In contrast to major urban centers, peri-urban areas, rural territories, and small towns have frequently been portrayed as spaces marked by homosexual invisibility. Based on a qualitative study conducted in the Drôme department (southeastern France) and a sociological reflection on the notion of “visibility,” this article offers a more nuanced perspective. Although collective and institutional forms of visibility remain limited and fragile outside large cities, gay and lesbian individuals engage in and navigate more individualized and everyday forms of visibility, which contribute to reconfiguring the social representations of these territories.
The analysis of LGBTI+ activism, when it is place-based, is still often marked by a dual tendency: urban and parisian, eluding LGBTI+ commitments outside the capital and in the countryside. Yet questioning these dichotomies allows us to study these mobilizations dynamically, by combining an analysis of community organizations with an examination of activists’ career paths. By revisiting the concept of “space of the women’s cause” (Bereni, 2012), via a spatial approach, this article analyze the construction of the LGBTI+ costarmorican “space of the cause” by deconstructing the effects of places on LGBTI+ mobilizations. Studying the links between different activist groups that structure the costarmorican “cause space” region allows us to identify moments when the boundary between urban and rural LGBTI+ mobilizations become blurred, without denying the specific characteristics of activism in each of the places studied.
In French scientific literature, regardless of the discipline considered, research on gender and sexual minorities has focused on a specific geographical context: the centers of very large cities. This article proposes to go beyond this limitation and, to do so, focuses on the activist activities of two associations committed to supporting these minority groups in two working-class towns in the northern suburbs of Paris. The development of these associations in contexts that are socially constructed as hostile to these minorities has so far received little attention in the scientific field. This article proposes to examine this original subject and establish an explanatory model that will enable us to understand recent developments in the spatial, residential, activist, and leisure practices of gender and sexual minorities in large cities, which the article links to the dynamics of gentrification affecting these contexts, particularly in Paris.
This article examines the coexistence of homonationalism and a postcolonial homophobic tension in French Caribbean settings. It analyzes the Eurocentric paradigm LGBT+ Caribbean activists based in Guadeloupe, Martinique and Paris used in the late 2000s-early 2010s to tackle the local expressions of homophobia. These activists thus reinforce a binary distinction between an LGBT+-friendly mainland French territory – or Western world – and its dependencies depicted as intrinsically intolerant. Since reflections on homonationalism tend to overlook how heterosexist violence manifests itself outside the west and at its margins, this paper also seeks to fill that gap. Therefore, it also takes into account the local, very tangible, expressions of homophobia. These reflections are based on a reanalysis of findings collected during two field studies. The first one, which was undertaken in 2008-2009, was about the French Caribbean gay scene in Paris. The second one, which was initiated following the general strike that paralyzed Guadeloupe in early 2009, examines the intricate self-identification processes this unprecedented social movement magnified.
Pathways of detransition, desistance or discontinuation (D*) among trans and non-binary youth (TNB) are attracting growing interest from the media, politicians and the scientific community. Although little studied, this phenomenon is fuelling lively debate, particularly among the professionals who work with TNB youth, who are often accused of encouraging these pathways through “erroneous diagnoses” or hasty interventions. Yet their perceptions and clinical experiences remain poorly documented. This article explores their understanding of the phenomenon, based on a sample of 60 professionals working with young NBDs who responded to an online survey. Thematic analysis of the open-ended responses reveals nuanced perceptions and clinical knowledge that is generally consistent with the literature. These professionals could play a key role in improving support for TNB youth and those with a D* pathway.
Since the 1980s, research on homosexuality has highlighted the logic of distancing oneself from one’s communities of origin, often analyzed through migration trajectories towards urban centers perceived as more conducive to the expression of minority sexual identities. By bringing this literature into dialogue with research on migration from the French overseas territories, particularly from Reunion Island, this article shows that geographic mobility should not be equated with a disaffiliation from one’s place of origin. It can also be accompanied by forms of closeness, attachment, or reinvestment. Drawing on a study based on biographical accounts and employing a life-course approach, this article highlights how the dynamics of embeddedness and distancing, far from being fixed and opposed, interplay and reconfigure themselves over time and across spaces.
While recent research has challenged the idea of rural areas as inherently hostile to homosexuality, few studies have quantitatively examined the trajectories of gay and bisexual men living in these settings. Drawing on data from the 2023 “Rapport au sexe” (ERAS) survey, this article explores the specific social and relational configurations of rural spaces and the particular forms of vulnerability they produce. The findings highlight lower levels of educational attainment, less community-based sociability, a more distant relationship to healthcare services, and a weaker uptake of prevention tools (testing, PrEP), despite levels of risk exposure that are comparable to – or even higher than – those observed in other areas. In this context, “rurality” does not appear as a direct source of vulnerability, but rather as an indirect determinant of sexual health inequalities, interacting with other social relations and relational dynamics that call for a rethinking of public policy.
Since the early 2000s, the late modern history of homosexuality in France has developped at the intersection of urban history and the history of sexuality. Non-urban spaces are absent from this historiography and are subject to a repressive a priori. This article examines the challenges of writing a queer rural history, considering both the under-representation of rural areas and the prevalence of sexual violence in legal archives. We use two cases enriched by complementary sources to show that the specific social structuring of rural worlds produces singular normative regimes, and to historicise the deployment of “sexual orientation” as a way of categorising individuals. From an epistemological point of view, this article underlines the value of the rural setting for taking a fresh look at the history of sex between men and de-metropolitanising the historical view of heteronormativity.
This article focuses on an example of lesbian community life in rural areas, based on an oral history survey conducted from September 2024 to January 2025, cross-referenced with private sources and lesbian periodicals. It is a study of Korrigwyn, an ecofeminist lesbian land imagined from Berlin, and established in the Breton countryside between 1993 and 1999. In line with Françoise Flamant’s work on women’s lands founded in the United States in the 1970s, this research understands lesbian lands as heterotopias in the sense of Michel Foucault, that is to say, forms of contestatory utopias anchored in reality. The aim here is to discern the level of porosity of Korrigwyn, through the way in which its members perceive the territory of the community and communicate about this place. The article uses, among other things, the field of returns to the land to question the relationship to rurality of the founders of Korrigwyn, who come from urban backgrounds.
The article analyses the impacts of incarceration on heterosexual intimate relationships. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted with incarcerated individuals and their partners, it shows that the prison experience forces couples to redefine their relationships. Incarcerated women face marked isolation, as their male partners often withdraw from the relationship. For some women who have experienced violence, imprisonment creates a space for distancing themselves from coercive control and for reconstructing their lives through women-centered supportive networks. Female partners of incarcerated men overwhelmingly maintain their commitment, while their partners become dependent on their support, significantly increasing women’s workload. This dependence may exacerbate a fragile masculinity that seeks to control the partner, but it can also lead to a reduction in violence due to the distance imposed by imprisonment and to a revalorisation of the woman’s role.
In recent years, the issue of reproductive rights for trans individuals has gained significant visibility in France, compelling professionals in reproductive medicine to confront demands that challenge the binary and cisheteronormative paradigm underpinning their clinical practices. Some practitioners respond with resistance and anxiety, reaffirming the supposed naturalness of sex-based categorization to uphold the procreative order. Others, by contrast, have entered a critical engagement with the epistemological foundations of their discipline, allowing themselves to be taught by the lived experiences of trans people. This article offers an analysis of the moral trajectory shaping fertility preservation medical practices for trans individuals within the field of reproductive medicine. To do so, we examine the contexts and mechanisms through which a group of biologists and gynecologists have mobilized over the past decade around issues of (trans)reproductive justice.
Drawing on interviews conducted with 21 gay men and lesbians aged over 60 living outside metropolitan areas, this article examines return or settlement in rural areas in later life. By reversing the idea of a “flight to the city” (Eribon, 1999) in youth, it seeks to understand whether leaving the city sheds light on the effects of déprise on mobilities and relational patterns.Decisions to relocate to rural areas are driven by multiple factors shared with most of retired people. Homosexuality is never mentioned as a motive, unlike family-related reasons. Singlehood, however, constitutes a constraint on mobility: faced with the perception that homosexual life is nonexistent outside large cities, stable couplehood is seen as ensuring its continuity.Settling in sparsely populated areas entails renewed forms of visibility. Single individuals adopt strategies of discretion grounded in an ideal of the privatisation of sexuality. Couples integrate into local social networks through a double negotiation, concerning both their representations of their new neighbourhood and the normative assignments addressed to them.Finally, gendered differences in the use of homosexual spaces tend to diminish with age, giving way to friendship-based and locally embedded forms of sociability.
