Les liaisons fructueuses - RUIG-GIAN

V – Eclairages | Témoignage
ered their deliberate and dynamic love strategies and
sexual transactions. Our emic (the so called “native’s
point of view”) approach allowed us to interpret and
understand young people’s - both girls’ and boys’ -
motivations and practices, their representations and
the meaning they gave to what they were doing. We
found out that youth are experiencing their lives in
a globalised world of consumerist life styles, transnational
vestimentary fashion, music production
and consumption, leisure activities, etc. Engaging in
sexual relationships therefore meant many things to
various social actors. We do not dismiss the fact that
girls and women sometimes have sexual transactions
out of necessity, but we were struck by the deliberate
strategies of many young women to deal with multiple
partners simultaneously in order to cope with
their aspirations in terms of symbolic and material
expression of their gender identities. We have chosen
the metaphor “Chic, chèque, choc” as a leading
thread of the International Gender Colloquium we
organised (October 2007) in order to compare our
findings with anthropological case studies elsewhere
in the world. We are convinced that our approach and
our findings have the potential of shedding a new light
on development and public health interventions in the
field of reproductive health. This is undoubtedly a very
valuable gain of the project in terms of knowledge production.
We are now in the post-project process of disseminating
the results in scientific arenas as well as to a larger
public (through radio, internet and a photo exhibition
“Toubifry,” by F. Grange and A. Peck.
Féminités et masculinités en
mouvement. “We were struck by
the deliberate strategies of many
young women to deal with
multiple partners simultaneously
in order to cope with their
aspirations in terms of symbolic
and material expression of their
gender identities.”
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