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.
