Abstract
This article examines the accounts of prisoners’ wives in Israel regarding their relationships with social workers. Meetings with social workers are mandatory for wives to obtain benefits for their husbands and children. The principal findings describe the overt objection by the prisoners’ wives to the psychological discourse that the social workers offer, as well as the therapeutic subjectivity ideal, and the vulnerable femininity that accompanies this discourse. Furthermore, the article reveals the agentic decisions by these prisoners’ wives to switch from one resistance strategy (overt resistance) to another (compromise attempts), and then a third (strategic passing). The discussion section depicts the research singularity of our article in the context of the link between welfare, therapeutic governance, and resistance.
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Notes
The interviews were conducted only with Jewish women since both researchers are Jews who mainly study Jewish society in Israel. Furthermore, the population of Arab prisoners and their wives has unique attributes associated with their status as a minority in Israel (Goldberg 2015).
The primary themes presented in this article were independently extracted by each one of the authors of the article. Each researcher did his/her own qualitative analysis of the transcripts of the interviews that he/she conducted. Afterwards, a mutual decision was reached to conduct a more meticulous analysis of shared themes. We did not identify significant differences between the authors regarding content that arose in the interviews.
For medicalization of welfare recipients see Schram 2000.
Jews originating from Europe and North America.
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Frantsman-Spector, A., Shoshana, A. Shameless Accounts: Against Psychological Subjectivity and Vulnerable Femininity Among Prisoners’ Wives in Israel. Qual Sociol 41, 381–398 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9391-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9391-1