Medical Violence in Israeli Literature: The Mining Women Genre

Abstract: This Article outlines a historiography of the topic of medical violence against women in Israeli literature. It suggests three waves of writing on the subject and focuses mainly on the third, a contemporary wave centering on fertility. The first wave includes works by Amalia Kahana-Carmon and Eda Zoritte, among the first women writers of the state generation, who wrote local modernist versions of anti-psychiatry fiction, emphasizing the consciousness of the characters. The second wave is that of the generation of postmodern writers, including works by Lea Aini, Orly Castel-Bloom and Ronit Matalon, who continue to focus on the total institution, but parodically, emphasizing the intersections between medical violence and marginalized social and ethnic groups. The third wave belongs to a generation of contemporary writers who are no longer concerned with the total institution, but rather describe medical violence that takes place in the community, during fertility treatments, fertility preservation and births. Their works in what is defined here as the "mining women genre" are characterized by grotesque realism. This mimetic genre does not draw the reader to doubt the reality of the narrative but allows her to be a partner in resisting the subject's feelings of "medical gaslighting," rooted in the body. The reader becomes a witness to the heroine's story and helps her overcome intertwined feelings of guilt, shame and alienation from the body.