Talking Politics: The Delimitation of the ‘Political’ As a Gendered Disciplinary Mechanism in Intra-Group Dialogue Among Young Israelis.

The current research concentrates on the discursive mechanisms that construct the way young Israeli women and men talk about politics. Our work is based on two case studies of intra-group dialogue groups comprised of Israeli women and men that were held between the years 2013-2015 at Ben Gurion University in the Negev. Each group met for weekly sessions along two semesters. In the meetings, the group members encountered Palestinian collective narratives followed by processing sessions in which they discussed and expressed their thoughts and feelings regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Analyzing the discourse in these two groups, we argue that the political space is being marked, defined and delimited through gendered discursive practices, creating hierarchies between emotional and cognitive knowledge. We present the different roles participants take in the group, and address the different disciplinary mechanisms and practices of resistance that are being used by participants in the group. We address three main strategies: cognitive talk, emotional talk and silence and their manifestation within different phases in the group process.

Finally, we discuss the meanings of the internal group dynamic in face of the external socio-political processes that happened in these years, and in particular related to the 2014 Gaza war.