Centre Marc Bloch Prearo

Journées d’études

Centre Marc Bloch – 26-27 juin 2014

Minorisations en actes: race, classe, genre au prisme de l’ethnographie

Les journée d’études franco-allemandes « Minorisations en actes : Race, classe, genre au prisme de l’ethnographie » qui se tiendront les 26 et 27 juin prochain au Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin) s’attacheront à analyser la manière dont l’ethnographie permet de saisir l’articulation diversifée de la race, de la classe et du genre dans les rapports de pouvoir contemporains. Par ailleurs, si la réflexion sur l’importation d’outils d’analyse produits dans un contexte social et politique différent – celui des Etats-Unis – a largement contribué à développer les recherches adoptant en France et en Allemagne une perspective intersectionnelle, le dialogue franco-allemand est resté marginal sur ces questions. L’un des enjeux principaux de ces deux journées d’études sera donc aussi d’interroger les apports théoriques potentiels d’un dialogue scientifique entre les deux pays.

Résumé de la communication

The LGBT militant context in the city of Verona appeared to be an interesting fieldwork for the issues of the conference, notably because of the mobilization implemented in a particular political context in September 2013. But after some significant events, it seemed to be vanished. After an initial period of observation and participation, the possibility to pursue the research fainted. From a practical point of view, it would be only an unfinished research, compared to the high expectations.

But from a reflexive point of view, it turns out that there is not only an impossible fieldwork, but also an “aborted” one. The entry in the field and my short period of permanence led me to position myself in a way that has destabilized my position as researcher, and to end my fieldwork. Throughout the meetings, I have indeed been brought (for reasons that will have to be explained) to be perceived as a man, gay, and “rich”, in other terms, in a dominant position over a “minority” context within which people live and think of themselves as dominated, even if the space of activism is still tainted by the logic of domination of gender and class, implicitly accepted under the guise of a different distribution of activist skills. Even so, I was seen as “dominant”, and generally, as an academic depositary of an out-of-the-ordinary, “superior” and “uncontested” knowledge.

In this paper, I propose less an analysis of the collected material, finally not really sufficient to formulate hypothesis and arguments about the intersectionality structuring the LGBT militant context, than a reflexive sociology (self-analysis?) about the positioning logics of the researcher during the fieldwork. Thus, I will try to discuss some ideas on how, through the prism of gender and class, the emotions of the researcher may lead to renouncing fieldwork, trying also to uncover the costs and benefits of such a choice. Finally, the chosen title “Situating oneself: positioning strategies and prioritization logics in a LGBT activist context”, originally thought to be applied to the situations and to activists engaged in the research, will be applied to analyze the entry procedures in the field, the permanence strategies and the moment when the researcher decides to “abort” the fieldwork.