“Every Now and Then, a Floor Rag Flies at Me": The Politics of Cleanliness in the Art of Mizrahi Women

Abstract

How does Zionism's relation to Mizrahi women affect their situated imagination of identity? This article offers an answer to the question through a close reading of artworks by third-generation Mizrahi women artists. In their works the artists reveal a struggle between their lived experience of an emotional burden; an intergenerational inheritance assigned to them against their will: cleaning work, and the desire to imagine a future beyond it and the social limitations that constructed it. Against the backdrop of this struggle, and in response to it, I argue that the artists use their work as an arena of Mizrahi feminist situated imagination through which they negotiate their forced identity and resist the emotional politics in Mizrahi women's cleaning work using artistic identity management strategies to seek a sense of worth. They do so while creating a shift from the institutional construction of Mizrahi women's image in Zionist visual colonial archives as the voiceless racialized intranational "others" of Zionism, to their own self-imaging.