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Construire le street workout, faire le genre : snapshots ethnographiques sur le bricolage identitaire engagé par les pratiquant-e-s de "fitness des rues'"
JournalArticle (Originalarbeit in einer wissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift)
Construire le street workout, faire le genre : snapshots ethnographiques sur le bricolage identitaire engagé par les pratiquant-e-s de "fitness des rues'"
Journal
Sciences Sociales et Sport
Number
9
Pages / Article-Number
47-82
Keywords
Sport, Gender, Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, Intersectionality, Street Workout
Abstract
Constructing street workout, (un)doing gender: ethnographic snapshots on the collective production of identities by practitioners of "fitness from the streets" In this article, I examine how specific logics and categories are conveyed and assembled by practitioners of street workout, a new form of urban sport, in the sensemaking, the "narrativization" [ mise en récit ] and the promotion of their practice. This analysis focuses more particularly on (1) gender, which I concepttualize as a routinized work that draws on preexisting resources (logics, representations and categories), and whose result and effect are a recursive solidifycation or a transformation of these resources ; and (2) the way it is interwoven within a broader identity work that draws on several repertoires of identification such as ethnicity, class, territoriality and groups of practitioners at different scales (global imagined community of practitioners, local peer groups). In the first part of the article, I propose an historical contextualization of street workout, in which I seek to track down the use, the trajectories and the effects of several categories with regard to the repertoires of identification and classification they are related to. In a second part, I pursue this analysis by focusing more specifically on street workout practitioners' discourses to promote their sport. This specific discursive register of promotion very often constitutes the basis on which the "narrativization" [mise en récit] of gender takes place, for it often implies an active promotion of the involvement of women in street workout, and more broadly pertains to a stance that to a certain extent can be associated with the notion of (pro-)feminism. I then analyze the strategies engaged to bridge the discrepancy between this active promotion of women's involvement in street workout, on the one hand, and the fact that this sport is mainly practiced by young men, on the other. Finally, I propose an overview of the arguments deployed by practitioners to explain the persistence of this discrepancy, and show to what extent the (pro)feminist stance is constantly put to the test of broader circulating logics and representtations, including some gender stereotypes.