“What Is a Girlfriend?”: Toward a Political Concept of the Girlfriend

In September 2014 the Israeli Parliament Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality held a special meeting to discuss state recognition of girlfriends of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers who died during their military service. The girlfriends, represented in the meeting by an organization called the Girlfriends of Fallen IDF Soldiers (GFIDF) (titled originally the Non-Profit Organization for Emotional Support of Girlfriends [Fiancées] of Fallen Soldiers of Israel Defense Forces), demanded that their loss be acknowledged by the military administration. The meeting protocol provides a record of what seems to be a clash between two orders. The head of the IDF Casualties Administration, Colonel Yaffa Mor, proclaims that for its conduct the army needs concrete criteria that explicate what exactly is a girlfriend: “[the army needs] a hundred percentage certainty, because [what constitutes] a family is definite.” Colonel Mor’s administration of bereavement is based on data that the army retrieves from soldiers in advance and relies on the family form to acknowledge loss. Yet the girlfriend, unlike the family, does not yield to bureaucracy. The state Ministry of Defense and military officials hold that the sovereign’s recognition of loss can be formalized through blood, law, or property, whereas the girlfriends speak in the name of informal love and intimacy. […]