Announcement Calenda 1 357776 - extracts
The body is currently the subject of constant interest in scientific work (we are thinking in particular of the seminar corps et sciences sociales - Crespa CNRS organized 10 years ago) but remains little used to approach and question agricultural work.
Using the body as an entry point for a new approach to the relationship between gender and agricultural work seems to us to offer promising prospects for making visible the work of the invisible, and opening up our field of reflection to an intersectional approach. As the interface between the individual and the society of which he or she is a part, the body lies at the confluence of social dynamics and natural data. Relationships with the body, including in the professional sphere, are constructed through the incorporation of norms differentiated by individuals (gender, race, age, norm, class, etc.). These different postures have an impact on how individuals relate to their work, how others view their work, their professional posture and the representations they form of it.
Body fit or unfit, healthy or sick, young or old, racialized or not, body under tension, visible or invisible, are all ways of expressing the relationship between the individual and the society that surrounds him or her. Varying according to time, region, social class and age, the way in which individuals apprehend the world through their physicality is by definition fluctuating, revealing to researchers a wide range of dynamics with which to interrogate the social.
The body therefore appears to be an interesting entry point for gaining a better understanding of the norms and relations of domination at work in the world of agricultural work, which is highly marked by issues linked to physical ability and relies heavily on the aptitude of bodies and their performance. The discourses constructed by the actors around physical strength, necessarily masculine and in its most hegemonic form, as a condition of possibility for their work seem to us to be particularly revealing of these dynamics.
The body is an object that emerged with feminist epistemology in the 1980s, and its mobilization varies from one social science discipline to another. While it is an effervescent emerging subject in geography and history, it is a fundamental reading prism in anthropology and sociology. This seminar thus proposes to cross disciplinary approaches to identify different aspects of the relationship to the body as it is expressed in the workplace, and the ways of making visible what is often perceived as self-evident by those involved. The methodological aspects of how research takes into account bodily data are therefore central to our thinking. Moments as crucial to the construction of bodies at work as vocational training will be studied, with a particular focus on those that make the researcher's relationship with the body visible. Health and disability; youth, ageing and pregnancy as life stages that recompose the relationship to work; social struggles as a means of making the militant body visible; the visibility of queer bodies in agricultural and militant spaces - these are just some of the issues at stake in understanding the link between the body, gender and agricultural work.
