Dr. Dana Kaplan is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication and in the MA Program in Cultural Studies. A cultural sociologist, Dana investigates the relationships between class-making processes under neoliberal capitalism, value regimes, and aesthetic judgments in everyday life. She is specifically interested in middle class cultures, lifestyles, practices of embodiment, and most significantly – sex and sexuality. Her recent studies focus on middle-class heterosexual relations; the media's role in introducing new classed ideals of creativity and self-realization through the concept of sexual freedom; and the connections between sexual experimentalism and employability. Her research on facial beauty and social class was financed by the Israel Science Foundation. Her book
What is Sexual Capital?, co-authored with Eva Illouz, was published in 2022 by Polity Press and translated to several languages.
Dana is currently working on several digital sociology research projects, including digital sexual story-telling and the platformization of recreational sexuality; digital self-documentation and life in persistent poverty;
and a pilot study on implementing AI tools for a gender-based longitudinal paralinguistic microanalysis of an audiovisual archive.
Selected Publications:
Digisex. With Lahav Raz, Yeela. In Dennis Waskul & David W. Wahl (Eds), The Elgar Encyclopedia of Sex and Society. (forthcoming).
Sexual Capital. In Kuipers, Giselinde and Sarpila, Outi (eds). Handbook of Beauty and Inequality. Springer (forthcoming).
Setting Tables: Commensality, Social Boundaries and Inter-Cultural Exchange. With Furstenberg, Yair, Wasserman, Natan and Weiss, Zeev. Magness Press, 2025.
Disillusionment. Israel Studies in Language and Society, 19, 84-89. 2024.
What is Sexual Capital? with Eva Illouz, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022
‘Ain’t I a human being?’: Self-documentation of living in poverty in the face of the abandoning state. With Levy, G., Biton, A., Kohan-Benlulu, R., & Buzhish-Sasson, H. Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 30(3), 2022. (Israeli Sociological Society best article award 2023, second place)