Zinn Isabelle
Butchers, florists and the workplace : when and how does gender matter?
Doctorante : Isabelle Zinn
Co-Direction de thèse : Professeure Nicky Le Feuvre, Université de Lausanne / Daniel Cefaï, EHESS, Paris
In order to understand the phenomenon of “doing and undoing gender” and the discursive accounts of gendered occupations, it appears to be fruitful to diversify the contexts chosen for analysis. My thesis focuses on the issues raised by doing research on occupational settings in Switzerland characterized by radically different statistical gender compositions: the florists, a statistically female occupation and the butchers, where men are in the majority. Both occupations are strongly associated with one or either sex - with being masculine or feminine - in a statistical sense, and in our collective imagination.
To generally associate “masculinity” with features of the workplace such as heavy, dirty or mechanical work would be too simplistic and, in fact, only reproduce stereotypical assumptions about men’s experiences at work. It is hence important to question exactly how “masculinity” is displayed through ordinary and professional discourse and through situated practices. The analysis of various professional documents, ethnographical observation and interviews should allow me to look into these two aspects and to question whether and how workplaces and occupations define a range of masculinities and femininities that are legitimate within a specific context. I am thus investigating how exactly these occupations are displayed as gendered in such a way that being a male florist may pose “problems”, while male butchers fit perfectly into our conception of what is “normal”.
On the one hand, I am interested in what sense it is meaningful to talk about feminine and masculine occupations. My aim is to understand how the two occupations are discursively constructed as gendered. On the other hand, I will look into the ordinary activities in the workplaces in order to understand exactly how people are doing what they are doing. In observing how they are practicing their profession, I will tease out if, how and when sex membership is mobilized in workplace activities. I am thus concerned with two kinds of analysis: one regarding occupational segregation and the discursive construction of a (gendered) occupation, and one regarding how individuals relate to existing gender categories in their occupational activities.
I attach great importance to the situated use of the member-recognized categories and my main interest lies in exploring the significance the professionals attach - explicitly or implicitly - to gender. While I expect that gender issues will be particularly salient in the two occupations I have chosen to study, I do not assume that they are “invariably a causal factor producing a behavior or an event” in the same way at all times (Emerson et al., 1995). Moreover, it’s not always obvious whether or not there is a concern, as gender issues are not always directly referred to - they are often taken for granted, in other words “seen-but-unnoticed” (Kitzinger, 2005).
Although no individual can really escape being allocated to one or other sex category, this sex affiliation is not necessarily relevant in all social contexts at all times. The point I am making is that every event, person or social action can be categorized in multiple ways. The aim of my research is precisely to investigate if and under what circumstances sex affiliation becomes meaningful for individuals in a given situation on the workplace.
By questioning the ‘taken for granted’ and fixed sex categories, my conceptual framework intends to investigate how ‘gender’ is locally actualized and defined. I aim to examine how and when sex affiliations becomes relevant and meaningful to individuals within a given professional context and precisely investigate under what circumstances sex affiliation becomes salient, when social interaction might become less gendered, or whether gender can ever be irrelevant to a given situation. Rather than imposing external categorization, I focus on the meanings individuals attribute to their practices (Emerson, Fretz, et Shaw, 1995). In so doing, I follow Lorenza Mondada (2011) who is interested in the affiliation to a gender category that the individuals are making locally relevant (or not).
