Commemoration labor as emotional labor: the emotional costs of being an Israeli militarized national widow

Abstract

The feminist literature addresses the various modes of gendered militarizing of women’s lives; however, little attention has been paid to the issue of militarization of national widows’ emotional lives. This study aims at exploring the experience of being a national widow and examining how national widows’ lives are militarized even after the husband’s death. By analyzing Jewish Israeli national widows’ narratives, we show how these widows are expected to serve the state and the military and engage in what we call active ‘commemoration labor’, i.e. maintaining the glory of the military and aggrandizing its activities. In so doing, these widows are compelled to invest in emotional labor by being publicly visible and faking emotional expressions. At the same time, their close relatives, community, and also society at large expect them to demonstrate empowerment and resilience and to serve as ‘ideal’ role models for all the other national widows. It is also argued that private grief and bereavement are expropriated and instrumentalized by the masculine state-in-arms in order to justify the continuation of military activities and operations as well as masculine domination of national conflict management.

Keywords:

• Bereavement
• commemoration labor
• emotional labor
• grief
• national widowhood

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to the editor of Gender, Place and Culture and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would like to thank all participants for their cooperation in the research study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Smadar Ben-Asher

Dr. Smadar Ben Asher received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at Ben-Gurion University in 2004 and she is an educational psychologist who specializes in grief and bereavement. She is a senior lecturer at Kaye Academic College. Her research interests include minorities' rights, culturally sensitive counselling and bereavement. She recently published several articles in Journal of Social Work & Human Rights, Papers on Social Representations, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. E-mail: [email protected]

Ya’arit Bokek-Cohen

Dr. Ya'arit Bokek-Cohen received her Ph.D. in Sociology at Tel-Aviv University in 2002. Bokek-Cohen specializes in Sociology of the family and studies families and reproductive technologies, mate preferences, family dynamics, spousal influence strategies, and marital power balance. Her current research project focuses on gender and sociological aspects of national widowhood. She recently published several articles in Journal of Social Work & Human Rights; Journal of Gender Studies, Social Compass, American Journal of Bioethics, Women's Studies International Forum, Journal of Family Studies, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. E-mail: [email protected]