Thesis advisor: William A. Gamson / Taking an intersectional approach, I show how news media portrayals of neoliberal welfare reform and welfare rights movements are rooted in culture-specific racial and gendered ideologies. Using critical discourse analysis in combination with frame analysis, I analyze 462 articles published in two central newspapers in Massachusetts (The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald) and in Israel (Haaretz and Yediot Achronot) during the public debates on welfare reform in 1995 and 2003 respectively. I trace the surprising discursive success of the Israeli welfare rights movement in the news media, and compare it with the failure of their American counterparts. At the conclusion of the dissertation, I offer an intersectional cultural explanation for this phenomenon. My findings are twofold: on the one hand, I find that the news media and elite actors used culturally-hegemonic sexist, racist, and classist discourses to stigmatize and silence welfare mothers and to justify neoliberal policies. Both the American and the Israeli news media tapped into readily available gender-specific racial discourses to discredit welfare recipients and welfare activists and to silence them. On the other hand, I demonstrate that the Israeli case is nevertheless quite distinct. The Israeli movement was more successful in discursively challenging the neoliberal welfare discourse than its counterparts in the U.S. I argue that what accounts for this difference are three unique cultural features of Israeli society: First, (1), a nationalist fertility discourse that served as a value system alternative to the neoliberal logic; second, (2), related to this, a strong "heroic mother" ethos that is a part of the Zionist nation-building project, which valorizes Jewish motherhood and thus provided an ambiguous entry point to the public sphere for Jewish mothers; and third, (3), a nationalist tension between Jewish-Israelis and Palestinian-Israelis that stimulates perceptions of Mizrahi women (i.e. Jewish women of North African and Middle Eastern descent) as a part of the imagined national collectivity, thus lessening their stigmatization and exclusion. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_101575 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Milman, Noa |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. |
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