‘ … How am I going to pass this “audition”?’ Shame and respectability among Ethiopian adolescent girls – dialogue with an invitation to expand occupational aspirations

ABSTRACT

The responsiveness of at-risk adolescent Ethiopian girls to the contents of a workshop promoting their occupational aspirations was found to be related to their belief in their ability to negotiate the unwelcome ethno-racial gaze of Israeli society. This belief is closely tied to the way they perceive and experience their ethno-racial blackness – as a burden or as a resource. Based on the field research, the article discusses the two responses to the workshop and suggests a framework informed by FemCRT as a possible approach to overcoming the shortcomings of the workshop described.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• occupational aspirations
• blackness
• respectability
• racism
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sigal Oppenhaim-Shachar's full academic affiliation is given as ‘Bar-Ilan University, the Gender Studies Program. Sociology and Anthropology Department, Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv’. The topics of her lectures and writings center on three main themes – girlhood studies, leadership, and facilitation of group and team processes, in the development of self in-relation within the feminist discourse framework. She also deals with the myriad experiential and pedagogic expressions of education, mainly but not exclusively, through the Intersectionality lens. Her articles were published in several Academic journals in Israel and in the U.S.A. She had initiated the ‘Daphna Center’ in 2010 – A professional development and training center established by the Bar-Ilan University Gender Studies Program – and managed the program up to the end of 2014.

Notes

1 The Reshatót workshop was developed by Hisherik et al. (2013), and was conducted/offered in collaboration with the Joint Distribution Committee and other organizations in various sectors, in response to the demand for what is defined and accepted in the literature as missing among adolescent girls from labelled communities.

2 Nunn (2017) describes school-aged black girls 8–13 years old, compared to 16–18-year-old Ethiopian adolescent girls in my research.