Research project in development
How LGBTQ men receive, negotiate, and remake norms of virility through life trajectories and ritual
This research examines how gay, bisexual, transgender and queer men navigate, receive, and sometimes refuse patriarchal norms of virility. Rather than treating virility as a natural masculine attribute, the project asks how it functions as a system of transmitted knowledge — learned, performed, enforced, and occasionally dismantled across life trajectories.
The theoretical framework is dual. From religious studies: virility norms are understood through the lens of rites, prohibitions, and sacred symbolic systems that give them coherence and social binding force across groups. From intersectional gender theory (Butler, Connell, Crenshaw): virility operates differently depending on age, cultural origin, class, and sexual history, and its effects on exclusion, belonging, and self-recognition cannot be read from a single axis.
The methodological design uses individual semi-directive life-narrative interviews with men identifying as gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. The interview structure covers three dimensions: how virility norms are transmitted across generations and social interactions; how they are integrated into or resisted within masculine identity; and how attitudes and practices around virility shift across the course of a life.
The project connects to postdoctoral research developed through the MOVE-IN Louvain fellowship program at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) in 2017, and extends the doctoral work on ritual negotiation, queer identity, and gender performance completed at UQAM.