The man for the job. How working-class men express masculinity in the normative ambivalence of an occupational limbo

Abstract

This paper draws on an ethnography of a French industrial factory to examine how working-class men trapped in context of indefinite in-betweeneness, framed as an “organizational limbo,” navigate the multiple ambivalent norms at play. It explores how this confusing situation engenders ways to express masculinity that differ from the discursive and corporal manners that the literature usually associates with virility affirmation among French industrial workers. The data indeed show that, in the complex context under study regulated by differing and sometimes contradictory standards, being “the man for the job” has various and ambivalent meanings: workers paradoxically fail to be perceived “as real men” when they rely on a single set of practices expressing an immutable form of masculinity. The paper uncovers how these blurred, contradictory expectations and attitudes combine to drag workers into a spiral of unresolved gender politics. In so doing, this work opens up further research avenues on the role of in-betweenness and hybridity in the lived practices of contemporary class-gender identity formations.