Emotional politics instil insecurity and doubt in working-class individuals. Researchers examining social degradation through (bad) employment or other stigma have demonstrated the exclusionary impact of this process. Some suggest that individuals respond to such emotional politics and other types of exclusion by identity-management strategies aiming at a sense of worth, whereas others have found self-isolation to dominate. Here we analyse the emotional politics emerging from women's responses to exclusion in the socially degraded field of cleaning in three ethno-national contexts in Israel. The sample was composed of Mizrahi women in the southern periphery, immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and Israeli-Palestinian women from Arab settlements in the north. By analysing cleaning employees' talk, we characterize these women's struggle to derive a sense of worth from their breadwinning experience within a specific ethno-national context in terms of family, community and workplace. We discuss the similarities and differences among these three groups with regard to the relative weight of each of these circles for negotiation of belonging and inclusion.

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From early 1980s, a large body of feminist literature has been attempting to account for and explain the particular mix of fragmented speech and multiple silences characteristic of interviews with subaltern subjects.The authors offer an epistemological challenge to these orthodoxies on two levels. First, the authors challenge the very premise that views the accounts produced by marginalized research participants as failures that need to be overcome through methodological strategies, proposing instead to understand silence and fragmentation as part of the process through which they develop their sense of self and agency. Second, the authors insist that both the micro interview setting and the macro, sociohistorical contexts must be considered and analyzed within the same framework that positions the research participant at the center. The authors illustrate these arguments through the case study of multiply marginalized Jewish women who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s from North Africa and Asia.

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