The authentic conservative Wonder Woman: Israeli girls negotiating global and local meanings of femininity

ABSTRACT

Girls in Western societies are increasingly exposed to feminist ideas, often led by women celebrities. The current study explores how Israeli girls negotiate feminist concepts such as ‘girl power’ and ‘feminine success’ by examining their responses to Wonder Woman – a film that is part of this ‘feminist zeitgeist’ – and its Israeli actress, Gal Gadot. The paper documents the voices of hegemonic Israeli girls aged 13 to 15 in ten focus groups, and shows that girls take pride in the presence of a strong female character and an Israeli representative in Hollywood. The girls position themselves around a model of success represented by strong global and local feminine images. The global elements reflect neoliberal postfeminist discourse advocating authenticity as the ideal for self-actualisation. The local elements reflect a relational sentiment of loyalty to both the state and the family. We argue that the authenticity myth plays a key role in reinforcing the existing gender order and the conservative definition of good citizenship through the perception of a successful woman. We conclude that the local cultural features and national belonging are meaningful categories for studying girls’ encounter with celebrities.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity feminism
• girl power
• post-feminism
• Wonder Woman
• authenticity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Israeli Scouts movement executive for their consent for the study and the girls who participated in the focus groups for their openness and trust. Thanks also go to Tal Alon, Bat-El Dabach, and Sivan Kedem Vinkler for their assistance with the field-work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Before Wonder Woman, Gadot was known by the Israeli public as Miss Israel 2004 and as an actress based on her role in The Fast and The Furious 2009.

2. The Israeli family is becoming more a private concern, since it is more and more normative for adults to be entitled as autonomous individuals to shape their destinies in both the private and the public spheres (Fogiel-Bijaoui 2016).

3. The gender gap is based on an index that evaluates gender inequality in Israel across a spectrum of fields over time: education, the labour market, gendered segregation of professions, poverty, power, media and culture, health, violence against women, time, and family status.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Einat Lachover

Einat Lachover (PhD) is a communications scholar at Sapir Academic College, dedicated to critical analysis of the encounters between gender and a broad range of media forms and contexts. Her areas of interest include: gender construction of news production; gendered discourse in news media; gender ideologies in popular media; and girlhood and media.

Shosh Davidson

Shosh Davidson (PhD) is a lecturer at the communication department, Gordon Educational College, Haifa. Her areas of interest are youth, children and mothers in consumer culture.

Ornit Ramati Dvir

Ornit Ramati Dvir (PhD) is the Employment Program Director at aChord. Among her areas of research are women in the workplace and female adolescents, with particular interest in the meaning of the body in the social space.