Contenu du sommaire : Lire les corps

What does the body signal in a context of domestic service? While domestic service is not in essence an area of work based on the exhibition of the body, this article argues that the body is nonetheless a central factor in the selection of candidates for full-time employment within wealthy households. Within this labor market, the body serves as proof of professional competence and moral qualities. For female employers, learning to read the bodies of their employees is a practice that is necessary to legitimize their roles as wealthy women in the milieus which they frequent.

Is race a pertinent category for understanding the way in which French officers read the body in combat prior to 1914? In order to answer this question, this article sets out to discuss this attribute as a means of reading bodies in combat, which led officers to produce these archives during the Moroccan campaign of 1912 to 1913. The study, which is both quantitative and qualitative, focuses on two distinct groups of documents and allows us to perceive a more complex form of classification of fighting bodies in the writings of officers. In these documents, the attributes of class and race in the uniformed services are mentioned but they do not feature to the same degree, or for the same reasons, depending on the narrative context and the view points of the archives.

This article looks at the socialization that operates within the ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration). With regard to studies that look at preparatory schools, the Grandes Écoles and the University as socializing entities, this articles explores two avenues of inquiry. On the one hand it focuses on corporal socialization because, while the ENA shapes the minds of aspiring senior civil servants, it also shapes their bodies. On the other hand, it looks at the gendered dimension of this socialization. The article shows that the ENA contributes to the fashioning of the bodies of female officials, differentiated from those of their male counterparts, by pushing them to embody a white, upper class style of femininity.

Exploring the corporal dimension of stammering, which is seen as a speech stigma, this article shows how speech and the body, as fields of social classification, together contribute to the definition of the norms of “correct speech”. Based on an ethnographic study carried out in three areas (Île-de-France, Hauts-de-France, La Réunion), it looks at the way in which stammerers detect signs of their “abnormality” in the eyes of their interlocutors and in their own bodies. The looks cast on the bodies of stammerers contribute to producing this language deviance in the stammerers themselves, with their interlocutors and in their relationships with speech therapists. On the one hand the analysis focuses on the roles played by these interpretations of the body and of ways of behaving during speech therapy sessions, and on the other it envisages these interpretations as the products of socialization processes marked by significant social and gender inequalities among stammerers.

From the end of the 16th century, Spanish colonial towns were structured by two hierarchical relationships: the first set free men against slaves and the second distinguished between whites and people of color. Despite the centrality of color, the separation between White militias and colored militias was never automatic or obvious. This article aims to reconstruct the roots of the colored companies of Spanish America in order to relate two dynamics which emerged at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries: the formation of colored elites and the growing role of vocabularies of color in the ways that hierarchies were referred to.

The aim of this article is to deepen the methodological reflexivity of qualitative sociological inquiry. Starting from the objectification of a research practice, in which the researcher occasionally mobilizes “personal narrative” in the course of interviews or observations, we aim to defend the notion that it can be useful for researchers to use their own biographical experience in order to encourage interviewees to “tell their own story”. Starting with the observation that available methodological literature remains silent with regard to these personal narratives, while implicitly inciting researchers to resort to them (1), we analyse our own “personal narrative” practices within similar survey contexts, i.e. surveys carried out by young female researchers among populations that are largely female, and on subjects that generally belong to the private sphere (2). Thus we show that the “personal narrative”, because it is based on a certain connivance, contributes to establishing a common discursive register which helps to balance the relationship between interviewer and interviewee and to encourage a more open discourse on the part of the latter.