The college hookup scene is a profoundly gendered and heteronormative sexual field. Yet the party and bar scene that gives rise to hookups also fosters the practice of women kissing other women in public, generally to the enjoyment of male onlookers, and sometimes facilitates threesomes involving same-sex sexual behavior between women. In this article, we argue that the hookup scene serves as an opportunity structure to explore same-sex attractions and, at least for some women, to later verify bisexual, lesbian, or queer sexual identities. Based on quantitative and qualitative data and combining queer theory and identity theory, we offer a new interpretation of women’s same-sex practices in the hookup culture. Our analysis contributes to gender theory by demonstrating the utility of identity theory for understanding how non-normative gender and sexual identities are negotiated within heteronormatively structured fields.

This paper offers a qualitative empirical examination of the noncompliance of Israeli female welfare recipients with welfare laws and authorities. The paper demonstrates that their behavior, defined as “welfare fraud” by the law, is a limited form of collective resistance to the Israeli welfare state. Although the acts of welfare fraud that the women in my study engaged in entail a political claim against the state, the relationship between these acts and notions of collectivity is very constricted in form. The women's collectivity is shown to be constrained by the welfare authorities' invasive and pervasive investigation practices and methods. Due to fear of disclosure to the authorities, the women emerged as deliberately isolating themselves from their immediate environment and potential members of their like‐situated collective. This weakens the connection between the women's acts of resistance and their collectivity, and prevents their acts of resistance from driving social change, trapping them in their harsh conditions and existence.

This article offers a qualitative empirical examination of the ways in which Israeli family members of elderly persons evaluate live-in elder care and translate their evaluations into monetary value. The author explores the relationship between family members’ views of appropriate wages for live-in elder care providers and their perceptions of their own power relations with their parents’ caregivers. The findings demonstrate that family members who perceive such power to be held one-sidedly, either by themselves or by their caregivers, also argue that the state’s minimum wage is appropriate for the work of caregiving. The findings also establish that family members who recognize codependence in their relationships with caregivers believe that live-in caregivers should receive a wage much higher than the minimum. Exposing the convoluted relationship between perceptions of power and perceptions of value in live-in care shifts our understanding of the possible mechanisms that shape the low monetary value assigned to care work.

This article exposes the political dimension of welfare fraud by investigating—in the context of the Israeli welfare reform of 2003—how forty‐nine Israeli women who live on welfare justify welfare fraud. I find that women's justifications cannot be fully explained by traditional noncompliance theories that view welfare fraud as an individual, private, criminal activity that solely reflects on the fraudster's moral character or desperate need. Instead, women's justifications for welfare fraud are better understood as a sociopolitical struggle for inclusion and deservedness—as a political act that reflects an alternative concept of citizenship with respect to women's unpaid care work.

The article offers a fresh perspective on the social value of paid care, and how we, as a society, can assign its full value. The social importance of paid care is highly reliant on the nonmarket attributes of the care offered. Thus, care is extremely valuable when it is bestowed with loving presence, kindness, and concern. The nonmarket characteristics of care work establish unique types of ties that transform egoistic individuals into a human society. However, the social import of this work is not acknowledged when we rely on the market to reflect care's value. Flattening the value of care solely based on its market dimension may lead to care being emptied of its nonmarket elements over time, transforming the essence of care, the relationships within which care is given as well as the identity and social fabric of the welfare state. To sustain and foster the nonmarket attributes of paid care, the article proposes a theoretical notion of reciprocity-rather than exchange-on the axis between the family, the community, and the state as a way to ascribe nonmonetized value to these attributes.