Women in resistance

The title of the work alone sums up the ambition of Danièle Kergoat who writes on the first introductory page: “ the revolt against class, gender and racial relations has structured my life and guided my research » (p. 9). For Kergoat, who says revolt, says “ need to understand the driving forces and mechanisms of systems of domination » (ibid.), the basis of a vast research program whose main lines are traced in the book. Listed in three parts, “ think about dominations “, “ think about work ” And “ think about emancipation », the collected texts provide the theoretical tools developed by the author and the results of her field investigations, but also outline the contours of a social research practice.

An embodied and historicized sociology

This book is more than an opportunity to (re)read certain articles which have influenced the sociology of work, such as feminist sociology since the end of the 1970s. ; in fact, the different introductions allow the author to position herself in the theoretical field, but also in the collective stories that have marked her intellectual career. The work opens and ends with the same words: “ ‘my’ sociology testifies » (p. 9 & p. 333) she writes of her activism and her participation in different social movements (the workers’ movement, the war of liberation led by the Algerians and the women’s movement). Make no mistake, the use of the personal pronoun does not refer to an isolated thought, but to the desire to undermine the idea of ​​axiological neutrality held by a number of feminist researchers. By explaining where she is speaking from, Danièle Kergoat takes a rare reflective look at an academic trajectory, thus enriched with a collective and embodied dimension. Fight, they say… certainly signs the author’s revolt, but above all gives voice to the revolt of the women encountered in the field. In this work, she develops a sociology which puts “ at the center of the analysis the political subject (and no longer just the victims of domination) » (p. 140), which strives to read and understand the will of women and men to transgress, as well as the force they deploy to resist and create “ a space of freedom » (p. 27). The repetitions, due to the very nature of the work, underline the nodal points of a thought which works by stacking, which readers will follow all the more easily.

Fruitful revolt: tools for thinking about the world

The first part of the book aims to think about domination and “ identify the sometimes unexpected ways in which it manifests itself » (p. 26). By showing that “ worker is not the feminine form of worker », the first texts shatter the supposed homogeneity of the working class. Kergoat clearly shows the heuristic scope of an analysis which takes into account the overlapping of the productive and reproductive spheres. Affirming on several occasions her feminist and materialist perspective, she recalls that the analysis of work cannot

the impasse on domestic work carried out for free by women in the private sphere. For the author, the division of labor constitutes the central issue in social relations of class, sex and race. The following texts specify its analytical framework in terms of social relations. For Kergoat, “ a social relationship is an antagonistic relationship between two social groups, established around an issue » (p. 126). The distinction she makes between social relationship and social relations allows her to show that if there is indeed “ displacement of tension lines » (p. 128) in social relations, particularly between the groups of women and that of men, on the other hand, the social relationship remains untouched: it “ continues to operate and express itself in its three canonical forms: exploitation, domination, oppression » (ibid.). The empirical anchoring of the different articles makes it possible to illustrate the dynamic, always changing nature of social relations and their historicity, both objective and subjective. Kergoat mentions, for example, the emergence of historically unprecedented social relationships between women, due to the outsourcing of domestic work by certain women in Northern countries. Registering on the sidelines of the “ intersectionality paradigm ”, which would tend to “ to freeze the categories, to naturalize them » (p. 133), the author develops the concepts of “ consubstantiality » and “ coextensivity » to designate respectively “ the complex dynamic interweaving of all social relationships » (p.136) and the fact that they co-produce and reproduce each other. For the author, the fact that they form a system does not exclude contradictions.

The second part of this work is devoted to the division of labor between the sexes, a major contribution to the sociology of Danièle Kergoat. In a first text on the part-time work of workers and employees, the author reverses the naturalizing argument according to which the place of women on the labor market is explained by their family situation. On the contrary, it shows that women’s investment in the private sphere depends on their “ place in production relations » (p. 170). Placing at the center of the analysis the nature of work and positions offered to women, she forcefully asserts the thesis of “ centrality of work ”, discussing the notion of “ conciliation » which often permeates works on the subject. The idea that women distribute “ harmoniously » their time between employment and family contributes to making the unequal distribution of domestic responsibilities and the balancing acts imposed on them invisible, but also reinforces “ the spiral of relations of domination between the sexes » (p. 174). The following texts are devoted to the paradigm of the sexual division of labor. It returns to its two organizing principles: the principle of separation (there are men’s jobs and women’s jobs) and the hierarchical principle (man’s work “ worth » more than a woman’s job). Questioning any biological causal link and striving to go beyond a binary categorization between men and women, the author provides a fundamental theoretical tool widely used in the sociology of work and gender today. Under the pen of Kergoat, “ problematizing in terms of sexual division of labor does not refer to deterministic thinking ; on the contrary… because if this approach supposes uncovering the phenomena of social reproduction, it simultaneously implies studying the displacements and ruptures of this one » (p. 215). If the sexual division of labor is the issue of social relations and is not an immutable, a-historical and a-social given, it is also a theoretical tool which provides the possibility of analyzing changes and resistance.

Is emancipation only possible in such a context of domination? ? This question is precisely the subject of the last part of the work. For Kergoat, emancipation must be analyzed as a movement which tends towards the overthrow of exploitation, oppression and all forms of domination. The first texts focus on questioning the difficult transition from group to collective, which she defines as “ system with strong action capacity » (p. 244). Concerned with describing the blockages, she deals not only with institutional barriers, but also with obstacles linked to the internalization of domination. The author gives a major illustration of this with “ the syllogism of the constitution of the feminine sexual subject », which allows us to understand the internalization by women of the deskilling of the work carried out. If the author expresses the need to think about the violence that women exercise “ against oneself and against other women » (p. 237), it also shows that they can develop a relationship with subversive work. The workers of the care (Paperman et al., 2005), although at the bottom of the classification scale, develop a positive relationship with their work, particularly with the helping relationship. For the author, this does not arise from the internalization of gender roles, but from the fact that “ the works of care are part of a line of force that feminists have theorized, i. e. continuity, for women and women only, between paid work and domestic work » (p. 276). In the texts on nursing coordination, the author returns to “ the power to act » of the collective, and shows that by definitively breaking with the vocation, nurses entered into “ the salary relationship without giving up what they value » (p. 295). An interview carried out by Armelle Testenoire with Danièle Kergoat closes the work. The discursive exchange returns to the extent of the author’s conceptual work, inseparably derived from her biographical and scientific trajectory, and serves to remind us that all work, and perhaps particularly research work, is developed collectively.