stinct modernist narratives both have reached a point of completion (Feldman, 1999; Shohat, 2006). Both Zionism and feminism have been transformed by difference (McClintock, 1997). Gender difference is an effect of relations of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980) and the cultural production of subjectivities and bodies (Butler, 1990). “The effect of poststructuralist theory is to see difference as material, as produced, but as ungrounded in any fixed nature” (Weedon, 1999, 24). Difference cannot be thought outside of situated, located, and politically positioned narratives of identity that construct the subject through a process of identification (Hall and du Gay, 1996, 1– 17). Cultural identity, or what Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994) refers to as the “nation,” is mediated through such discourses of identity or narrations that are nevertheless doubled. Post-Zionist counter-narratives of the nation disturb the ideological or essentialist identities constructed through pedagogic discourses of cultural identity. To use Derrida’s deconstructive terminology, the condition of Zionism’s possibility, is at the same time its condition of impossibility (Thomassen, 2006, 6).
This reader opens up an interval or spacing between gender and Zionism in which both discourses intersect through various articulations and performances of difference. With Derrida, I understand “difference” here as a historicized space where women and nation intersect (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem, 1999, 1–16). Each essay focuses on the problem of difference differently, and all of them refuse essentialist definitions of the difference they examine.
In “The Evolution of Critical Paradigms in Israeli Feminist Scholarship: A Theoretical Model,” I call attention to different discourses of Israeli feminism. My argument is that contemporary Israeli feminism evolved through three phases: the liberal phase of the 1980s, the radical phase of the 1990s, and the postmodern phase since the turn of the millennium. All three phases overlap, each continues to be influential in academic and activist contexts, and all are linked by a commitment to critical thinking. By deconstructing first the state, then the nation, and finally Israeli feminism itself, Israeli feminists have continuously deepened their commitment to a transformative politics of knowledge. In the 1980s the liberal critique was focused on exposing the myth of gender equality in Israeli society by drawing on empiricist and positivist social scientific data. The implicit solution seemed to lie in increasing women’s access to male-dominated privilege through incremental inclusion. A top-down model of legislation, governmental and parliamentary commissions, and greater inclusion in existing male-dominated leaderships was believed to hold the key to eliminating discrimination. The radical critique of the 1990s pursued two modalities: a reconstruction of women’s cultural and literary traditions and a reevaluation of nationalist ideologies as inscribed in Zionist historiography and ethnographic culture. Rather than greater inclusion and equality, radical feminism pursued an analysis of cultural politics and transformational revisions of literature, politics, law, and society as inevitably gendered apparatuses that reproduce the problem even as they apparently seek to eliminate it. The postmodern phase ushered in a redefinition of power as discourse, thus paving the way to critiques of feminist scholarship and processes of knowledge production. In addition it introduced the concept of difference as fundamental to all definitions of feminist collective identity, thus enabling a powerful critique of hegemonic articulations of totalizing feminist agendas. The cultural politics of differences between and among Israeli women was analyzed by Mizrahi, Palestinian, and lesbian theorists who highlighted the institutional and discursive silencing of marginal women. The foregrounding of discourse and difference turned the critical lens on Israeli feminist scholarship itself, opening out new fields of research and activist agendas. Th