Sylvain Ferez

From Women's Exclusion to Gender Institution: A Brief History of the Sexual Categorisation Process within Sport

It was not until the 1920s that the slow and long process of womens accession to the Olympics began: a progressive yet still uncompleted conquest. But the integration of women was not taken for granted. It was initially just a concession in reaction to the strategy of a separate female games. Besides, the progressive integration of women took place together with the institutional necessity of segregation between male and female events. Thus sport remains a place where gender division is institutionalised from a legal and an organisational point of view. The aim of the paper is to investigate the means employed by the sporting establishment to preserve this gender division in spite of the contradictions it has to face. This means covering the whole spectrum of the practice to control the body, symbolic as well as legal.

Continuer à s’engager dans des loisirs après avoir été infecté au VIH : entre quête de normalité et prescription sociale

Avec le développement des trithérapies et l’allongement de la durée de vie avec le VIH, de nouvelles questions se posent aujourd’hui quant à l’impact du diagnostic, et de la prise en charge à laquelle il confronte. Quand certains parviennent à résister aux injonctions biomédicales à la prise en charge et à préserver les loisirs d’avant le diagnostic, d’autres interrompent ces activités sociales et de loisirs, ou s’engagent dans des dispositifs associatifs où les loisirs deviennent un outil de prise en charge. L’article présente des données recueillies dans deux enquêtes : une sur l’engagement dans les loisirs physiques et sportifs des personnes vivant avec le VIH (PVVIH), par questionnaire (n = 619), et une sur la participation sociale, par entretien semi-directif (n = 21) et par observation participante des dispositifs de loisirs proposés par quatre associations du Languedoc-Roussillon. Elles montrent que les trajectoires de loisirs sont à la fois liées aux situations sanitaires et sociales et au type d’expérience du VIH. Les loisirs ne dérogent pas à l’alternative entre deux logiques, une de préservation d’une vie « normale » et une d’appropriation du statut de malade chronique, qui traversent par ailleurs tous les domaines de l’existence des PVVIH.

From the Institutionalisation of ‘All Disabilities’ to Comprehensive Sports Integration: France Joining the Paralympic Movement (1954–2012)

This article presents the institutional implications and ideologies in the organisation of a Sports Movement for the disabled, whether a physical or sensory handicap, and focusing particular attention on its development in France, linked with international structures. The emergence and development in France of sports organisations for the disabled is based on a different model from that introduced in England by Guttmann through the Stoke Mandeville Games. From the 1960s, both trends, one supported by physicians and the other by individuals concerned with disabilities, structured the International Movement as a contest of negotiations and competition. The objective of rehabilitating paraplegics put in place at Stoke Mandeville gradually gave way to a sport rational and the integration of all types of disability within the Movement. The desire to unite in a single organisation was the driving force of the Movement in its search for dual recognition, on the one hand, as the representative of all physical and sensory deficiencies and, on the other, by the able-bodied sports councils and, in particular, the International Olympic Committee. However, this raised a number of issues inherent to any deficiency when taking into account its specific peculiarities.

Technology at the service of natural performance: cross analysis of the Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya cases

Abstract Drawing from the pragmatic sociology initiated by Boltanski and Thévenot, this study bears on the moments of tension between nature’s dispositions and technology’s possibilities in sporting events. It is based on the premise that the deep meaning of sport competitions and their staging are best perceived when strange or foreign forces (an overly ‘bouncing’ prosthesis, an overly masculine body) comes and undermines the reality tests which constitute the events. Through a cross-analysis [in the sense lent to this term by Passeron and Revel], of two athletes whose sporting achievements generated debates – Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya – we will underline the fundamental role of technology, which consists in instituting, in secret, reality that is always more significant from a sporting standpoint.

To be or not to be sick and tired: Managing the visibility of HIV and HIV-related fatigue.

This article takes a new direction in exploring HIV-related fatigue by adopting a qualitative interactionist approach. We analyse the social meanings attributed to fatigue among people living with HIV in France, the social gains and losses of its visibility and the social frames that condition its discursive and physical expression. The two-part methodology combines grounded theory analysis of 50 transcribed unstructured interviews conducted across France and participant observations within four HIV-related associations. Results reveal that the visibility of fatigue is in part dependent on the visibility of this stigmatized illness. The expression of fatigue is therefore closely linked with disclosure and concerns about HIV stigma. The degree to which HIV and HIV-related fatigue are rendered (in)visible also depends on structural factors including gender prescriptions, as well as context effects such as the type of social or ‘care’ relations involved in the social frame of interaction.

Une approche « hétéro-statistique » et graphique des masses de données d’enquête – le logiciel PointG:

A “Hetero-statistical” and Graphical Approach for Massive Survey Data – The PointG Software. In sociology, one is often confronted with the problem of graphic presentations based on processing massive quantities of data from questionnaire surveys. Moreover, potential users can be of low statistical expertise, thus requiring relatively easy to use software such as PointG with drop-down menus. It is aimed at facing the difficulties due to the mass of collected quantitative data, both at the strategic, tactical and operational levels of statistical processing. It offers conventional ways of analysis going from univariate to multivariate data, but also automates treatments on groups of variables and calculates the size of overall and local effects. Apart from the graphic aspects, its distinctive “hetero-statistic” approach permits the user not to worry about the nature of the variables in bivariate analyses and during regression and factor analysis. PointG was developed within the powerful distribution free R programming environment.

Sports and ‘Minorities’: Negotiating the Olympic Model

Abstract This paper studies ‘minority’ initiatives to organize sports games. A meta-analysis of published data in the literature identifies the formal appearance taken by each of these initiatives under the Olympic model. But it also conduces to build a number of indicators to answer a series of questions about their logic and strategies. All the initiatives studied are based on an ambivalent posture that, while based on the denunciation of a discriminating space, claim access to it. By an astonishing paradox, ‘non-normative’ actors are driven to reclaim a model that, under cover of Universal, aims to establish a norm that is situated and dated. In practice, they use two types of strategies: a strategy for participation in the Olympics to transform them into a space which represents a fight against exclusion, or a strategy to create alternative events. Whatever the strategy, these initiatives are implemented according to their objectives. Differentiated in their forms—participatory or autonomy—they are also in their purpose. The comparison of these initiatives shows that ultimately, beyond strategies and logic inherent in different social, historical and organizational contexts, the mobilizations of the actors reveal the same ambivalence about the sports model conveyed by the Olympic institution.

The divisive origins of sports for physically disabled people in Switzerland (1956–1968)

Abstract Today’s Swiss movement for disability sports is made up of two distinct institutional entities. This division originated in the 1960s, when prominent figures in the Swiss movement were seeking to institutionalize their practices. In 1956, Sport Handicap Geneva was the first Swiss association to offer and organize physical and sporting activities for physically disabled people. A few years later, in 1959, the Swiss Grouping for Paraplegics of the Swiss Association for Paralytics and rheumatics became the rallying point for athletes in wheelchairs who could no longer recognize themselves in the orientation proposed by the Swiss Sports Federation for Invalids, their expressions of disagreement setting the stage for a protracted conflict. An analysis of the beginnings of the institutionalization of disability sports in Switzerland will help us to better understand the reasons why this national sports movement has remained bicephalous.

The manager, the doctor and the technician: political recognition and institutionalization of sport for the physically disabled in France (1968–1973)

Abstract It was in 1969, six years after the creation of the first sports federation for the physically disabled in France, that regular ties with the Ministry of Youth and Sports began to develop. The aim of this article is to question how these ties affected the development of the movement towards the model of ‘classic’ sports federations. Between 1968 and 1973, data from the Ministry of Youth and Sports kept in the National Archives, along with information published in the federal press (crossed with accounts from persons with prominent roles d in disabled sports at the time), reveals a reorganization of the internal relations between managers (who are physically disabled people) and doctors (who generally come from the field of re-education). These new circumstances entailed their collaboration with another federal agent, who consequently became centrally important: the sports technician.

Rapport au corps et engagement dans les activités physiques chez les personnes en situation d’obésité

Dans une perspective sociologique, les activites physiques et l’alimentation sont apprehendees comme pratiques sociales et culturelles, construites et transmises au sein des societes humaines. Le corps est alors pense comme construction sociale, signe et base des identites individuelles et collectives. Dans ce cadre, cet article se propose de mettre en avant quelques processus sociaux sous-jacents a l’epidemie d’obesite. En precisant les enjeux d’une definition medicale de l’obesite dans une societe obesogene, des pistes theoriques concernant les significations de l’epidemie d’obesite sont proposees. Des histoires individuelles de glissement progressif vers l’obesite sont presentees pour montrer la diversite des trajectoires qui peuvent mener a une obesite a l’âge adulte mais egalement la variete des vecus de la situation d’obesite. C’est en particulier le rapport au corps et les experiences en termes d’activite physique qui sont explores pour comprendre comment l’obesite est associee a un non-engagement, un faible engagement ou un des-engagement de la pratique d’activite physique. La question des configurations dans lesquelles un engagement ou un re-engagement dans une pratique physique reguliere pour des populations sedentaires semble possible, est ensuite examinee. La discussion montre que si un engagement regulier et perenne dans une activite physique suppose une transformation profonde du mode de vie des personnes concernees, la dimension collective de ce changement est trop rarement prise en compte.