La racaille
figuring gender, generation, and stigmatized space in a French cité
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v2i2.141Keywords:
gender, space, discourse, Muslims, EuropeAbstract
Dominant French discourses stigmatize la racaille (‘male street toughs’) in a national moral panic about cités (‘subsidized housing projects’). This paper examines how these discourses influence everyday talk and experiences of public space in Chemin de l’Ile, a cité west of Paris. In both national and local discourses, la racaille symbolizes stigmatized public spaces, particularly la rue (‘the street’). However, inhabitants in Chemin de l’Ile mobilize the symbol of la racaille to evoke a set of moralizing discourses that are inflected with cultural, gendered, and generational prescriptions. Specifically, la racaille is constructed as morally threatening to culturally respectful spaces, such as Muslim weddings, and the respect of certain persons including adolescent girls. Adolescent girls’ own perspectives are analyzed to show that through narratives about la racaille they elaborate and resist normative prescriptions for gendered uses of public space in their cité.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. The weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. Why be normal? Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in society 28:203–223.
Bucholtz, Mary. 2003. Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of sociolinguistics 7(3): 398–416.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1976. Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Duret, Pascal. 1996. Anthropologie de la fraternité dans les cités. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris.
Essed, Philomena. 1991. Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. London: Sage Publications.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. New York: Longman Publishers.
Foley, Douglas. 1990. Learning capitalist culture: Deep in the heart of Tejas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ghannam, Farha. 2002. Remaking the modern: Space, relocation, and the politics of identity in a global Cairo. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 1987. ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’. The cultural politics of race and nation. London: Hutchinson Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Goodman, Jane E. 2005. Berber culture on the world stage: From village to video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hall, Kira. 1997. Go suck on your husband’s sugarcane. In Anna Livia and Kira Hall (eds). Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 432–469.
Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order. New York: Holmes & Meier.
McElhinny, Bonnie. 1995. Challenging hegemonic masculinities: Female and male police officers handling domestic violence. In Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall (eds). Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge, pp. 217–243.
Modan, Gabriella Gahlia. 2007. Turf wars: Discourse, diversity, and the politics of place. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ochs, Elinor. 1992. Indexing gender. In Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335–58.
Peristiany, John. 1976. Introduction. In John Peristiany (ed.). Mediterranean family structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–26.
Ridet, Philippe. 2005. M. Sarkozy durcit son discours sur les banlieues. Le Monde, 22 November, p3.
Silverstein, Paul. 2004. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, race, and nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Silverstein, Paul and Chantal Tetreault. 2006. Postcolonial urban apartheid. Items and issues. Quarterly for the social science research council 8–15.
Smitherman-Donaldson, Geneva and Teun van Dijk (eds). 1988. Discourse and discrimination. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Terrio, Susan. 1999. Crucible of the millennium? The Clovis affair in contemporary France. Comparative studies in society and history 41(3): 438–457.
Tetreault, Chantal. 2002. ‘You call that a girl?’ Borderwork in a French cité. In Sarah Benor, Mary Rose, Devyani Sharma, Julie Sweetland and Qing Zhang (eds). Gendered practices in language. Stanford University: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 1998. Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race, and class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Van Dijk, Teun. 1987. Communicating racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Van Dijk, Teun. 1993. Elite discourse and racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Wihtol de Wenden and Catherine and Zakya Daoud (eds). 1994. Banlieues… intégration ou explosion? Special edition of Panoramiques II (12).
Williams, Brackette. 1991. Stains on my name, war in my veins: Guyana and the politics of cultural struggle. Durham, NC: Duke Press.
Published
2008-11-17
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Tetreault, C. (2008). La racaille: figuring gender, generation, and stigmatized space in a French cité. Gender and Language, 2(2), 141-170. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v2i2.141
