Beautiful Israeli Girls: Between Being in the Present and Future Unpredictability

Abstract

In this chapter I treat women’s beauty as a form of aesthetic labour and ask how it is represented in popular culture. Specifically, and using popular culture’s images and representations of Israeli girls and young women, this chapter identifies a tension between two temporal logics that characterise neoliberal outlooks. On the one hand, entrepreneurial and aspirational neoliberal subjects must be reflexive and always changing and in the process of subjectification or ‘becoming’. On the other hand, they must also act responsibly and render a self-assured personhood and ‘being’. This raises the following question: if projecting beauty, self-aestheticising and excitable self-presentation have become prerequisites for employability, as critical theorists of neoliberalism suggest (see below), how does beauty make visible a person’s inner capacities for simultaneous ‘being’ and ‘becoming’? I will address the tension between personhood (being) and subjectification (becoming) through a brief examination of a 2014 coffee table fashion/art/erotic book entitled Israeli Girls that has provoked an interest in Israeli media. As the Israeli-born photographer Dafy Hagai explained in several newspaper interviews, she hand-picked her subjects according to whether she ‘felt connected to what they projected and to how they look’. Hagai also said: ‘If someone sparked an interest in me and we had a good vibe between the two of us then I took her picture. The outcome is diverse’ (Hagai, quoted in Shalev 2014, np). The photographer thus presents her work as a form of curation of individual singularities. As she describes it, it was through the supposedly authentic ‘appeal’, ‘beauty’, ‘connection’, ‘vibe’ or ‘attention’—the aesthetic labour of being herself that each of the models performed in real life even before she was actually photographed—that the book receives its value as a ‘diverse’ work of art. Specifically, this chapter argues that as a representative of contemporary popular cultural artefacts, Israeli Girls utilises an imaginary space between being and becoming, between local and cosmopolitan Israeliness (a point I shall return to below), and, ultimately, between art and commodified life. In this, Israeli Girls represents the logic of current capitalism, whereby non-work activities are deemed empowering, liberating and non-exploitive and lifeworlds become exchangeable assets for employment.