Call for Papers

Research on issues concerning relations between the genders is now quite dynamic and institutionalized, in France as elsewhere. A considerable body of research explores relations between men and women in a variety of social spaces, the mechanisms socializing them to gender norms, and the constitution of gendered identities. In addition to this exploration of social mechanisms leading to the everyday “construction of gender,” analysis of social movements emerging from various forms of feminism has helped to bring attention to gender issues. More recent research has examined anti-feminist and masculinist movements and analyzed the consequences of such activist reactions to the progress of what they see as excessive feminism. Briefly stated, this body of work has addressed social relationships of domination, as individuals experience them in daily life and as sociologists have been able to objectively observe them, as well as activist postures created in connection to these relationships.

But no systematic study has focused directly on comprehending how people as individuals (rather than as participants in an activist movement) may seize upon gendered analytical categories and gender stereotypes in their daily lives (private, professional, political, or other spheres) to analyze an experience, decode behaviors, justify a personal attitude, or implement a strategy. Although gendered social relations are now well known objectifiable social realities, there has thus far been little study of relationships to gender, meaning how individuals may interpret or try to change situations by appropriating (or not) the issue of gender for themselves. Regardless, many women and men use the discourse of gender and masculine and feminine “identities” to interpret their daily lives and/or act in their professional lives (in the media, politics, medical or legal fields, etc.), with no connection to organized activism. Likewise, the positive or negative ways in which people talk about women or men are as many ordinary appropriations of gender, and as many gender struggles, whether it be expressed in ordinary discourse – that is, rooted in everyday social relations rather than explicit activism – on the excesses and perverse effects of feminism, or even in a denial of gender as a relevant analytical category.

Studies of the “capillary diffusion of feminist ideas” in the 1970s (Achin and Naudier, 2010) and after (Albenga, Jacquemart, Bereni, 2015), or studies on various occupations (agriculture: Comer, 2015; police: Pruvost, 2008; medicine: Olivier, 2015; reception and guest services: Louey and Schütz, 2014) have already contributed to emphasizing the beneficial nature of questioning ordinary relationships to gender. This conference is intended to systematize analysis of this issue, by varying the contexts and actors involved in a variety of social worlds or everyday interactions. We consider all of these little everyday gender games – the conscious or unconscious use or avoidance of notions of “men,” “women,” “masculine identity,” “feminine identity,” “male/female relations,” or even “gender” – as ultimately contributing to shaping gender itself. As with observations of the social construction of political boundaries (Arnaud, Guionnet, 2005) and ordinary appropriations of the law (in legal consciousness studies: Silbey, 2005, Pélisse, 2005), analysis would surely be enriched by observing the social construction of gender, without imposing an a priori definition of the concept, by looking at how individuals and groups (in their own ways and their own words) seem to (mis)understand gender relations and identities and (mis)appropriate issues of feminine or masculine identity and their cultural construction. A predetermined scientific definition of the term must thus be abandoned in order to observe whether (and if so, how) individuals speak of gender, both consciously and unconsciously: one can “do gender” unconsciously or without seeming to, like one can “do politics” without appearing to or conceptualizing it as such. Observing that some people use gendered analytical categories to interpret situations while others do not, one wonders if the way in which individuals “inhabit” their own gender identities might play a determinant role in resorting to gender as an interpretative framework. Does reflexivity concerning one’s identity make it possible to speak of “gender,” and conversely, does speaking of gender involve reflexivity for oneself and for the other? Do ways of making gender visible depend on how individuals are “settled” in to their gender identity?

Beyond the interpretive production of gender, people can instrumentalize gender issues to justify or protest a situation or power relationship. The issue, then, is what is at stake in the (non-)mobilization of gender-related analytical categories. A deputy who refuses to feminize the function of session president, a magistrate that emphasizes the difficulties arising from the feminization of the profession, a sports journalist refusing to cover women’s sports, all are instances of the ordinary instrumentalization of gender (as they do not fall under pro- or anti-feminist activism) allowing people to build strategic identities and position themselves in relevant social and professional worlds, through and beyond gender relations. Our hypothesis is that these discourses implicitly or explicitly concern the modes of domination that typify these diverse social spaces, and that they are all ways of protesting or justifying their configuration or development. Under what conditions are these ordinary gender discourses a resource for those who use them? What are their consequences on the “construction of gender” (in speech and acts) as well as on the fundamental elements of the worlds in which they are used? Or, to the contrary, do our sociological observations contain situations where people would usually use gender-related categories, but the observed actors seem to avoid doing so?

By asking such questions, this conference aims to address the range of forms taken by gender appropriation or avoidance in what we call “ordinary” social relations, meaning individuals’ everyday experiences rather than how gender relations are referred to or considered within group-based feminist or anti-feminist activism or academic analyses of an objective reality. Individuals can very well use and appropriate activist discourse as much as they can use knowledge or concepts from the sociology of gender (such as describing the existence of gender stereotypes) to interpret their daily lives and give meaning to social reality. But it is less these activist or expert discourses in and of themselves that will be analyzed here than it is how individuals may or may not use certain templates in their daily lives for interpreting gender relations to make sense of their lived experience and decipher their environments. Briefly put, our central interest is not in activist or academic conceptions of gender, but more generally the social construction and ordinary production of gender as a frame of reference, as it can be observed in all manner of everyday situations (routine or exceptional, personal or professional, etc.). At the same time, we do not assume that this interpretation is entirely cut off from academic or activist conceptualizations of gender; to the contrary, we are interested in the potential cross-pollination that might be found between these various social worlds when individuals use a gendered reading to make sense of their everyday living experiences or wider social environment. We agree with A. Ogien, for whom analyzing the ordinary is “an endeavor that should not content itself with merely unearthing and exposing things commonly held to be unimportant (the mundanity of the everyday) or negligible (profane knowledge), but should also aim to account for another order of phenomena: everything individuals regularly take as the basis for acting together in an acceptable way, without even realizing it. The ordinary thus raises a question: of what consists the unquestioned backdrop upon which common action is engaged and developed?” (Ogien, 2012, 164). In such a light, several forms of ordinary gender appropriation can help us to learn more about this unquestioned backdrop, while also analyzing the conditions under which it may, in some regards, be challenged. Papers might address observations along these lines:

1. Appropriations of the concept itself: What meanings do individuals give to gender? Is there an observable distribution of academic work on gender in certain social worlds, where the concept is handled as in the academic setting? And to the contrary, can transformations of the concept’s academic definition be observed in other social spaces?

2. Uses of analytical categories related to gender, a gender-related grammar or argumentative and discursive routines (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991, p. 87-93): Do individuals make reference to male/female identities, their relationships, their socialization and/or gender stereotypes to analyze their environment or their own behavior? Under what conditions do they do so (or not) in their daily personal or professional lives?

3. Lastly, papers could explore the ordinary appropriations of particular themes supported by gender-related activist movements (feminism, anti-feminism, masculinism, etc.). It could mean considering activist discourses’ possible influence on the everyday relationships to gender and the ordinary production of gender as an interpretive framework. In order to analyze these dimensions, we are interested in a whole range of everyday relationships to gender, from the least reflexive to the most strategic, from the most naturalizing to the best “informed” (that is, having appropriated an academic view of gender as a cultural construct), and from the most consistent (systematic appropriation of an entire preexisting activist discourse) to the most ambivalent (selective appropriation of some aspects of activist discourse while rejecting other aspects; Guionnet, 2017).

Of course, proposed papers should make no value judgments of this “ordinary” production of gender as interpretive framework (such as indicating incorrect usage according to the academic definition of gender), since the researcher’s sole objective is to apprehend all forms of (non)appropriation of gender by all social actors, in all possible social situations (private, professional, media, political, and other spheres). The idea is to draft the range of selective appropriations of the concept of “gender” in and of itself, its associated analytical categories and grammar, and gender discourses from activist movements that receive enough media coverage for non-activists to pick up and use those discourses themselves. This range of situations will be methodically contextualized to understand why a given behavior may or may not be labeled or analyzed through the lens of gender, according to relational issues, projected identities, and/or knowledge of an individual or a social group. A. Saguy (2003, 2012) provides a good example of this, demonstrating how sexual harassment may or may not be designated as such according to frames that depend on “social structure, internal relations within institutions and countries, and cultural and political traditions specific to their national and institutional context” (Saguy, 2003, p. 9). The framing of sexual harassment is partly shaped by the legal tools available for qualifying and defining it. Inspired by analyses such as this, one might more generally wonder what templates social actors use and do not use in relation with gender issues.

This international interdisciplinary conference aims to explore several themes to answer these core questions:

1. Papers could address the strategic uses of gender categories to make sense of professional situations or behaviors observed in certain social spheres of activity (politics, media, etc.). These uses may be resources for the people concerned, used to conserve or contest power relations, build or protest legitimate orders, justify or discuss a configuration or distribution of tasks, and/or make sense of a behavior. For example, do women and men asked to evaluate their professional skills or interpretive lenses call upon identity issues or male/female relations to do so? Do they appropriate the analytical and lexical field of gender to interpret their behavior and that of those around them – and if so, in what exact terms? To denounce injustice, or to stigmatize others? Do they use gender issues to analyze how professional, social, or political fields operate? Although it is obvious to sociologists that being a man or a woman engenders significant consequences in social relations, behavior, social expectations, prejudices, and so on, to what extent do everyday individuals see it? How do people appropriate (or not) certain gender discourses, argumentative grammars, feminist discourses (Albenga, Jacquemart, Bereni, 2015) or anti-feminist discourses that suffuse the social worlds found in their everyday lives? Are there performative effects of these ordinary appropriations of gender?

2. Papers could also analyze ordinary relationships to gender by observing how people use or do not use gender categories to decode the attitudes of people around them or make sense of their own behavior or judgment in the private sphere or in the order of personal opinion. For instance, in what ways can the distribution of household chores in a couple be justified or protested by referring to masculine or feminine identities? To what extent are stereotypes of the skills that are supposedly specific to men or women used to comprehend how tasks are shared (childrearing, housework, economic decisions, home maintenance, etc.)? How do people see family legacies in their socialization and gender identity? Do they use a grammar of gender to explain their choice of leisure-time activities, lifestyles, or political opinions? An abundance of sociological analyses of the question isolate gender as a variable, but they do not probe whether or not individuals use it to explain their own political opinions, or for that matter, the behavior of political or media figures (for example, are there people who think that women do politics differently than men, and who thus cite this divergence to explain differences in politicians’ attendance or behavior?) It is less about analyzing the strategic uses of gender than it is about situations where people may “gender” unconsciously, may appropriate gender stereotypes or activist discourse (from feminism or anti-feminism, for example), or may form their own images of gender and use them to varying degrees to decode their social environment or their own behavior. It could also concern observation of people whose social identity could lead to injunctions to take a position on gender (Muslim men, for instance, who are readily suspected of having a relationship of domination with women). We thus wonder about the connection between racialization and ordinary relationships to gender: how are injunctions to have a certain discourse on gender increased due to the stigma carried by gender relations among “Arabs”? We could thus explore the importance of generations, socio-cultural identities, and other factors in shaping ordinary relationships to gender.

3. Researchers may use gender as an approach for understanding the behavior or discourse of individuals in instances when they do not invoke gender. To speak of a feminine or masculine identity or gendered relations may in certain contexts prove dangerous or costly for individuals, such as women who avoid mentioning gender identity in their professional lives because they fear being stigmatized as “feminists.” Are there blind spots or even avoidance strategies in relation to discourse about gender? How to understand these behaviors for avoiding gender analyses in situations where sociologists are likely to see them as an obvious major interpretative framework? Is simple ignorance of these lines of interpretation enough to explain why they are not used? Or might people be aware that gender is relevant without wanting to claim it in-situation, or indeed by choosing to naturalize certain differences between men and women? Beyond avoidance, could the disqualification of gender as analytic concept mark a common group identity (within a profession, a political group...)? Knowing that in politics, for example, a propensity to reject institutional politics has been linked numerous times to the influence of the surrounding group (Braconnier, Dormagen, 2007), one might also wonder how determinant the role of the group might be in the avoidance or even rejection of gender-related analytical categories.

Inspired by work on ordinary relationships to politics, for instance, one might wonder about the possible costs of raising gender issues in non-feminist activism: does avoiding them correspond to a desire to avoid provoking conflict (Hamidi, 2006, Agrikoliansky, 2014, Eliasoph, 1998), such as when women irritated by the division of activist labor in a student group do not speak up to protest in a meeting, for fear of conflict or being called “feminist”? Sociologists are well aware of the implicit gendered distribution of tasks so often found in activist circles (Fillieule, Roux, 2009; Dunezat, 2007). What happens among activists when these relations are central without being the explicit subject of discussion? Do activists themselves use gender as a key to interpreting activist practices? Here again, analyses relative to these questions have mainly highlighted the weight of the gender variable from an objective perspective, but have rarely probed whether and how activists appropriate this dimension of gender to decode their own practices (other than in (anti)feminist contexts), although there are some exceptions (such as Dunezat, 2007; Avanza, 2009; Meuret-Campfort, 2010; Rétif, 2013; Johsua, 2015). Several questions are still open for exploration: Under what conditions are these ordinary discourses about gender resources or constraints for those who use them, sometimes going so far as to reactivate normative expectations relating to “femininity” (Comer, 2015) or “masculinity” to justify activist practices? And what performative or other effects do they produce, as much in terms of “constructing gender” (in word and deed) as in terms of fundamental elements of the worlds in which they are mobilized, in careers, or even in definitions of the self?

4. This conference cannot overlook methodological issues. Papers relating to methodological considerations of the feasibility of conducting research on the ordinary production of gender as an interpretive framework are welcome. Conducting interviews to collect women’s and men’s accounts of the importance they accord to gender in figuring out certain situations or behaviors naturally touches on the classic issue of asserting the research question. This unavoidably raises the question of the effects of legitimacy (Lahire, 1996), which could lead some informants to change their discourse to meet what they think are the researcher’s expectations (in an interview given by a female researcher known to work on gender or introducing herself as such at the outset, for example). To what extent do the range of gendered appropriations, readings, and interpretations of political practices depend on their context of enunciation (Hamidi, 2006), including the context established by the research relationship (Bargel, Fassin, Latté, 2007)? How to analyze the way in which an individual mobilizes the variable of gender in his or her interpretation of a situation, without imposing the gender issue on him or her? How to empirically identify ordinary relationships to gender when they are not verbally expressed? Could this happen, for instance, by using the tools offered by ethnographic methods (Avanza, Fillieule, Masclet, 2015)?

In addressing these approaches, paper proposals could take inspiration from recent or older studies in any area of social life, from professional, political, economic, media, private, or other spheres. The studies analyzed from these perspectives may come from a number of academic disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, political science, history, anthropology, and economics. Regardless of the discipline, the analyses presented in proposed papers should avoid treating the question of gender as an objective variable producing real effects as its central objective. Instead, they should favor an approach that has yet to be systematically explored in field-based studies in France or elsewhere: the ordinary appropriations of gender issues in everyday life, in periodically occurring situations, and far from feminist or anti-feminist activist debates.

Paper proposals of no more than 5,000 characters, accompanied by an additional list of bibliographical references, should be submitted by 5 March 2018 at the latest to the following two addresses : christine.guionnet[at]univ-rennes1.fr and bleuwenn.lechaux[at]univ-rennes2.fr.

The final texts of approximately 50,000 characters must be submitted by 10 September 2018.