Contenu du sommaire : La violence, les mots, le corps

Rather than an instinctive state inherent to human beings, violence is a reaction to socialization. Constant elements impel the need for self-definition by opposition and the classification into same and different is at the basis of a feeling of belonging. This is shaped by two moulds : the « among our own kind » of consanguinity and territory, and that of gender. Universal needs and affective states are expressed in metaphors of the body, the territory, seniority. It is the more or less organized manipulation of these that creates violence. There is thus a logic of intolerance, of which examples are given. A universal ethics, still to be built, is however possible.

Counting violence against women. Institutional and theoretical context of the ENVEFF survey`/titrebThe debate on violence against women has emerged today in the forefront of media concerns. It is treated as a current affair topic, as a problem that affects the whole of French society. The results of the National Survey of Violence Against Women in France (ENVEFF), the only available one in France, feed this discussion. In scientific circles, there are still those who decry its legitimacy as a research topic. However, the social and political perception of this phenomenon has radically changed since 1997, the year when the idea of a quantitative investigation into violence against women in France was launched. That year, in an international context that was very sensitive to this theme, the French scientific and political context was specific. Compared to the countries of Northern Europe, France had to make up for lost time on the question, but scientific circles, including feminist researchers, remained relatively circumspect. In order to better understand this context, this article sets in historical perspective the evolution of public policies, and the research and debates of feminist activists from the beginning of the women's movement up to the time that the government commissioned the ENVEFF survey.

The double invisibility of the violences made to the women in the local contracts of French safety`/titrebThis article explores the way in which local security contracts (CLS), recent form of local security « law and order » policies, deal with « violence against women ». It considers the significance of this concept when applied concretely to municipal policies. The study of ten recent contracts shows that they find it difficult to take account of this dimension. Only the case of Paris seems to break with this rule. However, an analysis of the functioning of municipal policies reveals not only a distinction in practice between domestic (private) violence and violence in public, but also an obscuring of the feminist point of view in favour of a psychological approach. One can thus say there is a dual process of making violence against women invisible.

Surviving on the street. Violence against women and relations with social care institutions`/titrebA differentiated analysis of institutional violence and violence among peers shows that women are continuously assigned their « female » characteristics, whether by institutions that try to educate them within a domestic framework or their male peers who use their « weaknesses » to involve them in a relationship of sexual dependence. For some who escape this leads to a new dependence, on social care institutions. These latter, far from supporting or creating a new lifestyle, will reinforce and try to continue traditional roles for homeless women and men : women in the domestic sphere for which she is responsible, and men in the professional sphere.

Over the last fifty years, some French women farmers — through their individual and collective action and in spite of the difficulties of their condition as female and rural (work-related, economic and social violence) — have been in the vanguard in the development of ideas and the technical and economic experimentation that they have provoked. This is true for movements related to the ideas of durable development, and also those which promote original forms of organization based on a close solidarity with consumer associations and family — based organic agriculture. These movements and choices make it possible to consider « another globalization » and « different regional planning ». There are networks of women farmers who find and rehabilitate the local patrimonial dimension. This experience brings training in political thought and action.

For medicine to limit its therapeutic approach to the construction of sexuality to childhood events while work — in its regulations, its organization, its ergonomic effects, its cost, its organic and psychic effects — strongly shapes the material existence of the patient is a clinical stance that it is impossible to maintain. It appears more useful to follow the patients in their workshops, their factories, their offices. This reveals the centrality of work in identity construction and the powerful constraints that the social field exercises — through work — on sexual identity, which is often more subject to the social characteristics of masculine and feminine than to a true perception of the difference of the sexes.

Although still marginal in this debate, sociology makes it possible to analyse moral harassment as a process and the product of well-defined social relations. This article is based on a survey starting from the cases of a hundred « harassed » people. One of the hypotheses formulated is that the concept of moral harassment makes it possible to avoid or channel social conflicts by dissimulating the existence of antagonistic social relations and masking under the « label » of moral harassment trade-union, gender or racist discrimination, or other forms related to age or disabilities. Thus, a reality that is the expression of gender relations, like sexism or sexual harassment, can slip from being the social to the interpersonal sphere and not be clearly recognised for what it is.

Cleaning ladies and night watchmen : a gendered approach to casualized work in a hotel in France`/titrebThis article results from a study of the work of cleaning women and night watchmen in a hotel in France. Both these activities, carried out within a framework of « casualized work », involve physical involvement, availability, adaptability, social and technical organization, co-operation between the actors which, far from being symmetrical, highlight gendered differentiation at work. The chambermaids experience the casualization of work as permanent availability related to uncertainty as to the duration of the work, irregularity of schedules, submission to the requirements of the customers and the market. Segregation, whether sexual, based on skin-colour or professional, women's vulnerability to the employer, social and economic devalorization, combine in this job which plays a central role in the functioning of the hotel. As far as they are concerned, night watchmen, all graduated of higher education, while they do not undergo the same fluctuations, experience casualization through a job that they judge socially and economically devaluing.

The master-domestic relation is an example of a specific relation of domination : it is exerted in constant face-to-face contact. However it is shown in similar and differing ways in the French and English cinema of the 1930s to the present day. Reflection of social reality ? It is suggested here that what this relation of domination reveals is in fact « the universe of the thinkable » of a specific social group : screenwriters. Films can also be regarded as one of the places where solutions to socially-troubling can be selected and tested in the realm of the imagination.