kian coins the term “voxicide” in considering the multiple regimes of silencing—colonial, sexist, national, and religious—which deprive the victim of consciousness and voice. This language must not be used by Western colonialists to condemn the totality of a cultural collective identity, but should rather inspire the enabling of cultural change and boundary crossings. Shalhoub-Kevorkian proposes to expand the definition of femicide in such a way as to criminalize the social collaboration with and legitimization of the process of intimidation, terrorization, and dehumanization leading up to the murder itself. She recommends a strategy defined as “dialoguing with the muted” and continuous discussion of femicide as part of a broader goal toward political and social liberation from tyranny, colonization, and national oppression.
Erella Shadmi’s “The Construction of Lesbianism as Nonissue in Israel” argues that the invisibility of lesbians in Israeli representations of women derives from the heterosexual definition of Zionism as a nexus between God, masculinity, family, and land. Within this national and religious context female sexuality is constructed as a depoliticized, auxiliary, and functional fact, while lesbianism is erased as a nonissue. This state of affairs drove lesbian feminists into silence and invisibility. In the early seventies, lesbians joined the feminist movement in the hope of finding a non-heterosexist space for political self-definition. While lesbian feminist activism was accepted, lesbian identity remained closeted until the 1990s. It was feared that the lesbian issue would detract from the feminist agenda through sensationalist misrepresentation. When the lesbian issue was articulated as a public issue, it was done within the discourse of civil and individual rights in the 1970s. Within this theoretically genderless yet still homocentric context of queer theory and praxis, the lesbian community had to forfeit its original feminist transformative and revolutionary vision. In the 1980s the feminist lesbian movement began to emerge into public discourse as a distinct group. Shadmi identifies three major points of empowerment and alliance that supported the lesbian– feminist movement: the peace movement that linked nationalism with gender analysis, the emergence of Mizrahi and Palestinian feminisms, and the political organizations for civil liberties and individual rights. On the other hand, lesbian feminism has been constrained. Ignored by mainstream public discourse as well as academic feminist publications, lesbianism as a political revision of heterosexuality and Zionism has been co-opted and neutralized. The original radical vision of the lesbian feminist movement may yet be reconstituted as part of an ongoing process of identity formation despite its current orientation and its alliance with other radical groups.
In her essay “From Gender to Genders: Feminists Read Women’s Locations in Israeli Society” Hanna Herzog notes that Israeli gender studies has evolved from a focus on woman as a unitary social category to a genders perspective that sees women in every class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The hierarchical relationships between Israeli women and the various forms of knowledge their positioning produces make it impossible to refer to a feminist politics of knowledge that applies to all women in Israel. Herzog argues that it is possible to channel the differences into alternative modes of sociopolitical diffused activities. Following Kuhn’s model of revolutions in paradigms of knowledge, Herzog proposes that a shift has occurred in Israeli sociology in the 1990s that has moved from “Israeli women” to “wo/men in Israel.” The earliest phase of social research was based on a model of modernity, which evaluated families on a continuum from traditional to modern. In this early phase that spanned the 1960s and the 1970s, women were defined as a sexual biological category. In the 1980s, the criterion of gender equality emerged as a social analytic lens. Social institutions including the military and 