De l’insultance sexiste : enquête sur la perception d’actes insultants sexistes auprès de la population francophone européenne (Belgique, France)

Details

Supervisors

Hambye

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres françaises et romanes, orientation générale, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

enThis thesis focuses on the notion of sexism, its realizations in discourse (discursive sexism) and its effects of verbal violence: what is sexism? Does it have an unbiased aspect in speech, regardless of the intention of the speaker and of the understanding of the witness and of the resulting effects? Does the sexism of discourse contribute to male domination? When put into words, can this sexism hurt? What are the forms and the mechanism of the violence of language - more strictly speaking, of discourse - which is exerted against women beyond what’s called insult, in everyday language? After having defined sexism, proposed a typology of the forms it takes in discourse, and thought about the similarities which unite this phenomenon with insult, I identify the discursive and social property of insultance, which designates the potential capacity of an act of speech to cause an insulting effect to an interlocutor or to any other simultaneous or deferred witness of this statement due to the inferiorization of an identity (insulting meaning) conveys or objectively supposes by this act and with which this interlocutor or witness identifies or is identified by others. The insulting meaning, which is objective, is independent of the intention of the enunciator, of the personal meaning conferred on it by the interlocutors and of the effect it provokes on them. Finally, this thesis presents the results of a survey on the perception of discursive sexism and its insultance (2021) in French-speaking Europe (Belgium, France). It shows that the perception of types of discursive sexism (elementary or hostile sexism; anti-feminism of modern sexism / neosexism and masculinism; objectifying sexism; inverted sexism; benevolent sexism; subtle sexism; conventional or linguistic sexism) generates a perceptual continuum of the sexist insultance. This survey also examines the perception of sexism when expressed by a woman and a few cases of elementary sexist humor.