Lectures and presentation

Next Year in Tel Aviv: Queering the Representations from the "Outside" and the "Inside". Fiammetta Martegani and Chen Misgav

A paper for the "Spaces of Difference" in the University of Milano-Bicocca, October 20th 2010

In this paper we are going to present different narratives of the city of Tel Aviv, which is the cultural and economical capital of Israel and the most liberal city in the country. As such Tel Aviv serves as the LGBTQ center and as a magnet for those people that are immigrate to the city from all parts of the country. We would like to concentrate in the narratives of the city as a queer space from two different and complementary perspectives that will illustrate our peculiar points of view and our identities: the “outside”, an Italian straight researcher which spent her last two years in Tel Aviv, and the “inside”, Israeli gay researcher that actually live in the city for many years.
We will start talking about the historical Zionist narrative that contributed to construct the role of the city of Tel Aviv in the Israeli society and in the Israeli LGBTQ community, to move into some insights that arrow from the academic work. We will try to explore and to show the different ways people might experience the city, whether they are straight or part of LGBTQ community, citizens or foreigners, and we will illustrate this position by few kinds of visual methods, such as popular culture products, “regular” maps and “mental” maps.
We will use these two points of view in order to represent and to examine the interesting constructions of this complex multicultural, multisexual and full of different identities space.

The Night Club: the Sexualized Body, Identity and Space. Chen Misgav 

A paper for the pre-meeting of IGU Gender and Geography commission in Jerusalem, July 2010

There is a great deal of  discussion in "queer geography"  about the role that cultural sites such as bars, cafes and clubs play as places and spaces constituting gay identities and as sites of resistance against the homophobic society. However, these sites are usually perceived only from their outside scale, as a monochromic institute without paying enough attention to the dialectic relationships that take place in these inner spaces between sexuality and embodied performances that affect people's identity and thus transform these places into significant gay sites. 

In this paper I would like to present a research taken place in one of the most well-known gay night clubs in Israel – the Oman 17 club. In this club takes place a party known as FFF party, which has been running from the early 90's almost every Friday night, and became a famous name in gay nightlife scene and for the gay community in Tel-Aviv. It runs since 2004 based on   the famous Oman 17 club in Tel-Aviv that attracts mixture of gays, lesbians, straights and transgendered people. It probably became the most important going-out place for the transgendered people and maybe the only place that mixed gay men and transgendered women get together under one roof.

My research focuses on people and spaces on the event itself – the party and the interior halls and spaces of the club, where  bodily performances, drags, alcohol, sexual practices and music connects together. My main aim on this research is to check how bodily performances, gender and identity expressions define special spaces inside the club's halls. I conducted many field observations in the club and later on made some in-depth interviews with people who spent time in this club, focusing especially on gay men and transgendered women. I found out that although there is not any official separation between these two groups, each of them produces a kind of what Foucault defined as "heterotopy" in the space that helps to create  a "room for ourselves" inside the main space.  In my paper I discuss these different and unique constructions of sexual identity and the role of bodily performances and gender through the production of these heterotopias. I will show the extent to which space plays an important role in the construction of identity through body performances.

Contested Space/ Controlled Space: Community Garden and Urban Food Production. Efrat Eizenberg

A paper for FOOD POWER AND MEANING conference, June 14-15, Ben Gurion University

Community gardens are community green spaces which are used for cultivating vegetables, herbs and fruits as well as for social and recreational activities. Community gardening in urban settings becomes an increasingly widespread phenomenon taking roots also in Israel since 2000. This paper identifies three different types of communal urban food production relating to three political meanings of space: community gardens as spaces of contestation; community gardens as spaces of organized garden project; and community gardens as spaces of neoliberalization. This paper argues that while In the first type, powerless residents produce themselves as significant social actors constantly challenging the modus operndi of the local government. In the latter two types, a top-down control undermines the potential for a critical edge that may be developed out of urban communal food production sites.

Government Control of People's Food Consumption and Daily Food Practices: Effect on Sense of Belonging. Goor Somer

A paper for FOOD POWER AND MEANING conference, June 14-15, Ben Gurion University

Times of need pose a challenge both to governments and to the population. Immediately following its independence, Israel faced a dilapidated infrastructure and major shifts in population. To ensure the citizens' basic needs, one of the government's actions was to implement a policy of austerity known as the Tzena period. During that time, goods (primarily food) were rationed. This presentation will outline the austerity policy as a modern economic plan ascribed by a government in an attempt to enforce social-economic fairness.  This top-down policy will be contrasted with documented coping strategies used by citizens (bottom-up). Israeli citizens developed various strategies to cope with the austerity policy. Ways of coping spanned from political struggle, personal sacrifice, and use of the black market, to reliance on communal help and gardening. By examining the different modes of food practice used by citizens in the context of one monolithic food policy, it is possible to reconstruct citizens' sense belonging, a term used in contemporary social geographic discourse to describe residents' attachment to their physical and social surroundings.