Contenu du sommaire : La production quotidienne du genre en milieu populaire

This article explores the complex forms of domination that were exerted through housekeeping tasks in Belle Époque military barracks. Taking such domestic activities seriously is tantamount to reversing the order of the obvious : while doubt remains as to whether barrack life trains men to be ready to fight for their country (as the military institution proclaims), there is no question that it obliges them to perform housekeeping duties every day. Such tasks contribute to the disciplinary hold exerted over soldiers on the basis of military rank, social identity, and the forms of masculinity found in the world of barracks. The lowest-ranking and least-educated men, who were subjected more than others to this demanding and demeaned work, nonetheless found ways to soften and subvert this restrictive system.

Qualitative analysis of working-class women's pregnancies is useful in shedding light on class and gender dynamics during the period leading up to birth. Pregnancy intervenes in everyday lives that are structured by social relations, which it simultaneously exposes and crystalizes. Class socialization and gender dynamics within the couple, in conjunction with a subordinate employment situation, lead to the reassertion of these women's dominated position while they are pregnant. Their assignation to maternity and domestic work is re-enforced and their position as worker is weakened. This crystallization of domination during pregnancy nonetheless leads to a degree of protest from the women concerned.

The article shows that in rural settings, belonging to a group of friends compensates for the obsolescence of older instances of gender or class-based socialization. For the young working-class men in our study, the “gang of friends” works as a context for the production of a legitimate masculinity. In a socially homogeneous setting, masculinity is not expressed so much in speech as in act, by demonstrating friendship with other men who themselves have good reputations and belong to a group that is both selective and loyal. The article shows that the belonging provided by friendship is an essential component of these men's social status, preserving their reputations and instilling them with ways to be respected in their community.

Between 1963 and 1982, BUMIDOM, a national office created as an instrument for keeping overseas departments (DOM) part of France, coordinated the migration of 200,000 French citizens from the overseas departments of Réunion and the French Antilles to the mainland. It offered these domestic migrants low-cost “vacation-trips” for visits to their home island, which helped to both control these migrants and legitimate the institution. Study of this vacation system is useful for considering the practical modes of colonial (re)production of difference in the 1960s and 1970s, until a crisis befell the model in 1978 and its social dimension was unable to resist the desire to develop consumer tourism.

This study addresses the ethno-racial criteria used to organize psychiatric care at San Francisco General Hospital. Drawing from fieldwork, it is possible to highlight a paradox in an approach to care that is put across as progressive, and yet which revives fixed categories of race largely inherited from essentialist thought. This article reveals that, in addition to striving for effective patient care, the clinic's policies are concerned with the regulation of access to healthcare careers, and that they ultimately serve to increase the number of health professionals recruited from ethno-racial minorities.

A “classificatory fever” swept Europe in the late nineteenth century, not only for the classification of species in the natural sciences, but in the social sciences as well. Germany and France first respectively counted the number of unemployed nationwide in 1895 and 1896. But Great Britain rejected the idea in 1895, and indeed, the first commissioner of the Labour Department under the Bureau of Trade, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, was opposed to a survey of the unemployed. This article casts light on an enigmatic and hidden corner of the history of English statistics : how to account for this suspicion of quantifying the unemployed of Great Britain ?

This article revisits the conditions of possibility for conducting research on wealth, starting from the following question : How to get people to talk about money ? It first examines a relative blind spot in the social sciences – the modalities for apprehending economic capital, which is often reduced to the objects and signs of wealth that comprise it. We then provide an account of the rocky progression of an interview-based study of taxpayers subject to the ISF (impôt de solidarité sur la fortune), a progressive wealth tax in France, to reveal the ways in which interviewees use the grey area around the category of wealth to better distinguish themselves from it. Verbalizing taboo subjects is not without consequences : the discomfiture and “oversights” that punctuate interviews ultimately attest to the cluster of norms that surround the accumulation of money.