adopted this limitation in order to achieve maximum homogeneity of the research group. Since this is the first empirical

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study on women’s marital names in Israel, we felt it was necessary to minimize the predictable variance so that unexpected variance can emerge. Women from different national and religious backgrounds, at various familial stages, and with various sexual preferences are likely to face different structural circumstances and discursive orders. Future research should undoubtedly fill these gaps and explore the parallel fields in other groups. Another issue was the operative meaning of the term “marriage.” We decided to adopt the phenomenological meaning of it, rather than the institutional one. Therefore we included also couples who got married in alternative ceremonies (a civil ceremony or a non- Orthodox religious ceremony) along with those who followed the norm. According to Israeli law, these alternative paths are not considered lawful marriages, and couples using them are not acknowledged by the state as married. We believe that such a wide definition of marriage is necessary, if we wish to understand the naming practice in the context of additional ways of breaking with the local conventions on marriage and family live, especially under the specific cultural climate for secular Jews in the state of Israel.

Approaching the Interviewees In order to find women who fit the profile described above, a one-page questionnaire was designed as a screening tool. The questionnaire was circulated via the internet: published in open forums dedicated to family issues, and sent as a viral e-mail request, first to our list of contacts and forwarded from them on to theirs and so on (a virtual version of the snowball-sample method). All women were asked to send their filled questionnaires to an e-mail account especially opened for this research. Within one week (!) from the day we released our call for participation, 358 women responded. After six weeks, 632 e-mails were in our mail box, including 564 filled questionnaires; 150 of these women were willing to participate in a qualitative interview research and also eligible based on the demographic and reflexive criteria detailed above. Analyzing all 564 questionnaires, we realized that our definition of the reflexive criterion was too inaccurate. We discovered a group of 48 women, who were not eligible for the research based on our decision to use all three factors (of the reflexive criterion) simultaneously. But reading their names, made it clear they should be included. The catch was in the clash between the options factor (considering more than one option) and the time frame for contemplating (more than just at the moment of registering). Some women, for example, were so confident in their decision to retain their birth name that they felt that they had no other option and/or did not need or take any time for contemplation. Once again, we changed the research plan, deciding to use only the woman’s declaration on the importance she attached to what would happen to her last name after marriage, at the time of marriage. On a scale of 1 to 10, only those who graded 8 and above were eligible for inclusion in the research, regardless of their actual choice on the marital name.

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632 e-mails arrived in the mail box in the course of 6 weeks since the release of the call for participation

564 (89%) contained filled questionnaires

431 (76%) willing to be interviewed 420 (74%) eligible by demographics 168 (30%) eligible by reflexivity

150 (27%) willing to be interviewed and eligible by all parameters

Figure A2.1 Collecting the data—flow of the respondent rates.

After changing the definition of the reflexive criterion, we had a total of 259 women fitting the demographics (Jewish, secular, heterosexual, Israeli women in their first marriages) and willing to participate in an interview about their family name after marriage. This number equals 45 percent of the total of the screening questionnaires. In Table A2.1, we present the distribution of this group along three significant axes: (a) the woman’s family name and the changes it underwent, if at all; (b) the man’s family name and the changes it underwent, if at all; and (c) the children’s family name, if there were any at the time of the interview. A total of 15 different subgroups resulted from the multiple combinations between these three axes. It is worth mentioning that the proportions between these subgroups are not representative of the general Israeli population, since this is a “purposive sample” or a “theoretical sample” (Patton, 1990; Denzin & Lincoln, 1998). These kinds of samples are used when researchers need to collect data that will enable them to develop a theory, in order to explain a specific phenomenon (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In the present case, the characteristic used to create the sample is derived from the explored naming practice, in the sense that these are all women, who consider their names important, as reflected by their declaration under the reflexive criterion. As shown in the Table A2.1, 45 percent of the women in the screening sample adopted a variation of hyphenation as their naming practice; 28 percent followed the patronymic norm, replacing their birth family name with their husband’s name; another 20 percent retained their birth family names, and 7 percent created together with their partners a new third name and adopted it in various forms (alongside their birth name or instead of it). As we tried to minimize the amount of data, women were asked to give in the screening questionnaires, we did not ask for additional information like age, ethnicity, education, and such. Given that our research population was divided into 15 subgroups, we faced the need to choose how to sample the interviewees. We had two options: to give up on trying to reach the full diversity and focus only on the major subgroups, in order to cover more cases in each of the selected subgroups; or alternatively, to cover all subgroups, even if that meant inquiring fewer cases in each one. We eventually decided to use the latter option, called “maximum variety sampling” (Patton, 1990), for several reasons: first, since our primary sampling method was in the form of a “purposive sampling,” meaning it is focused on the extreme

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cases, we figured that the secondary sampling method should complement it, hence cover the maximum range. Second, as Patton explains (ibid), the major advantage of the maximum-variety sample is that it enables the collection of two kinds of data: one that describes the researched phenomena in their most detailed forms, allowing to document unique cases in their full depth; and the other enables the presentation of meaning patterns that coexist across all cases. Therefore we sampled randomly out of each subgroup its respective number of cases for the purpose of interviews. To summarize the process of filtering and sampling the research population, it is sufficient to say that all interviewees were chosen based on considerations that take into account several criteria types: demographic criteria, reflexive criteria, and the naming practices as reflected in the names of the woman, the man, and their children, if they had any.

The Interviews Interviews of the explorative type (pilot) were conducted during February– March 2002 and included 9 interviews with Jewish Israeli women, who responded to a request we distributed via e- mail. The other 33 women were interviewed during February–April 2005. All 42 interviewees were secular and heterosexual and in their first marriage; they all stated that the issue of the family name after marriage was central to them at the time of their marriage. These women have made diverse choices on the question of the family name after marriage; in other words, there are those, who have retained their maiden name, others, who have changed it to their spouse’s name; there were those, who have hyphenated the two names, and still others who, together with their spouses, have taken a new, third name. Without prior intention, it turned out that the women in the sample were all middle class, all but one were born in Israel, and the vast majority was of Ashkenazi origin. They all had high levels of education and held relatively prestigious occupational positions. All 42 interviews lasted about one and a half hours; most of them were conducted in the private home of the interviewee at a time of her convenience, or if she preferred at a public meeting place of her choice. After receiving the interviewee’s permission, all interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed. All participants were asked the same set of questions, using the same semistructured interview guide detailed above; since we expected women’s experiences to vary widely, however, we encouraged exploring new topics as they arose.

Sociodemographic Profile of the Interviewees With regard to age, the research group included women from their late twenties to their early forties: the youngest was 27, the oldest 43, and the

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average age was 33. The age range of their partners was similar, varying between 28 and 47, with an average of 34. In terms of marriage seniority, the youngest couple was married for 6 months at the time of interview, and the veteran couple had been married for 18 years. These women were living in various parts of Israel, from the north to the southern plain. More than two thirds (29 women) were mothers at the time of the interview (with one to three children each), and the rest had no kids at the time. Although we did not select the sample using characteristics such as levels of education and origin of birth or ethnicity, we ended up with a quite homogenous group according to the following parameters: Education levels: All women had more than high school education in their backgrounds: 20 with bachelor’s degrees, 16 with master’s degrees, two had a doctorate, and four were at graduate school working on their dissertations. Among the male partners, the picture looks the same: 9 high school diplomas, 15 bachelor’s degrees, two engineers, 17 master’s degrees, and one PhD. Occupation: Our sample included psychologists, programmers, marketing professionals, business women, lawyers, and one artist. Six of the women were unemployed at the time of interviews, due to what they described as “their own choice to stay at home and raise the kids.” None of the men were unemployed at the time of the interviews, and most of them were professionals as well: two pilots, a judge, accountants, lawyers, engineers, etc. Place of birth: All women except two, who immigrated to Israel as a child, were born in Israel, and all of men as well are native Israelis. Moreover, the majority of the women and men are at least second generations in Israel: two thirds of them had parents, who were also native Israelis (at least one parent, if not both). Ethnicity: According to the birth place of interviewees’ parents or grandparents: 14 women had Israeli born parents; seven had one or two Mizrah’i parents (of them, 4 had ethnically mixed parents, and 3 had one parent born in Israel), 16 had one or two Ashkenazi parents (of them, five had one parent born in Israel), and 5 women had South American parents. Type of marital procedure: Twenty-five women got married according to the orthodox Jewish establishment (Rabbinical court), while another 14 women and their partners chose not to follow this path, but to get married in a civil ceremony outside Israel, which is the only civil marriage recognized by Israeli law. Three more couples are formally not married by the Israeli law since they choose wedding ceremonies that are not recognized (meaning they did not perform an Orthodox one in Israel and also not a civil ceremony abroad). Not less significant is that ten of those, who got married in a civil wedding abroad, celebrated their marriage in a normative wedding party in Israel that included a non- Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony (H’upa, canopy)—three with a Conservative Rabbi and seven with a Reform Rabbi; Israeli law does not recognize either of these wedding ceremonies as legally valid, and therefore a civil wedding abroad is required to be recognized as married by the Israeli state.

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215

In Table A2.2, we list all our interviewees and some of their characteristics sorted by their naming practice: their own family names as well as the family names of their partners and their children (if they have any). One important aspect of Table A2.2, which is unique to the current study, relates to the names of the participant: these are all fake names; but they were not chosen randomly, given that our research deals with names and issues that evolve around it. As customary in this kind of studies, all interviewees were guaranteed full anonymity during the preliminary stages of the study. Since the names in our study are central to readers’ understanding of the discussed social processes, each interviewee received a fake name carrying a cultural loading similar to her real name. To ensure similarity in the cultural loading between real and fake names, a specific evaluation process was conducted. The same was done with regard to the partner’s name. Six Israeli women, who are in their social profile similar to the participants of the study, served as external judges ensuring that the meanings and signifying marks of each name are fully conveyed by the fake name chosen. Each of the judges received a list of the real names of the men and women, before and after marriage, and was asked to offer names that would meet the requirement stated above. The task was explained and demonstrated extensively in order to achieve the judges’ best contribution. At a second stage, the lists were several times transferred between the judges, until a list of the best proxy names was achieved. The final list contains fake names, on which all six judges agreed, as best representations of the cultural loading of the real names. These faked names are used throughout the book.

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Women following the patronimic norm: replaced their birth family name with their husband’s name a. without children b. with kids got father’s name children

Women retaining their birth family name: neither woman’s name nor man’s name changed a. without children 1 kids got father’s b. with children name 2 kids got both names 3 kids got mother’s name

Women hyphenating their family names IIIa Both partners hyphenate both names a without children b. with kids got both names children

I

II

III

2%

0.4%

1

6

2%

6

45% 5% 3%

8%

22

116 13 7

9%

23

20%

51 20%

8%

21

52

28%

% of total

72

Total

5%

11% 6%

4%

26%

96%

71%

29%

% of subgroup

46%

54%

% of subgroup

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Subgroup number

Table A2.1 Distribution of naming practices among the research population willing to be interviewed and eligible according to reflexive and demographic criteria (n = 259)

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IV

Women who adopted a new third name IVa Both partners replaced their birth family name with the new name a without children b. with kids got only the new children name IVb Both partners added the new third name to their birth family name a without children b. with kids got only the new children name

IIIb. Only the woman hyphenates, man’s name did not change a without children b. with 1 kids got children fathers’ name 2 kids got both names

3% 3% 2% 0.4% 1%

8 4 1 3

2%

4

7

28%

73

7% 6%

10%

26

19 15

40%

103

16%

5%

21%

42%

37%

79%

3%

63%

22%

89%

75%

25%

53%

47%

4%

71%

25%

15

14

13

12

11

10

9

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Eyal Yarkonia

O’ad Noymanc

Tal Gal’on

Meyrav Sold

9

a

Ran Limanc

Gili Kfira

8

c

Asaf Lugasid

Adi Gvirtzmanc

Gal’on (1)

a

Civil and Reform

Civil and Conservative Orthodox

Orthodox

Orthodox

Orthodox

Orthodox

Yoav Buka’id Haim BuchachAppleboimb

Orthodox

Dany Cohen

Type of marital procedure

Orthodox

Buka’id (3) BuchachAppleboimb (2) Noymanc (3) Yarkonia (3)

Children’s family name (No. of children, if any at all)

Itay Sade a

Retainers: Women, who kept their birth family names

Maya Sadea (Maya Eytan a) Tamar Cohen (Tamar Nah’manyd) Daniel Buka’id (Daniel Swartzb) Elinor BuchachAppleboimb (Elinor Ben-Ya’akovc) Neta Noymanc (Neta Grossb) Na’ama Yarkoni a (Na’ama Blumshteinb)

Women, who adopted their partners’ family names

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

The man’s name after marriage personal name + family name (name before marriage, if changed)

Naming practices of participants in the study

The woman’s name after marriage personal name + family name (name before marriage, if changed)

Table A2.2

9

1.2

2.5

9

16

9

10

1.3

1

Years in marriage

36

30

33

34

42

31

35

27

28

Age of woman

36

29

32

36

45

31

40

28

29

Age of men

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El’ad Naftalic Ishay Gila Ynon Tzura Ya’ir Ledermanc

Dafna Gania

Michal Hartova

Galit Nitaia

Meytal El’ada

12

13

14

15

20

19

18

Inbal Dorona- Shlyfec (Inbal Dorona)

Amit Shlyfec

Uri H’ajbyd Rosemanc Meira H’ajbyd (Uri H’ajbyd) Rosemanc (Meirya Rosemanc) Omer Cohen- Sela Cohen- Sela Hila Cohen- Sela (Omer Cohen) (1) (Hila Selaa) Ran Tala Cohen Tal- Cohen Amit Tala Cohen (Amit Tala) (Ran Cohen) (2) Only the woman hyphenated her name with her partner’s name

17

Assaf Maroma-Vilcheckc (Assaf Vilcheckc)

Noga MaromaVilcheckc (Noga Maroma)

El’ada (2)

Tzura (1)

Gil- Harto (1)

Nah’umd (2) Ben-Yzri d (2) Gani-Naftali (2)

16

Both the woman and her partner hyphenated both names

Eran Nah’umd Yaron Ben-Yzrid

Dalit Avra’amyd Yuval Schillerc

10 11

0.8

11

Civil only

Orthodox

1.5

3

3

9

3

2.5

6

8 7

Orthodox

Civil and an alternative Jewish ceremony Civil and Reform

Civil and Reform

Reform only

Civil only

Civil and Reform

Orthodox Orthodox

36

40

30

31

28

36

34

28

35

37 34

Continued

33

38

29

31

28

40

36

37

34

36 37

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27

26

25

24

23

22

21

Moyald (2)

Kobi Moyald

Ytzh’ak (Tzah’i) Dubnovc

Gabayd (1) Dubnov Haffner (2)

Reinhartc (2)

Eytan Reinhartc

Assaf Gabayd

Atiasd (2)

Roni Atiasd

Anat Millerc Gabayd (Anat Millerc) Nurit Dubnovc Haffnerc (Nurit Haffnerc)

Civil and Conservative

Mendelbaumb (2)

Ronen Mendelbaumb

Civil only

Orthodox

Orthodox

Civil only

Orthodox

Conservative only

Eyal Ravida


Hagit VilkomirskycRavida (Hagit Vilkomirskyc Efrat Hotzlerc Mendelbaumb (Efrat Hotzlerc) Aylet- Hashah’ar Krausc Atiasd (Aylet Hashah’ar Krausc) Ayala MorielacReinhartc (Ayala Morielac) Gal Shah’ara Moyald (Gal Shah’ara)



Continued


Table A2.2

5.5

5

8

6

6

4.5

0.5

Years in marriage

38

31

33

33

34

37

31

Age of woman

42

32

33

34

34

44

29

Age of men

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39

38

37

36

35

34

33

32

31

30

29

28

Liat Shefermanc (Liat Shinemanb) Ta’hel Rimona (Ta’hel Rintzlerc) Ya’el Snira (Yael Shfetzlerc) Irit Yardena (Irit Lahava) Rinat Sho’ama (Rinat Gamzid)

Oz Shefermanc (Oz Sheferc) Idan Rimona (Idan Weinbergb) Tomer Snira (Tomer Balulud) Gal Yardena (Gal Fligelb) Oren Sho’ama (Oren Shindlerb) Rimona (1) Snira (1) Yardena (1) Sho’ama (1)

Reuven Rothmanc Anat Rothmanc Yuvala Rothmanc (Anat Yuvala) (2) Eilon Be’erya Dafna Shtingc Be’eria (Dafna Shtingc) Yehuda Shimshid Shimshid Varonique Sol- Shimshi (3) (Varonique Sola) Guy Baksisd Vered (Riechmanc) Baksisd Vered Reichmanc Burshtein c Raz Burshtein c Efrat Burshtein c (2) - Sassond (Efrat Sassond) Liran Alona Alona Dafna Ramona- Alona (Dafna Ramona) (1) Yotam Gilada Amit Arnona- Gilada Amit Arnona Innovators: Both woman and men changed their name to a third new name 10

3 1.5

Orthodox

Civil only Orthodox

2.5 8

Orthodox Civil and Reform Civil only

4

3

Orthodox

1.5

1

Orthodox

Orthodox

10

1.5

18

Orthodox

Orthodox

Orthodox

28

34

28

28

29

25

31

33

29

42

32

43

Continued

31

34

32

28

30

30

30

36

25

44

34

49

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Continued

Iris Elkayamd Lotana (Iris Levi)

Dana Amira Orena (Dana Amira) Ariel Hago’elc (Ariel Blassc)

40

41


Yeh’ezkel (H’ezi) Elkayamd Lotana Yeh’ezkel (H’ezi) Elkayamd Yoram Grinbaumc Orena (Yoram Grinbaumc) A’aron hago’el-Freh’terb (A’aron hago’elc Freh’terb) Orena (1) Hago’elc (3) Civil and Reform Orthodox

Orthodox


11

1

1

Years in marriage

36

36

32

Age of woman

42

40

31

Age of men

As part of our endeavor to maintain the cultural loading of the original names our signification of names’ ethnic sound in the table reflects interviewees’ understanding of their original names. Surely, other evaluations of the ethnic sound, are possible. a Hebraized names (usually words in Hebrew, Israeli sound) b Yiddish sound c Ashkenazi sound d Mizrah’i sound

42


Both woman and man hyphenated a new name to old ones


Table A2.2

Notes

Preface 1. Note that in the case of actresses Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, the lack of a shared family name was something the media could not tolerate, so they were soon named “Brangelina” a hybrid combination of their personal names symbolizing their unity. 2. In Hebrew, Ben-David means “son of David,” and although it is constituted by two words, it functions more as one name word, in a pattern of compositional morpheme with a second word in a construct state/position.

Introduction 1. For more details about the Coverture doctrine and the feminist criticism, see Pateman (1988); about its development in the United States since the eighteenth century up to the present, see Hartog (2000). According to this doctrine, it is God’s will that women should be treated as their husbands’ property. 2. For example, Allport, 1961; Erikson, 1968; Strauss, 1969; Miller & Swift, 1977. 3. See, for example, Azaryhau, 1996; Simmonds, 1996; von Hassell, 1998; Campbell, Lee & Elliot, 2002; Mendez- Gastelumendi, 2001; Reed, 2001. 4. The Inuit people are a North Canadian community that developed its first names culture in close connection with the historical aboriginal naming of places. In this sense, Alia broadens the notion of personal identity to include the Inuit idea that land and person are almost inseparable, called by names of places used by a community. Inuit family names often include the suffix -miut (“the people of”) as one form of the incorporation of place into personal identities. Alia documented quite a few forms, through which the connection to a specific area has been historically part of an individual’s identity. Throughout the Canadian colonization of their land, however, the Inuit were registered within what was called Project Surname, under names designed by the Canadian administration. Likewise, tourists, visitors, scientists, and

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224

Notes

administrators act to change the names of places, which formed parts in the Inuit names. To conceptualize this practice of colonization, Alia coins the notion “naming politics.” 5. Rates of patronymic tradition followers: Germany, 95 percent; England, 94 percent; Austria, 93 percent; France, 91 percent; Ireland, 90 percent; Sweden, 87 percent; Finland, 86 percent. 6. Slightly lower rates of followers were found in Denmark 71 percent, Greece 66 percent, the Netherlands 55 percent, and Portugal 51 percent.

1


1. A kibbutz is a collective settlement that originally began as an utopian community, combining socialism and Zionism. Up until the 1990s, the kibbutz was based on a unique pattern of social organization of childcare in which children spent only three hours a day with their parents in order to allow their parents to engage in working for the collective. 2. The center of the country offers potentially broader opportunity structures. Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics for 2002–2004 gave the unemployment rate of men in the whole country as 10 percent and that of women as 11.5 percent. According to Orenshtein and Feferman (2008), the average rate of unemployment at the centre of the country in 2007 was 8.8 percent vs. a significantly higher rate, reaching 11.7 percent in the periphery. The report further showed that 14 unemployed individuals competed for any job in the northern periphery, 6 unemployed in the southern periphery and only 4 unemployed at the centre of the country. 3. In general, Arab and Mizrah’i women did not carry a family name; in exceptional cases, they carried their fathers’ name. 4. All figures presented here were accepted on August 2010 and are valid only to the Jewish population in Israel, couples who are legally married as appear in the interior ministry registration. 5. Before 1985 registration at the interior ministry has been less systematic. 6. Hebraization is the trend of new comers to Israel to replace their family names, especially those sounding Arab or Yiddish, by short words with a meaning in (often biblical) Hebrew.

2


1. For an elaborated explanation, see chapter 3 under the section “The Israeli Version of Familism.”

3 Israeli Ambivalence and Gender Relations 1. According to ICSB 2008 census data, 76 percent of Israeli citizens are Jewish. 2. About one third (31.5 percent) immigrated or are the children of immigrants from Arab countries. Five percent are of Turkish, Iranian or Indian decent;

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Notes

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

225

two percent of Ethiopian decent; immigrants from the former Soviet Union constitute just under 17 percent. Only 37 percent of those born in Israel have fathers born in Israel. Source: ICBS table 2.24, statistical abstract of Israel 2009. In recent years it became common to refer to those of the three first categories as Mizrah’im. In 2008, 64 percent of Jewish and 20 percent of Israeli- Palestinian households in Israel were of the dual- earner type; ten percent of the Jewish and three percent of the Israeli-Palestinian households relied on women’s income only. Among higher education couples, the rates of the dual- earner model reach 68 percent for the Jewish and 58 percent for the Israeli- Palestinian households. Men and women made equal contributions to the income of 36 percent of all households (Stier, 2009) In her seminal work on the Israeli welfare state and the dominance of local familism, the late Daphna Izraeli, showed how in Israel both part-time and fulltime jobs benefiting from a shorter working day (of seven hours only) eventually block women’s chances for promotion and higher labor market rewards. Only about 18 percent of local fathers are found to demonstrate significant levels of domestic and parental participation (Gaunt, 2006). In 2007 the divorce/marriage ratio was 26 percent, locating Israel in the twentyseventh place in global terms, with 10,000 divorcing couples per annum. ICBS 2009, Census data. Existing data is not precise to this category but provides a fair proxy: In 2008 about 16 percent of the children lived in families headed by a single parent. A link to the statistical report can be found at http://www.children. org.il/publication_article.asp?ImgID=32 We borrowed the notion “political familism” from Maxine Baca-Zinn (1999) even if for her it stands for a resistance political resource while in our usage, at the present historical moment, it still stands for institutional imposition mainly. See for example, Safran, 2006; Bernstein, 1987, 1992; Herzog, 1992.

4


1. The notion of reflexive calculations corresponds with Giddens’ understanding of life-style choices as emerging within the continuous application of individuals’ reflexivity and knowledgeability (1991). 2. Lev in Hebrew is a two letters word: the first letter, “Lamed,” is also the first letter of the word “Lo,” which means “Not.” The second letter is “Beit,” which is also the first letter of the name “Booh’boot.” 3. Ayelet hashah’ar is a literary metaphor for the early morning.

5

Getting More Out of It: Identity Positioning through the Name

1. According to Lebell’s Bilineal Solution (1988: 64), each partner establishes a source name according to aesthetic, ethnic, psychological, religious, and

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2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7

Notes

spiritual considerations. Daughters receive mother’s last name; their father’s last name becomes their middle name. Sons receive father’s last name; their mother’s last name becomes their middle name. See the opening paragraph of our discussion chapter. Interpellation is used by Marxist media theorists who follow Althusserian thought, to explain the ideological function of mass media texts. According to this view, the subject (viewer, listener, reader) is subjugated by the text to the extent that one’s will is shaped; the power of the mass media resides in their ability to “position” the subject in such a way that their representations are taken to reflect everyday reality. The legal system limits the possibilities of changing children’s surnames even more than it does for changing women’s surnames. Once a child is registered at the Ministry of the Interior, any further changes of her/his first or family name depends on an approval by the Family Court, entailing a fee, the personal appearance of both parents in court, and an interview with a social worker—a range of measures meant to prevent abuse of the law by a parent interested in smuggling the child abroad by giving her a new name and new passport. A form of a non- Orthodox Jewish religious current. The speaker is using the Hebrew word for the prickly pear cactus, which is the colloquial reference to native Israeli. Ayelet hashah’ar is a literary metaphor for the early morning and sometimes (rarely), like in this case, it is used as a first name. Incidentally it is similar to Shah’ak, which is given as an example for what she would like to have as family name—but these are not the same.

Name in Relations

1. Clair introduces Collinson’s (1994) differentiation between distancing resistance and persisting resistance used by employees to illustrate how problematic it is to judge resistance for its efficacy. Distancing resistance refers to the rejection of any possible similarity or encounter by distancing oneself of/ from? spaces and promotion; Persisting resistance is a stubborn search for more information and justification (Clair, 1998:158).

8 Discussion 1. Despite the very different experiences of women, who do not share their surnames with their children and partners, from those who do, we discuss the issue of ambivalent belonging for both cases together. For the purpose of our analysis, which focuses on discourse interaction and the power relations between familism and feminism, this otherwise significant difference is marginal.

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Index

Abramovitch, Dorit, 54 accommodation (vs. resistance), 29, 44 accountability, 79 accounts (as stories), 29, 77, 161–2, 167, 188, 191, 205, 207–8 Aceto, Michael, 60 adult identity, 35 aesthetic dimension, 63–70 African slaves, 8 agency and structure, 31, 36; in relational pragmatics, 31–4 Alford, Richard, 2 Alia, Valerie, 8, 9, 16 alienation, 86, 88, 151 Almog, Oz, 25, 61, 63 ambivalence and contradiction, 37–8; and discourse interaction, 51–2, 162, 170, 190; emotional, 172; and femininity, 96, 101; local feminists, 55; and longing, 88; and patrilocality, 133, 143–9, 151; and relationships, 117, 123, 155–6; retainers’ belonging, 190–2; and subversive categories, 40; temporary, 192–4; and women’s duty, 64 ambivalent belonging, 12–13, 34–5, 47–8, 190, 194–8 Amir Delila, 98 antipatronymic struggle, 21 appearance, 7 appropriate citizen, 40; family, 76, 90, 113–15, 123–5, 183, 192;

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femininity, 10, 73, 93–9, 103, 190–6; Israeli, 174; name, 57–9, 61–89, 183–7; wife, 12, 106, 117–18, 162, 188; woman, 129 Aptheker, Bettina, 33, 149, 153, 195, 199 army, 16, 40, 54, 65, 68 Ashkenazi, 17–18, 20, 26, 46, 55, 59–80, 187, 213, 214, 222 Askham, Janet, 156 authenticity, 47, 89, 93, 114 Barbalet, Jack, 162, 172 Barthes, Roland, 76–7, 80–1, 83 Barzilai, Gad, 17 Bauman, Zygmaunt, 88, 93, 151, 156 Baxter, Judith, 5, 6, 32, 51 Bean, Susan, 58 beautiful name, 64–6, 82, 88, 114, 186, 201 Beck, Ulrich and Elizabeth BeckGernsheim 91, 157 becoming, 29, 30, 36, 57, 98, 106, 122–5, 134, 145, 149, 152, 169, 174, 185, 192–4 Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin, 25 Ben-Haim, Aharon, 59–60 Benjamin, Orly, 17, 53, 98, 155, 157, 165, 167, 169, 175 Berger, Peter, 48, 202 Berkovitch, Nitza, 16, 53, 75, 115 Bernard, Jessie, 92 Bernstein, Deborah, 18, 53, 75

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244

Index

bilineal solution, 185 Bing, Janet and Victoria Bergvall, 6, 67, 102, 106, 110, 139, 193 biography, 1, 39, 61, 79–83, 89, 96, 108, 191 birth family name, the adding of, 20; and aesthetics, 63; and familial loading, 78; and feminist loyalties, 58; and gender dimension, 70; identification with, 79; losing, 92, 116; partners’, 128; protecting, 80, 83; ramifications of, 106, 110; reclaiming, 21; replacing, 6; retaining, 4–5, 22, 25–6, 106, 125, 127; transferred to children, 112; unrelated to feminism, 102 Bokstein, Ruth, 19 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 64, 66, 206 Boxer, Diana and Eelna Gritsenko, 124, 144 Braidotti, Rosi, 124 Brightman, Joan, 11 British legal system, 19 Bundi, Ruth, 65 bureaucratic spaces, 3, 44, 111–12, 131–41, 181, 188, 191 Butler, Judith, 32–4, 42–3 calling the equality bluff, 16 Cameron, Deborah, 6 Campbell, Cameron, James Z. Lee and Mark Elliott, 223 Cancian, Fransesca, 93, 155, 157, 159, 171, 184 Caplan, Jane, 2–3 celebrating patronimy, 3 Chiles, Tina, 164 choice, freedom of, 10, 48, 178; the experience of, 29, 99, 107; and habitus, 64; humanist notion of, 35–6; marriage as, 117–18; mothers’ choices, 83, 119; and name value, 66; naming choices,

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11, 23–4, 26, 31, 44, 48, 66, 73, 146, 152, 171; the narration of, 91–3; nonconventional, 23, 183–4; reproductive choices, 98; as resistance/accommodation, 29, 100, 122–3 citizenship, 13, 40, 50, 53, 75, 95, 111–16, 119, 193, 196, 198 civil rights, 16, 111; weddings, 17 Clair, Patric Robin, 64, 121, 165, 170, 175, 183 cohabitation, 17, 22, 24, 53, 132, 155, 178 Cohen, Steven Martin and Paula E Hyman, 114 Cohen, Yinon, 17, 18, 19 collective memory, 77, 84 Coltrane, Scott, 158 communities of practice, 30, 34, 37, 47–8, 51, 55–7, 123, 125, 129, 131, 144, 149–55, 160, 175, 179, 187–200 confluent love, 156–8, 171 Connell, W. Raewyn, 44, 157, 207 contestation of familism and feminism, 55 contesting discourses, 40, 43, 44, 207 Cooley, Charles Horton, 7–8 Coverture doctrine, 4, 223 critical feminist discourse analysis, 207 cultural loading, 12, 48, 58–9, 62, 70–82, 89–90, 114, 121, 144, 155, 159, 165, 171–95, 210, 222; ambivalence, 51–2 Davies, Bronwyn, 31, 34–5, 40, 42 Davies, Bronwyn and Rom Harré, 38, 42, 94–5 Davies et al, 99, 196 Deetz, Stanley, 158, 166 Denzin, Norman, 131, 212 dependency, 17, 30–1, 48, 61, 93, 146, 179

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Index deskilling, 19 Devault, Marjorie, 125, 156, 165, 209 discursive order, 12, 29, 31, 38–9, 42–4, 48, 56, 60, 91, 95, 101–2, 108, 116, 124–5, 153, 187, 190, 194, 205–11; ambivalence of, 29; practice, 38–42, 55, 185, 188, 193, 195, 205; resources, 13, 37–8, 41–2, 47, 98, 104, 122, 151–2, 177, 179, 182–3, 190–1, 193–8, 206; storyline, 94 displacement, 88, 151 dominance, 7, 16, 25, 44, 116, 157, 179, 207 dominant familism, 170–5; feminism, 177–82 Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet, 6 education system, 16 egalitarian Categories, 94; discourse, 107, 193, 195; values, 94 egalitarianism, 96, 102, 105, 108, 116, 119, 169, 195 Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie R. Hochschild, 146 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 9 Emirbayer, Mustafa and Ann Mische, 30, 34–7, 128, 130, 196 emotionology, 162, 164–5 emotion work, 99, 156, 175, 184 equality, 9, 15–17, 20, 50, 54–5, 103–4, 111, 142, 192–3, 199, 201 Ermisch, John, 132 ethnic hierarchy, 18; dimension, 59–63 ethnicity, 2, 12, 18, 68–9, 187, 212, 214 Evans, J. Richard, 4 Evan-Zohar, Itamar, 66 exclusion, 18, 31, 35, 39, 46, 58, 84, 112, 151, 193

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245

fading energy, 135–7 Falk, Avner, 7 familial loading, 76, 78, 80, 82, 87, 89, 90 familism in Israel, 52–3 familist discourse, 21, 25, 44, 55, 94–6, 101, 116 family heritage, 74, 87, 186; all girls, 78–80; name – history, 2–4; work, 132 fathers’ name, 3 feeling rules, 156, 167 feminism as systematically defeated, 11 feminist categories, 94, 122, 191, 197; critique of patronimy, 10–11 Fershtman, Chaim and Uri Gneezy, 59 Finch, Janet, 51 Fineman, Martha, 10 first names, 4, 25, 64, 70, 109, 114 fluidity, 124–8, 139, 151–2, 193, 197 Foucault, Michelle, 31 Fowler, Roger, 6 Fox, Green Litton, 99 Gaunt, Ruth, 225 Gee, James Paul, 30 gender and language, 5–6 gender dimension of the cultural loading, 70–1, 183, 210; identity, 46; relations, 50 gendered entitlement, 174 generation, 4, 10, 18, 78, 80, 84, 86, 90, 144, 170, 178, 189, 198, 214 Gerson Judith and Kathy Peiss, 153 Giddens, Anthony, 31, 36, 124, 129–30, 156–7, 159, 171, 205–6 Gill, Rosalind, 51 Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm L. Strauss, 212 Goffman, Erwin, 32

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246

Index

Golda Meir, 15 Goldin, Claudia and Maria Shim, 11 Gooding, Gretchen E. and Rose M. Kreider, 11, 22, 198 Griffiths, Morwenna, 57 Grimshaw, Damian and Jill Rubery, 19 Guba, Egon G and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 208 Haberfeld, Yitchak and Yinon Cohen, 17, 18, 19 habitus, 37, 64, 206 Hackstaff, Karla, B., 155 Hajer Maarten A., 31, 42–3, 95, 115, 207 Halperin-Kaddari, Ruth, 17 Hanks, Patrick, 2–3 Harding, Sandra, 87 Harré, Rom, 38, 42, 94–5 Hartog, Hendrik, 223 Hays, Sharon, 108 Hebraization, 24, 62–3, 65, 78, 86–7, 90, 187 Hebraizing names, 86–9 hegemonic discourse, 73, 93, 115, 122, 193, 207; individualism, 36 Helman, Sara, 53 Herzog, Hanna, 54–5, 225 Hey, David, 2 Hibbard Chelsea L. C., 3 Hochschild, Arlie, 99, 146, 156, 167 Holocaust, 82, 84, 189 home, 29–30, 47, 79, 81, 88, 96, 98, 102–4, 124, 129, 136, 145, 151, 156, 186, 213, 214 honor, 160–72, 175, 178, 181 hooks, bell, 10, 149–50 Horowitz, Dan and Moshe Lissak, 16 Hughes, Karen, 150 humanist approach, 35–6 human rights, 16

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hyphenation, 4, 11, 71–5, 80, 84, 93, 105, 110, 127, 139, 141, 159, 163–4, 170–4, 179–81, 184, 189, 192, 212; and children, 73–5 ideal femininity, 12, 96, 98–100, 102, 116–17 identity change, 7; performance, 33, 44, 63, 187, 205–9; politics, 186, 197; positioning, 91, 225 immigration, 19, 52, 60, 68, 82–3, 87 individualism, 25, 36, 40, 47, 98, 102, 116, 156, 184, 207, 228 inequality, 17, 50, 54–5 inheritance law, 3 institutional familism, 53, 95, 119 intelligibility, 32–3, 42–3, 60, 64, 153, 188, 196 intelligible repertoire, 30 interdependence, 157, 159 interpellation, 99 inuit, 8–10, 26, 37, 42, 77, 153 isolation, 8, 150, 183, 198, 199 Israeli studies of names, 24–6 Izraeli, Dafna, 52, 225 Jaggar, Alison, 196 Jamieson, Lynn, 157–8, 160, 172 Jewish onomastics, 24 Jobling, Mark, 3 Johnson, David R. and Laurie K. Scheuble, 83, 125–8, 197, 210 Jorgensen, Danny L., 208 Josling, John Francis, 3 justifying the awkward name, 141 Kahn, Susan, 53 Kamir, Orit, 20–1, 24, 57, 162–4 Kaplan, Justine and Ann Bernayes, 9 Katz, Ruth, 53, 59, 87, 157 Kimmerling, Baruch, 53, 75 kinship, 3, 10, 71, 129

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Index Kipnis, Laura, 49–50 Komter, Afke, 172 Kraus, Vered, 17–18 Kupper, Sussan, 11 labor market and ethnic relation, 17–18 language, 2, 30, 35–6, 51, 57, 63, 93, 94, 114, 121–3, 145, 149, 167; and names, 6–7 Laskowski, Kara, 150 late modernity, 31, 88, 114 Lavee, Yoav and Ruth Katz, 53, 157 Law of Names, 20–1, 25 Lazar, Michelle, 29, 73, 116–17, 122, 207; on ambivalence, 94, 100, 105 Lebell, Sharon, 10, 97, 185 legal change 1956, 19–20; Legal discourse, 16–17; Legal regulations, 19 legislation, 3–4, 20–1, 54, 199 Lemish, Dafna, 52 Lieberson, Stanley, 64 Lincoln, Yvonna, 208, 212 linguistic agents, 6 Lister, Ruth, 33, 35 Lithwick, Harvey, Yehuda Gradus and Irwin Lithwick, 18 loyal citizen, 12, 114 Lucy Stone, 9 Luken, Paul C. and Suzanne Vaughan, 105 male power, 10 management of emotions, 158 marital conversation, 156, 158–9, 162, 167, 169–71, 181; blueprints, 157; negotiation, 12, 156–7, 159–60, 162, 165, 167, 176–7, 180, 182–4, 198; work ethics, 155 Marshall, Catherine and Gretchen B. Rossman, 208 Martín-Alcoff, Linda, 39, 45

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247

matrilineal heritage, 4; story, 83 Mattley, Christine, 132, 152 McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 6 Mcfarland, Daniel, 150 McNay. Lois, 32 melting pot, 20, 24 memories, 34, 39, 47, 83, 129–30, 151, 189, 208 Mendez-Gastelumendi, Cecilia, 223 men’s (feminist) insistence, 179–82; patronymic privilege, 158–9, 161, 174, 176 militarism, 16, 17, 53, 111, 189 Miller, Casey and Kate Swift, 10, 135–6, 220 Mills, C. Wright, 85 Mills, Sara, 30, 47, 123, 125, 128, 150–1, 160, 197, 207 Mische, Ann, 30, 34, 36–7, 128, 130, 196 Miss, 6, 19, 57–9, 80, 83, 97, 105, 168, 181, 189, 213–14 Mizrahi, 59, 63, 68–70, 176, 187, 214, 237 Moore, Dahlia, 16, 54 moral stance, 39, 40, 96, 98 Moses, Claire Goldberg and Leslie Wahl Rabine, 9 Mottier, Veronique, 84 Motzafi-Haller, Pnina, 18 Mrs, 4, 6, 9, 145 Ms, 6, 11, 84, 95, 195 multiple dimensions of identity, 46 multiplicity of stories, 37 Murray, Thomas, 5 Murru-Corriga, Giannetta, 4 Muslim, 5, 52 myth, 15–16, 49–50, 75–86, 114, 161, 189 mythologies, 76–7, 80 name-related speech, 159 names and class, 3; identity, 7; power, 7–9; as symbols, 7

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248

Index

naming statistics, 11; agency, 31, 34; politics, 9, 12, 25, 224; system, 2, 5–6, 13; work, 122, 127, 132–4, 138, 152, 199 narrator, 77, 86, 175–6, 188 nationalism, 189, 207 nation building, 75, 85, 116 negotiating from the margins, 47 negotiation, 12, 34–5, 45, 74, 84, 89, 111, 116, 124, 132–5, 138, 152–3, 156–70, 175, 176, 177, 180, 182–7, 196, 198, 228 nonconventional choice, 23; naming practices, 11, 22, 81, 198; self-naming, 22–3; surname, 11 nonpatronymic naming, 11 Noordewier, Marrte, 125 normative order, 39–40 Nugent, Colleen, 23, 110 Omi [Morgensten-Leissner], 3, 7, 9 onomastics, 5, 24 opportunity structure, 19 oppositional discourse, 94 orientalism, 207 Orthodox Judaism, 17, 111–12, 211, 214–22, 226 parenthood, 4, 53, 127, 155, 158 parliament, 17, 19–21, 54 Pateman, Carole, 223 patrilocality, 12, 122, 133, 143–5, 147 Patton, Michelle Quinn, 208, 212 Pauwels, Ann, 6 Penfield, Joyce, 3 performativity, 30, 32, 42 persuasion, 31, 38 Picard, Max, 170 Pike, Sarah M., 145 pilot, a name of a, 65, 181 power relations, 2, 8–10, 43–5, 48, 63–4, 86, 94, 117, 123, 155, 163, 172, 205, 207, 209, 226 power to name, 8

9780230100152_15_ind.indd 248

pride, 8, 16, 40, 46, 57–8, 81–2, 85–7, 92–3, 100, 114, 117, 127, 129, 143, 146, 180–1, 191, 196 private sphere, 61, 170, 199 pronatalism, 53 public sphere, 61, 71, 170 quality of the relationship, 160–2 rational choice, 34–6 Reay, Diane, 108 reciprocity, 159 recursive relationship, 31 reflexive consideration, 33, 57, 68, 159, 190, 200 reflexivity, 6, 29, 36, 199, 202, 212, 225 Reinharz, Shulamit, 208 relational notion of agency, 34–6; pragmatics, 30–1 religion, 72, 111, 178, 189 renaming as remaking, 8 respectability, 10, 21, 57–8, 118, 125, 129, 163, 172 responsibility, 33, 40–1, 47, 70, 75, 79–80, 91, 97–100, 102, 108, 109–10, 113, 152, 206 responsible mother, 12, 41–2, 186, 188–9, 193 retainers, 9, 11, 22, 24, 111, 132, 159, 190, 191, 214 ridicule, 75, 104, 108, 138, 141, 153, 166–7, 172, 196 right to name, 10 Risman, Barbara, 155 Romaines, Suzanne, 6 romance, 11, 51–2, 92, 117, 157, 160, 162, 179, 202 Rosenthal, Donna, 131 Rosin, Tali, 49 Rubin, Gale, 10 Safir, Marilyn, 16, 53 Safran, Hanna, 49–50, 225 Said, Edward, 68

3/29/2011 6:06:44 PM

Index Saint Simoniennes, 9 Sasson-Levi, Orna, 16 Scanzoni, John, 143 Scheuble, Laurie, 83, 125–6, 128, 197, 210 Schwartz, Pepper, 101 Scott, James C., 33, 35 Scott, James C. et al, 3 secular, 17, 26, 46, 52, 111–13, 155, 169, 182, 186, 189, 191, 210–12, 213; identities, 177–9; resistance, 112–13 sense of becoming, 145; belonging, 37, 47, 48, 84, 88, 93, 95, 105, 119, 129, 143, 146, 149, 178, 190, 194, 196 Shadmi, Erella, 49 Shields, Stephanie S., 99, 156 Shifman, Limor, 63 Shim, Maria, 11, 212 Shtal, Abraham, 59 silencing, 43, 63, 66–7, 159, 165–6, 168–74, 181–4, 199 Simpson, Paul, 6 Skeggs, Beverley, 64 Smith, Dorothy, 44, 108 social capital, 12, 177, 183, 186, 195, 196–8; devaluation of the name, 7; location, 1, 44, 60, 124; respectability, 10; value, 8, 38, 66, 105, 155 sound, 66–8 spatial/temporal perspective, 123–8 speech act, 30, 39, 58, 84 Spender, Dale, 6, 10 stability, 23, 71, 117, 150, 156, 170, 183, 197, 227 Stanley, Liz and Sue Wise, 87, 158 Stannard, Una, 4, 6, 126 state registries, 10, 17 Stier, Haya et al, 225 Stodder, James, 4 stories, 1, 30, 37–8, 68, 70, 77–8, 80–5, 90–1, 111, 118, 119, 140, 168, 175, 186, 188–9, 201–3

9780230100152_15_ind.indd 249

249

storylines, 38, 95, 98, 101 Strauss, Anselm L., 212 structural dimension of the cultural loading, 71–3 Suarez, Esther, 8 subjectification of experience, 158 subjectivities, 37, 95, 155 subjectivity, 34–5 subject position, 21, 36, 41–2, 46–7, 112, 121, 188–90, 194–6 subjugation, 12, 91, 100, 118, 124, 192, 207 suffragists, 4, 9 Swirsky, Barbara, 16, 18 Tabory, Ephraim, 17 taste, 64, 66–9, 186–9, 206, 229 temporality, 12, 129, 130, 133, 149, 152–3, 197 temporary naming, 10 Tirosh, yofi, 110–11 titles, 3, 6 topic avoidance, 158, 166–7, 199 trust, 31, 40, 48, 59, 167, 179, 180 Turner, Victor, 128 types of surnames, 3 unsilencing, 165, 175–6, 199 Urry, John, 152 Valetas, Marie-France, 5, 11 Vanderbilt, Amy, 126 Van de vijver, Fons and Ype H. Poortinga, 58 Vaughan, Susan, 105 visibility, 39, 45–6, 76, 129, 135, 153–4, 180 Wagner, Etienne, 30, 34 Walby, Sylvia, 31, 40, 51 Weigert, Andrew, 51 Weitman, Sasha, 25 Weitzman, Lenore J., 143 Williams, Raymond, 51 Wilson, Stephen, 2

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250

Index

Wise, Stanley, 87 women’s accounts, 29, 162, 205, 207–8 women’s family name in different countries, 4–5 women’s movement, 9, 43, 49, 55, 123, 199, 206–7

9780230100152_15_ind.indd 250

Yasuda, Norikazu, 3 Zabeeh, Farhang, 7 Zelinsky, Wilbur, 6 Zionist discourse, 53 Zisowitz-Stearns, Carol and Peter N. Stearns, 162

3/29/2011 6:06:44 PM

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