Emotional politics instil insecurity and doubt in working-class individuals. Researchers examining social degradation through (bad) employment or other stigma have demonstrated the exclusionary impact of this process. Some suggest that individuals respond to such emotional politics and other types of exclusion by identity-management strategies aiming at a sense of worth, whereas others have found self-isolation to dominate. Here we analyse the emotional politics emerging from women's responses to exclusion in the socially degraded field of cleaning in three ethno-national contexts in Israel. The sample was composed of Mizrahi women in the southern periphery, immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and Israeli-Palestinian women from Arab settlements in the north. By analysing cleaning employees' talk, we characterize these women's struggle to derive a sense of worth from their breadwinning experience within a specific ethno-national context in terms of family, community and workplace. We discuss the similarities and differences among these three groups with regard to the relative weight of each of these circles for negotiation of belonging and inclusion.

Investigating the possibilities of change in marital relationships, we argue, involves examining the interplay of gender consciousness, relational resources and material circumstances in their concrete, interactional manifestations. The attempt to address this interface is grounded in the idea that understanding gender relations necessarily involves both institutional and interactional dimensions. While much research has been devoted to the influence of material or structural resources on indicators such as the domestic division of labour, relatively little direct attention has been given to the issue of differing 'relational' or interpersonal resources. We use a multi-method approach based on interviews with women in different occupations to analyse possibilities of change in marital communication and the domestic division of labour in relation both to women's material and to their relational resources. We conclude that a combination of increased gender consciousness and the development of particular inter-personal skills facilitates negotiation and change in the boundaries regulating both communication and the domestic division of labour within the marital relationship.

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Scholars of intimate partner violence (IPV) cite the various forms of IPV perpetrated by violent male partners to establish their coercive control over women. This scholarship emphasizes IPV’s long-term destructive effects on survivors’ lives. However, until recently, the role of the state in the relationship between different manifestations of IPV has received little attention, leaving hazy the meaning of absent formal legislation. An opportunity to clarify the significance of this condition lies in Israel, where economic abuse is not yet recognized as grounds for legal and social sanctions. Based on in-depth interviews with 33 IPV survivors, the present study explores state actions involved in transitions between types of violence as revealed in cases of ongoing economic abuse.

Cultural trends shape the experience of marriage by forming expectations, entitlements and obligations. The self-development discourse generated by the therapeutic culture has been suggested as playing a part in such shaping. This paper examines how this particular discourse affects the way women experience their marital conversations and, more specifically, the extent to which they feel able to initiate change-directed negotiation within them. Twenty-eight professional women in England, selected to reflect different occupational exposures to the self-development discourse, were interviewed in order to examine their experiences of the marital conversation and possible changes within it. The analysis shows that specific feeling rules limit the possibility of women's concerns entering the marital conversation, and that the self-development discourse can introduce alternative feeling rules with the potential to overcome such limitations. It is shown that women who are influenced by the ideological messages equating change with relationship improvement contained within this discourse are able to adopt its proposed feeling rules and to use them to introduce negotiation into their marital conversations. These women are able to use this increased negotiability within the marital conversation to become more powerful in shaping their marital experiences.

Previous studies on women’s experiences with sexually explicit material used by their long-term partners indicate that women’s responses were complex. Neutrality and acceptance were the dominant responses even though some women continued to report negative emotions and experiences. This complexity has not yet been explored from the perspective of maintaining intimacy and the meanings of togetherness. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with 20 Israeli Jewish women, we identified a process in women who expect to have passionate and sexually active relationships. Apparently, embracing pornography and using it as a guiding resource for developing couples’ sexuality is characteristic of women for whom togetherness implies the need to nurture mutual passion. We also examine how pornographic images of intimacy in heterosexual relationships can lead to the development of alienated and hierarchical sexuality in the lives of married women who feel entitled to fulfill their sexuality.

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Poverty knowledge has made a long-term contribution to the images and representations of people in poverty. Yet one can find only limited analysis of poverty knowledge and the politics of representation. This article describes current directions in poverty knowledge and analyses the degree of their enhancement or their challenging of Othering towards people who live in poverty. Specifically, the article refers to the hegemonic narrative, which reflects and creates stigmatized and punitive representations of people in poverty, and to three counter-narratives that try to challenge these reductionist images: the structural/contextual counter-narrative, the agency/resistance counter-narrative and the counter-narrative of voice and action. The analysis highlights the critical value of each of the counter-narratives, while pointing to the possibility that specific usages of these stances of investigation carry the risk of themselves producing Othering and social distancing. The article concludes by referring to several approaches to poverty research which encourage a resistance to Othering through combining components of the three counter-narratives.