Tracés, n°30/2016

Calling on the notion of experience to approach minority groups aims at keeping at bay any assumption of passivity regarding minority groups. This issue therefore examines not only the social situation of minorities, but also their experience of stigma, their positioning towards producers of stigma and their conception of their own identities. Looking at how assigned identities and characteristics are experienced, and how they may be rejected, interiorised, appropriated or overturned, experience-based approaches seek to identify the specific forms of subjectivation to which the experience of assigned identities may lead.

From then on, what account may one give of the content of minority experiences, when the idea is no longer to circumscribe, from the outside, a social and political position? How do minority experiences make sense in relation to the majority normative framework and the apparatuses of power? What is at stake in terms of knowledge and power, when a group is defined as a minority? How is the divide between majority and minority achieved and reconfigured? How do minority practices operate in a variety of social and cultural contexts? What is the minorities' relation to the public space and to social time? How do power apparatuses produce minority bodies, which can be questioned through research or fiction?

To explore this set of questions and perspectives opened up by the coupling of the two notions of minority and experience, this issue brings together a number of contributions based on diverse fieldwork and sources. The authors collected the material for their research on minority groups through semi-structured interviews, through ethnographical surveys, in judicial archives, in political and poetic works, in a critical study of historiography or even in their own personal histories.