Contenu du sommaire : (En)quêtes de genre

In French historiography, the use of gender as a tool of analysis in Western and Byzantine history is still relatively new. This approach, in the sense of a historical study of relations between the sexes, is here applied to a study of both Parisian widows at the end of the Middle Ages (14th – 15th centuries) and Byzantine nuns during the Palaiologos period (1261-1453).If we examine what it means to be a widow or nun, and the reputations that accompany the two statuses, we can see that the demands made on these women were heavy. Indeed, it was the women who set up the first female monasteries themselves who, even more than their male counterparts, insisted on the weakness of female nature in their monastic rulings. Likewise, widowhood was also strongly stigmatised. Widows are more visible in Parisian legal and fiscal documents than either married women or widowers, and they were also bound by an obligation to maintain a “good reputation” that was firmly set down in the didactic literature of the time.The relational and comparative methods used to study Byzantine nuns and monks on the one hand, and Parisian widows and widowers on the other hand, illustrate the complexity of gender relations. Inequality in the cloister appears clearly in monastic regulations: it is nuns on whom the most rigorous confinement is imposed. Within the Parisian trades, the impact of gender varies. When women become widows, they take on a new status, placing them on an equal footing with “maîtres des metiers”. However, within trades with a large female population, women can become “maîtres” without necessarily being widows; special provisions then apply to widows in this case. Relations with men fluctuate from one trade to another.The ideal of virile women, nuns or widows, can be found in the monastic typikas and in the writings of Christine de Pizan. It corresponds in the former case to an ideal of holiness that is by necessity masculine, and in the second to a concept of widowhood as a tool for gaining entry to domains traditionally reserved to men. However, this process of “masculinisation” which women are expected to undergo is qualified slightly when age is taken into account: nuns and elderly widows, who have been through the menopause, avoid the need to have to “become men”.

This article is based on two field surveys carried out among families of independent workers, one among wine growers in the Cognac region, the other one among families of bakers and masons. In both cases, one observes, on one hand a gendered share of tasks among the —professional and domestic— cooperative of family production — which we will call « household « and, on the other hand, a « gendered « definition of roles in the trasmission of the descendants' patrimony (or groups of descendants). However, the people questionned don't speak either normative or disputing discourses about the role of men and women. The sharing of tasks, for example, is described, but its gendered aspect is ignored and even less questioned. In the absence of a feminist or sexist discourse, the issue of the genre can nevertheless make sense for the actors when problematics that concern them are raised. Then, the differenciation between male and female roles in the lineage is quite explicited, even questioned, by the people surveyed. On the other hand, the problematisation of the gendered sharing of tasks (professional and domestic) only appears indirectly. In order to tackle it, the surveyors had to raise a question that was particularly relevant to the surveyed : the increase of salaried work among independent workers' wives.

Fieldwork conducted since 2001 on gender parity in a city council is revisited in this paper. This reflexive approach clarifies how gender comes to play, how actors play with or are played by gender. First, political voices have to do not just with sex, but with gender. It is not nature speaking, as these voices signify power relationships. Second, gender does appear at times as a constraint, and at other times as a resource; but this largely results from differences in the way it is staged. Third, sociological interpretations of gender interact with interpretations by social actors.

This article is based on a field work conducted from 2001 to 2006 among members of two Ultra groups from Auxerre. The ethnographic study allowed to observe the male construction of the Ultras' role in Auxerre. On the one hand, their supporterism activities are manly assigned: they take root in a body built and designed as manly, and Ultras show their opposition to supporters from rival football clubs through virile activities. On the other hand, the supporters' sociability -particularly during bus travelling- is gendered. Indeed, belonging to the group of young Ultras gives structure to a dense social life, in which these young men claim their manly identity, playing with a repertoire of sexist and homophobe chants and jokes.The masculinity of the supporter's role is the ground for power relationships within the supporters' group. Thus, a sexual sharing of labour could be observed, typically excluding girls, yet present in the group of a number of status-enhancing practices. In addition to the sexual division of labour, this study reveals a fund of masculinity ordering labour sharing and success between men. Boys and those less masculine are also dominated and confined to the less rewarding tasks.

This article deals with how girls build their relationship with body beautifying processes during childhood and how discrepancies can appear between representations and actual behaviours in that field of practices. A survey amongst ten and eleven years old primary school children showed that, when it comes to body beautifying processes, a number of girls have internalized ways of behaving which do not agree with their ways of thinking. Some of them thus express a certain contempt for fashion, jewellery, make-up and hair styling and yet actively and consistently pay attention to their own beauty. On the other hand, others perceive body beautifying practices in a very positive light, but their own dressing and cosmetic practices remain very basic. This article aims to emphasize such discrepancy cases between representations and practices and to identify the socialization conditions that made possible those discrepancies. It does so through portraits of two of our female surveyees. In each portrait we first try to describe what the surveyees think of beautifying processes and how they behave in that field of practices. We then show that various socialization agents – peers, medias and parents – contribute to shaping those practices and representations.

This article analyses the use of a didactic theory called “pedagogy of empathy” within history lessons on nazism in a high-school of the city of Hamburg. Ethnographic observation and semi-directive interviews have been exploited. The appropriation of the pedagogic framework differs between girls and boys, the former tending towards a fascination for the victims of nazism, the latter towards a fascination for the actors. Professors will grade the boys less favourably, thus contributing to a reorientation of their interests towards the victims. This article shows the consistency of gendered stereotypes concerning the “learning capacities” of adolescents: “emotionality” is attributed to girls and despised, “rationality” to boys and valorised. A temporary valorisation of affects within the teaching of nazism does not change the general attributions. It does leave some space of opportunity for masculine agents of upper classes though. Devalorised through bad grades, they acquire the capacities considered as “female” which will allow them to catch up with the girls.

In APE (Artistic Physical Education), the circus arts are thought by teachers to favour coeducation in artistic training. Circassian practises would permit the combination of achievement and virtuosity, which would rather appeal to boys, with expressiveness and aesthetic quest, which would rather appeal to girls. Within all the physical exercises having an artistic objective, many teachers are attracted to this image of “coeducation” underlying the circus. Indeed, they wish they could find an alternative to dancing, the major expressive activity in APE the feminine connotation of which hinders the boys' involvement in training. Thus, the “coeducation” of the circus goes against the “femininity” of dancing. We have to analyse the way “he feminine” and “the masculine” are developed and organized within specific Circassian training contexts. Therefore, considering that gender may vary in accordance with the institutional contexts and social groups we have to deal with, analyses attempt to detect significant variations of the representation of the feminine and the masculine and sexualization modes of practises according to the APE teachers' educational objectives. In a significant way, the article shows that in the classes aiming at producing a show, the “gendered” codifications of the performing arts, which are particularly conspicuous in the convening of theatrical expressiveness, lead to a mode of gender development significantly different from the one used in the teaching related to athletic education.

This article is based on ethnographic interviews that were carried out with teenagers (aged 15 to 20) residents in four housing projects located in the suburbs of Paris. It deals with the impact of dating experience on injunctions which rule the social definitions of “feminity” (necessarily sentimental) and “masculinity” (necessarily sexual).

By focusing on observations of two reader clubs in contemporary France, in Lyon, this article aims at showing how gender can be used in different useful ways to enlighten appropriations of these public reading practices by their members, and the way they represent to themselves their own literary legitimacy. So, considering gender both as a habitus and as a power category (as defined by Joan Wallach Scott) enables to emphasize an important stake of social distinction in these reader clubs; and more generally, the way gender takes part in class relationships. However, this stake of social distinction does not prevent members of reader clubs from detaching themselves of the ideal of literary legitimacy in some of their reading practices. These practices can be likely to reform gender habitus.

To work on a historical period requires, for sociologists, a particular attention to the hiatus between discourses and practises, the first ones tending to dodge, if not occult, the understanding of the second ones. The study of social relationships between sexes and the situation of women in a given field therefore presents a number of traps, which must be avoided by giving its full importance to the polysemy of the concept of genre which covers both the socially constructed differences between sexes and the way these differences impregnate representations. The point is to look back on these difficulties as well as on a number of preconceived ideas, through the example of an analysis of the trajectories of female plastics artists in the art field of the first half of the XIXth century.

The Romantic discourse that emerged at the dawn of the XIXth century was critical of the bourgeois uses and morals and led to an ideal type of masculinity and femininity which operated as counterpoints. Hence an equivocal model within which virility was reinvented and femininity's attributes largely questioned opposed the patriarchal model which sealed masculine domination. However, if gender relations were re-envisaged and idealized in a general move that enhanced the value of feelings, can it be said that they reversed the domination relations anchored in society's imagination?

This article studies the major French feminine league, at the beginning of the 20th century : the Ligue patriotique des Françaises (LPDF). The point is to highlight the apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, conservative political statements, and, on the other hand, the sometimes innovative practices of certain Catholic women. The LPDF, which was a million and a half strong in 1933, has represented a place of politization for many Catholic women, which partly explains the electoral behaviour of women when they first could vote. Under the constraint of the 1901 Law, and in the name of the defence of religion and conservatism, the militants have contributed to the modernization of the political system by appropriating certain techniques of mass followers democracy and by converting the know-how they had acquired through their experience in religious matters. Thus appeared, at the beginning of the 20th century, the modern political woman, conservative of course, yet able to finance candidates, to express political propositions, even to promote certain social reforms.

In this article we discuss how gender has influenced the biographical consequences of participation in the “events of May-68”, based on a survey of two-hundred families in which at least one of the parents took part in these events in France. Therefore, this work revisits the classic issue of generation-shaping from a gender perspective.In order to analyse the influence of gender on the politicizing role of the May-68 events, we initially look back at the process which drove the primary political socialization of our interviewees and we show that gender shapes the type of competences acquired in the course of this primary socialization and which can be summoned in the political sphere. Beyond the sheer number of entries into politics coinciding with participation in May-68 (higher in the case of women), gender also affects the form of politicization itself: A significant majority of my female interviewees (as opposed to a minority of the male ones) became involved in the feminist movements and challenged the social relationship between the sexes. They contributed to the creation of a new feminine habitus, while the masculine habitus emerged less affected from these events, hence the different perception – both objective and subjective – of the consequences of May-68 by each of the sexes.The second part questions the existence of gendered generations. In contrast to their male counterparts, the women in our sample credit May-68 with a more influential effect on their current political ideas, the education they chose for their children and their vision of life as a couple, and they are also more numerous to assert their belonging to a “1968 generation”. We then show how gender influences the biographical reconstruction process. The devaluation of far-left militancy as soon as the mid-Seventies makes it far more difficult for the men in our panel to work out some form of coherence between their past involvements and their present circumstances: In the aftermath of May-68, they find themselves unable to benefit from any equivalent of the feminist movement and its consequences that could grant them a ‘new identity' around which to coherently structure their biographical trajectories.However, the relative advantage of women over men in asserting a “May 68” past has to be moderated: Women's emancipation, as we show, comes at a price, namely their rejection by some men and members of their family because they no longer fit into the interiorised gender norms and representations of femininity. Furthermore, men find it easier to convert the political skills they acquired as militants into organizational, leadership and management competences within the professional sphere, whereas women struggle to find the same social recognition in the job market for their corresponding – albeit less legitimate – militant asset (these tend to be redeployed in the private and/or the caring sphere). Therefore, the gendered process behind the redeployment of this militant asset in the professional sphere operates preferably in a way that promotes men and demotes women.

Based on a field survey over a span of several years, Delphine Dulong and Frédérique Matonti analyse the professionnalisation – or, on the contrary, the processes of self-eviction –of newly elected members at the Regional Council of Île-de-France. Would women, as the advocates of parity had imagined, make politics differently? The observation of plenary meetings and work committees show that, with equal social, educational and political ressources, gender has no proper effect... with one exception. To speak in public is still definitely a « male » exercise – men do it quite more often and with much more pleasure than women, and have tailored its obligations through time. But this small difference has big consequences the visibility of women, and, consequently, their opportunities to raise in the hierarchy, partly rest on the ability to speak in public.

Starting from an ethnographic investigation in two fights of unemployed persons in Brittany in 1997-1998, this article analyzes the modes of perception of the male domination located in the mobilizations observed. Those appear as processes which contribute to manufacture not only the sexuation of social order but also a relation to this sexuation, according to collective dimension of the fight. The article also reconsiders the constitution, in a nonfeminist social movement, of a “social subject women” (Danièle Kergoat).