Women's body as a live political message: the individual and collective body in the vigils of Women in Black in Israel

The paper addresses the issue of the centrality of the body to social protest. It combines insights from theories of social movements, classical sociological theories and feminist perspectives on the lived body experience. Using data collected through ethnographic observation and interviews the paper explores the bodily practices of the vigils of Women in Black in Haifa Israel as they are performed in the public space, in real time. The analysis explores the ways in which WIB dramatize their individual bodies in order to communicate an oppositional political message of defiance and the ways in which the bodily practices of the vigil give rise to a collective body which becomes the message. It further demonstrates that the collective body that emerges at the site of the vigil has a double meaning. It is both a metaphorical message of power delivered to society and at the same time it is a vibrant, embracing, warm living body which is experienced by the women as having a liminal existence. It is claimed that even though the analysis is focused on a specific Israeli case, it has general relevance to the study of the protesting body in other societies, and it has also a theoretical contribution towards the understanding of dynamic processes of protest in real time and space.