“My Life? There Is Not Much to Tell”: On Voice, Silence and Agency in Interviews With First-Generation Mizrahi Jewish Women Immigrants to Israel

Abstract

From early 1980s, a large body of feminist literature has been attempting to account for and explain the particular mix of fragmented speech and multiple silences characteristic of interviews with subaltern subjects.The authors offer an epistemological challenge to these orthodoxies on two levels. First, the authors challenge the very premise that views the accounts produced by marginalized research participants as failures that need to be overcome through methodological strategies, proposing instead to understand silence and fragmentation as part of the process through which they develop their sense of self and agency. Second, the authors insist that both the micro interview setting and the macro, sociohistorical contexts must be considered and analyzed within the same framework that positions the research participant at the center. The authors illustrate these arguments through the case study of multiply marginalized Jewish women who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s from North Africa and Asia.