Session 3 - Séminaire Territoire(s) et genre: "Genre et espaces publics urbains : Métiers de rue, socialisation urbaine et sociabilités ordinaires" (Gender and urban public spaces: street trades, urban socialization and ordinary social skills)

The urban public spaces of major French and European cities constitute a troubled and in many respects unsettling territory for researchers who approach the study of gender in contemporary history and that of the present day. The gendered segregation of people and activities, always acute, is complex and leaves interstices at its margins; places providing a punctual suspension of dominant norms and moments of possible transgression, stolen from the daily routine of the unequal order. Reserved territories for men in modern history, mirroring the household where most women had to remain confined, the streets and squares of big cities gradually made visible, with the birth of the modern city and social movements, the timid and still uncertain effects of a certain equality of conditions.

Neither pure recording chambers of gender inequalities, nor free spaces where future forms of civic equality are anticipated, the game becomes more complicated when, at the beginning of the 20th ^{century, a few common women come to exercise " and onlookers gather to witness the spectacle of their mere presence, while the press and postcards relay the public's astonishment. How can we explain these few women's measured and belated access to these trades? What is the significance of this popular enthusiasm and new public visibility in the press and on postcards? What did the feminist magazines of the time have to say about it? These are just some of the questions addressed by Juliette Rennes, director of studies at EHESS, in her book, Métiers de rue. Observer le travail et le genre à Paris en 1900, which she will be presenting in Valenciennes during the 3rdème session of Larsh's Territoire(s) et Genre seminar. In her talk, Juliette Rennes will focus on " the different modalities of occupation and appropriation of the street by work and how they are shaped by professional status, gender and age ".}

Other scenes in the same city, Paris, and another metropolis, Milan, at the start of another century, our own. Three waves of feminist and queer movements have now enshrined the equality of men and women in law, and contributed to the timid recognition, through the force of conflict, of the egalitarian claims of other gender minorities, criticizing the weight and oppression represented by sexuality for many minority subjects in a patriarchal society, as well as the principle of equal access to education and the as-yet-unrealized principle of professional and wage equality. Nevertheless, in the streets of major cities, the freedom to circulate anonymously in urban space, to enjoy possible impromptu encounters or the simple pleasure of strolling and to collectively maintain the civil norms of co-presence, is not equally distributed for all pedestrians. Women, people stigmatized for their supposed sexual identity or those who claim to be LGBTQIA+, cannot easily enjoy the freedom of the city-dweller. Less easily benefiting from the indifference proper to civil inattention that colors many interactions between men, they are more often reduced to their supposed sexual identity, questioned in this sense, considered as available sexual objects, and are often discriminated against or even assaulted.

Or, in this context, within two socially mixed neighborhoods of Paris and Milan, the family home, where children prepare for autonomy in the city during adolescence, is only marginally a place where the political struggle against these different forms of violence is organized. A protected, protective and even confining place, it remains a social space where parents teach their daughters, in particular, to live with the threat of sexual aggression, and therefore to be discreet, to tolerate certain looks at their bodies, to skilfully conceal certain parts of them through their clothing, and to limit their movements to what is strictly necessary. As Clément Rivière finely demonstrates in his book Leurs enfants dans la ville. A survey of parents in Paris and Milan, the urban socialization of adolescents.regardless of the parents' social class (but with certain nuances), " to teach girls to know how to behave in public places " and thereby to accept that access to the world of strangers that the big city constitutes consists for them in occupying a place of inferiors in the streets. In his contribution to the Gender and urban public spaces session, Clément Rivière proposes, on the basis of an ongoing survey and " mirroring his doctoral work, to question the way in which interactions in which parents take a direct part in public spaces are likely to contribute to their process of " parental socialization ", which " reshapes individuals into parents " in very different ways depending on whether they are men or women (Darmon 2016) ".

A short distance from the 19^ème arrondissement so dear to Clément Rivière is another network of streets enlivened by a crossroads, that of Quatre-Chemin, between Aubervilliers and Pantin in Seine-Saint-Denis, home to a metro station. Until recently one of France's poorest neighborhoods, the fears surrounding this shopping and passing area have less to do with the safety of the streets than with the anarchy that is supposed to reign there. For a fraction of the neighborhood's population - a few retired people, small shopkeepers and craftsmen - the culprits of this anarchic climate are quite obvious. Post-colonial immigrants, who have been arriving en masse since the late 1980s, have transformed this commercial and civilized area into a "souk " with its share of incivilities, " false poor " litter, noise and hieratic traffic, where petty theft and serious crime are undoubtedly fomented. Mothers, more nuanced, nonetheless try to identify a few of the more limited number of undocumented culprits. Finally, some women activists question the over-representation of men in these urban gatherings, and their collective, Place aux femmes, labels cafés that welcome their group without discrimination. Over time, the question they pose evolves. Does the problem stem from the masculine norms that govern these public spaces, or from the forms of control that circulate in families and frame private life? Why do certain cafés, such as PMUs, attract fewer women than the large café on the carrefour, the café des victoires ?

West African émigrés met during a lengthy ethnographic survey (doctorate) in the cafés of the carrefour by Josué Gimel, have no wind of these interrogations indirectly concerning them and aimed at giving an estimate of the categories of supernumerary individuals. For in the midst of the hustle and bustle, the great respect for the civil rules of co-presence forbids imputing collective responsibility on a cultural or racial basis for the city's ills. Protected from the discriminating gaze, they come to occupy the sidewalks and cafés in the interstices left to them by their work, and are content to spend their free time there, to " feel good ". Alongside a wide range of customary discussions and commentary on current political affairs, these small gatherings of men sometimes tend to turn into " sex classes ", particularly when saucy jokes alternate with accusations of the selfishness of certain African women  their lack of recognition of their natural authority eventually, they say, making love impossible and leading to divorce. Nevertheless, this discourse proves to be of little help when it comes to confronting their heart problems individually and intimately. Like the father of Abdelmalek Sayad's Zahoua, who can only accept his daughter's choices and acknowledge her successes through silence, the Africans at Quatre-Chemins alternate between the hollow public discourse of conquering or wounded virility, and the reparative exchange where, in private, marital woes can be expressed in a more nuanced way and women's desire for greater equality within the couple finally finds a place to be recognized. The contours of masculinity, leaving behind the closed territory of virility, are timidly redrawn through these few cures.