Silenced Reality: Power Relations between Marital Blueprints in Israeli Marriages

Abstract

In this study we examined the effect of job insecurity on couples' relationships in the context of recent macro‐level economic changes in Israel. Based on Hajer's discourse interaction approach, we conceptualized marital relationships and particularly the marital conversation as contested terrain reflecting power relations between social forces and their related discourses. We interviewed seventeen couples in which at least one of the partners suffered from job insecurity in order to trace forms of emotion work and silence in their marital interaction. We found that couples experienced a decreased ability to speak with each other. In their accounts of this experience, gendered “story lines” that we interpreted as “new” to the relationship emerged. Women's emotion work was indicative and halted change‐directed marital negotiation. The possibility that authoritative gendered relationships are reinforced in Israeli marriages during times of job insecurity is thus supported.