Contenu du sommaire : Sexe et politique

Behind the « midinette », as the sincere but slight lover, the « sweating system » of home sewing is looming. Essential figure of the femininity in the male imagination, the « midinette » is also associated with this form of subcontracting that feeds the garment division of the department stores. At the heart of the « social question » that haunts the late nineteenth century, she became one of the examples from which the lawyers of the Legislative Studies Society defined the « contract of employment » as a legal framework to qualify these department stores as their « employer ». From the 1910s, the « midinette » is no longer defined as only the working girl we can see lunch in public places, or participating in the joyous procession of the « catherinettes ». The processions turn in demonstrations of strikers demanding better working conditions. From the first war to the Popular Front, the « midinette » appear as the heroine of a forgotten working epic, contributing to progress as remarkable as the extension of collective agreements.

This article concerns women journalists working in major media in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, the southern province of China. The author shows the contradictions in which young women find themselves placed in a double bind, political and sexual domination, drastically limiting their professionnal ambitions. Logics of subjectivation are analysed pointing the usual traps of sociological interpretations and the ambiguities of the emancipation of work in a hypercapitalist society where the state party is omnipresent and omnipotent.

This article examines how the liberalism advent placed in the heart of the socialist reorganizations the questions of gender and sexuality. In front of various orders, women of the post-socialist world live complex and sometimes contradictory situations. The Mongolian « sexual culture » and the « sexual subcultures » propose a revealing example of these gendered dynamics all around the post-socialist world, today characterized by the revival of nationalistic ideals, male chauvinist and xenophobic. The analysis of two categories of economic-sexual exchange, mixt-marriages with a foreigner and the prostitution in China, illustrates how Mongolian women use their body and their sexuality as a way of emancipation and migration. This article so highlights how this « flight of the women » corresponds to a « crisis of the virility ».

A start of distance happens on works on sexuality that the HIV epidemic has encouraged. The choice of methods, the choice of objects and schools of thought, may have confirmed a neoliberal model that has eluded researchers who conducted them ? The issue goes beyond acceptance or refusal of an ideologie : it is consciousness that wants to treat this article, before talking about position. To do this, and without to be certain of bringing the debate into the public arena the things are moving, the article alternating elements of personal fields around sexuality and risk, and Abstracts elements.

Besides its geographical locations, the French territories of Guadeloupe and Guiana share a Caribbean and South-American culture but are under French rule of laws and norms. An anthropological research was undertaken (2008-2012) in Guadeloupe and Guiana, to explore the construction of gender norms with regards to HIV prevention. The question of gender in the Caribbean has multiple paradoxical roots in colonial history, in the creation, in 1946, of French « Départements », in independence movements (creole nationalism) and in the creolisation of the Caribbean world. The research brings to the fore the interplay and tensions that these socio-historical constructions have had and still have on sexuality and gender, creating a « gender and sexual apparatus ». The analysis of these paradoxes can highlight the ideological constructions that bring sexuality on the stage of politics. Analyzes of historical accounts, as well as the application of metropolitan public policies associated with Creole nationalism also reveal the social, economic and political constraints that help to shape gender relations. How does western standards of nuclear family and monogamy organise or « creolise » together with so called Caribbean norms regarding matrifocality or multi-partnership ? What do contemporary tensions and paradoxes in gender relation display ? How do Caribbean women free themselves from the burden of « respectability » that they should endorse ? How do men cope with their ambiguous social position ?These are some of the questions that this article attempts to explore by mobilizing an interpretative framework inspired by postcolonial studies and gender, class and race intersectionality theory. Through the imposition of Western subjectivity via the control of bodies, gender, reproduction and sexualities a « post-colonial bio-power » is revealed at the expense of a creolized way of life, paradoxically powered by Creole nationalism.

This article examines the claims for gender equality in the sphere of formal politics in Chile. First, it presents different historical phases, namely the two feminist waves and the period of « silence » between them. It then discusses how gender issues are currently addressed in Chilean politics and policies, focusing especially on the issue of sexual and reproductive rights. The political inclusion of gender equality reveals a tension between motherhood and individuality, which has led to a full-blown conflict in the framework of the gender policies implemented since the return of democracy in 1990. Indeed, these policies have not dealt with sexual and reproductive rights' shortcomings and claims.

Through an analysis of the mediatization of the French controversies about same-sex marriage, this essay seeks to analyze the argumentative registers of the movement contesting the reform. The media coverage of this protest movement reveals a discursive formation that at the same time promotes a rigid conception of « sexual difference » legitimizing gender inequality, and sustains the notion of ethnically inflected differences of civilization. Therefore this discursive formation tends to articulate two ways of naturalizing inequality. The space given to this discourse, that played a major part in the definition of the controversy, allows us to demonstrate how the mediatization of this debate has enabled the public articulation of an ethno-sexual differentialism that reinstates heterosexuality and gender asymmetry as safeguards of an ethnicized national identity.

Through a both socio-anthropological and historical approach, this article seeks to analyze the imbrication of gender, religion and nation in contemporary Iraq. It relies on a ethnography of the post-2003 Iraqi women's movement and a study of gender politics in the country from the period of the ba'ath regime to the occupation of the country by the US-led forces.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the global norms of gender as varied and contradictory by examining the current gap between the representations of these ones and their multiple uses in France, China and Mexico. Genders, feminisms, sexualities are at the core of these analysis that mingles several methods, epistemological, anthropological and political.

Although the 1970s were marked by what is quickly called the « sexual revolution », activists, meanwhile, claim the revolution challenged for most this expression. This article examines therefore the politicization of sex in communist revolutionary organizations to better understand the importance accorded to sexuality, how it is transformed into political object but also how it is an object of tearing : on psychoanalysis, homosexuality, sexuality of activists, the positions are very different. However one thing is certain : a « revolution » implies radical political and social change, the condition of a « sexual revolution » is the overthrow of the capitalist system. This is why sex is also political.

The visibility of homosexuality in the political arena during the French Fifth Republic started in the late seventies with an entryism of gay activists, who run for elections or came out within their political parties. From 1998, a few politicians, mostly men, chose to publicize their homosexuality, before major polls or nominations. Their public discourses carefully avoided addressing gay and lesbian community issues, and gender theory, but focused on an universalist ideology refering to “ the idea of nature ” and “ the privacy of sexual life ”, in order to fit in the doxa de sexe. Today, openly lesbian or transexual politicians are still very few in France and homosexual men are still discreet, even if the younger generation may more easily identify with the actual LGBT community.

To be employee and shareholder appears as a solution to limit the power of employers and to integrate workers into the company. The analysis of the sale of the press group Le Monde, whose largest shareholder was historically its employees, by external shareholders in November 2010 questions the limits of owner participation. Faced with recurring crises that the group went through, the positions of shareholder and employee were difficult to reconcile. Quitting shareholder power when selling group allows a rediscovery of the capabilities of employees. This case shows that, paradoxically, the government shareholding workers do not necessarily reveal the best way to ensure the independance of employees.