Abstract
In many national contexts, young to middle-age ‘single’ men who have never married or lived in a marriage-like couple arrangement match or outnumber ‘single’ women in the same age group, but it is the latter who attract disproportionate attention in popular culture and are more likely to be subjected to stereotyping in media discourse, often in ways that are misogynistic. Academic research on singlesness is relatively sparse but again disproportionately focused on women. Kinneret Lahad explains this focus with respect to her own study as an attempt to understand how patriarchy and heteronormativity affect women’s lives. She begins her book with the personal anecdote of a colleague asking her 30+ year-old self, how it could be that a woman like her was still single. The evidence she amasses demonstrate very clearly that, in the study context, in her nation of residence, Israel, cultural reinforcement of ‘a heteronormative temporal order’ continues to tell single women that they are both out of place and out of time.
The data she draws on are primarily online media products focusing on singlehood and single women but, as she acknowledges, particularly heterosexual, cisgender, white, Jewish, middle-to-upper class, able-bodied single women. She visited the columns published on the Israeli portal Ynet daily over a 10-year period from 2006 to 2016. Her analysis also draws on relevant articles identified on weekly visits to other news websites and web platforms constituting the Israeli online sphere, including relevant blogs and social media debates identified through google searches. Recognising that media discourse is not contained within national boundaries, she also includes analysis of relevant films and TV series circulating internationally, such as Sex and the City, Girls, The Bachelorette and the Bridget Jones films.
Her analysis focuses on the discursive constructions of time that frame how people make sense of and seek to organise the lives of people without partners. The text seeks to build on and elaborates existing theorising and empirical contributions to the study of time, gender and singlehood. Chapters are loosely organised around different explorations of temporality. These include hegemonic assertions and disturbances of the temporal linearity of the life course, ideas of age-appropriateness and accounts of becoming single as a biographical disruption. Chapters also explore constructions of single women as wasting time, taking time out, various forms of waiting and the awkwardness of the special family times of high days and holidays. The final chapter brings together discussion of alternatives to hegemonic temporalities and narratives of resistance to time norms. The overall picture resonates with British and North American work on singles in its combination of optimism about social change with demonstration of how far there is still to go before the intersection of ‘woman’ and ‘single’ is no longer only widely intelligible as a passing phase.
What makes this work of additional interest is that Israel is a relatively extreme case; Lahad refers to the ‘traditionalism–modernism paradox’ of contemporary Israeli society. Sociologists of nationalism have long recognised state interests in controlling women and their familial status in their attempts to ensure the physical and symbolic reproduction of a nation and people (Yuval-Davis, 1980, 1998). Jewish marriage remains a religious duty and a very strongly state endorsed national project. The politically laden emphasis on marriage in Jewish Israeli society is more muted or perhaps almost absent in some European contexts. Civil marriage continues to have restricted availability within Israel (Bystrov, 2012). As Lahad notes, the emphasis on marriage among Jewish Israelis remains routinely expressed in clichés, even to young children. Her narrow focus on the most advantaged sector of Israeli society is a strength as well as an obvious limitation; she is directly addressing the dominant sources of the patriarchal and heteronormative discourse and the social media responses of the women best able to resist. Her study is a welcome addition to a growing international literature scrutinising the social and cultural room for manoeuvre at the intersection of partnerships status, domestic arrangements, sexuality and gender as a barometer of wider social inequalities and social change.
