Contenu du sommaire : Sexualités

Modesty and its ambiguities, from Antiquity to modern times
Modesty, or the tendency to refrain from showing, observing or making a point of certain parts of the body, especially those of a sexual nature, has been variously judged, criticised and analysed over the ages. This article describes some of the changing perceptions of “modesty”, with its underlying ambiguities, since Antiquity.

Talking about sexuality in interview situations : guidelines for bringing private matters into the public sphereIn interview situations that address sexuality, the problematical point is not so much talking about sexuality as, more generally, how to address private matters when they are to be brought into the public sphere. This article on methodology reviews various “tricks of the trade”, drawing on a recent survey conducted by the author and on the theoretical and empirical contributions of a seminar organised at the EHESS (School of higher studies in social sciences), and focusing on three issues : the attention that should be given to the register of vocabulary, inasmuch as it determines forms of communication in interview situations, taking questions of gender and heteronormativity into account during the survey process as a whole, and the idea that the stance taken by the interviewer influences the defence of “points of view” in interview situations.

Street flirt versus net flirt : how (not) to pull a bird on line
Based on an ethnographic survey conducted in France from 2007 to 2011 on young men aged 18 to 35 who had signed up to coaching sessions on how to chat up girls, this article looks into the connections between gender and seduction according to whether the young men's attempts take place in the street or on the Internet. When analysed, the contrasting images of the street flirt versus the Net flirt brought up by the young men interviewed outline a model of masculinity that relegates other forms of masculinity to the sidelines.

Love in the plural and communication : debt, counter-debt and constructive jealousy
The emotional and sexual career of women who move from adultery to sexual hedonism and on to polyamory opens up a field for studies of communication patterns, both verbal and non-verbal, between these women and their partners, especially their spouses. A dual trend emerges : the interplay of debt and counter-debt within couples, which can show jealousy in a constructive light, and social screening of the potential lover(s) of each spouse, through which the latter exert some control over the risks of a mismatch.

Sexualised behaviour and power in women's prisons
Women in goal tend to adopt deliberately sexualised behaviour towards the men they encounter in the prison environment, including coarse jokes, shameless taunts and exhibitionism, all of which are related to demonstrations of power. This form of communication is part of a trend in gender relationships in the biographies of women prisoners.

Sexuality in the women's press : the turning point of 1968During the 1960s, the women's weekly Elle began to publish features on women's sexuality, reflecting the profound changes brought by the second feminist wave that gave women the freedom to control their own bodies. This revolution obviously changed the place and the role of sexuality, as sexual fulfilment between partners became a central issue in the life of couples. This article shows how the magazine both reflected and contributed to these changes as it adopted a variety of stances according to the different journalists and media genres.

Berlusconi's “bunga bunga” and the “totty factor” on Italian neo-television
The Rubygate scandal, which broke in 2010, was taken up by the media across the world and triggered numerous protests in Italy. It boomeranged on Silvio Berlusconi, who had caused the scandal, just as neo-television can boomerang on its high priests. By becoming a reality show star, il Cavaliere conquered political power by playing on the popular imagination aroused by neotelevision. Now hoist by his own peta rd, he has become the victim of what propelled him to success.

Sexuality and the redistribution of power in American TV series
In becoming separate from marriage and reproduction, sexuality is now recognised as multi-faceted. This is reflected in American TV series : the redistribution of power brought by feminist movements is shown first of all in the counter-hegemonic strategies of thirty-something heroines whose sex life, in the mid-1990s, became influenced by neo-feminism. By the early 2000s, TV characters were shown as attempting to establish democracy in couples through the creation of a public sphere of private matters. Sexuality, as a result, has gradually become a construction site for couples.

Sexuality in transgender and trans-sexual media subjects
The establishment of transgender and trans-sexual identities as a fact of social life, a has triggered a great deal of discussion on gender and sexuality. This issue has been making news since the media frenzy around transgender Christine Jorgensen's arrival at New York airport in 1953, the media coverage of “shemales” and the Bois de Boulogne transvestites in the 1980s and 1990s, through to contemporary Internet pornography, creating confusion, divisions and competition on the ground. Drawing on the results of a study conducted from 2008 to 2012 and on audiovisual archives, this article shows the complex and interacting processes at work in the media construction of trans-identities.

Cyber-eroticism and the body
Why has disembodied eroticism remained such a constant feature in simulations of the unconscious, from the films of David Cronenberg to hentai fetish games ? In studying erotic communication, pornographic video games are worth investigation as an experience of the inner self, as expressed in Brett Leonard's film The Lawnmower Man. What does this experience tell us about our relationship with the virtual ? Are we playing out a “farewell to the body”, or a new form of eroticism ?

Pornography and its regulation
From the invention of obscenity as a category of censorship in the early 19th century to the first moral crusades against the democratisation of pornography at the century's end, new relationships between knowledge and power emerged around the effects of pornography on the bodies and behaviour of supposedly vulnerable audiences. Retracing the emergence of this system of regulation of images and bodies sheds light in turn on contemporary developments : how do these knowledge and power relationships evolve into their modern configurations at times of moral panic over cases involving gang rape or “sex addicts” ?

Sexuality and the family circle : an anthropological perspective
Societies have always been wary of sexuality, preferring the family as the means for ensuring reproduction and for securing the necessary conditions to preserve social continuity. Anthropology tells us how, by artificially creating differences through cultural factors, early societies invented ways of controlling sexuality and creating unassailable social ties to bind communities together. Our question here is what this can bring to our thinking on the contemporary family, which, contrary to those in early societies, is created by desire and cemented by romantic love and sexual fulfilment.

Normative sexualisation in the public sphere
The borderline between public and private has shifted throughout history, following the broader contours of social segmentation. Examples are the crystallisation of the medical “gender difference” model from the 18th century and the invention of gender binarism (homo/heterosexuality) in the 19th. Such, at least, is the hypothesis made by authors in the wake of gender studies, and especially of “queer theory”. The aim here is to tease out the threads of these possible problematics by looking into gender binarism in media output, in order to outline how the public sphere is grasped from the “queer” perspective.

On the legitimacy of government communication on sexuality : the case of AIDS prevention campaigns from 1987 to 2007This article reviews trends in government campaigns on AIDS prevention from 1987 to 2007 in France, in which sexual practices have become increasingly explicit. We then analyse the factors of legitimisation that have enabled the public authorities to communicate more and more freely on sexuality in these campaigns.

Antagonistic views on prostitution as a social phenomenon
Prostitution arouses diametrically opposed views and contradictory tendencies as regards its patterns of regulation in society. In an attempt to elucidate the singular vehemence of this controversy, this paper first explains the axiological conflict that underlies the arguments of activists, before relating it to recent transformations in sexual normativity in western societies.

The Femen, bare-breasted emancipation ?
Drawing on a study of the media treatment of the Femen feminist movement, this article reports on discursive output around “emancipation”. Through association with the figure of the Amazons, who are bare-breasted and therefore liberated, the Femen embody emancipation by using their nude breasts as a “weapon” against sexism. But there are two problems : adopting the rhetoric of choice opens the way to the sexualisation of the Femen activists, while their actions in stark contrast with the “Islamic veil” anchors the approach in the world of white women.

Paradox and conflict around sexuality in institutionalised “mentally handicapped” people
Perceived for centuries either as asexual “angels” or as oversexed “beasts”, those who used to be described as “mentally retarded” are now being recognised as people. But with the advent of the sexual health concept, sexuality is now seen as a right for all, handicapped or not. This trend has brought profound changes, which this article analyses in sociological terms, in educational stances regarding support for the “mentally handicapped” in managing their sex lives.

Over thirty years (1960-1990), through battles for contraception, abortion, women's rights and the recognition of homosexuality, Europe experienced a radical break with the past whose importance we no longer always realise. Everything changed, from the structure of the family unit and relationships with our children to individual liberties.

The labour movement and the reorganisation of the social sphere in Egypt
Contrary to mainstream views in international journalism, the collective movement that overturned President Moubarak's regime in 2011 was not a spontaneous popular uprising that occurred outside the party political apparatus and without any long-term vision, nor did it stem from a programme for radical regime change. The sudden mass outcry of private grievances in the public sphere was the fruit of profound social changes and of a lengthy and irreversible process of delegitimisation of state power that had reached maturity. This paper seeks to shed light on the Egyptian labour movement that spearheaded the critique of the regime and the confrontations between the State and the people, thus promoting the emergence of a public sphere that was at once the place and the necessary condition for the critical and emancipating communication that occurred. Our theoretical model here is the analytical category of the “public sphere”, which is always linked to a unique development in civil society, in problematical socio-historical circumstances that generate the normative ideals required for their transformation to occur.