L'identité dans l'interaction: pratiques de catégorisation et accountability en milieu homoparental

Drawing on a corpus of audio-recorded interactions in a French association of present and future gay and lesbian parents, we analyze the processes whereby participants construct their identity of homo parents. The recorded interactions take place during focus group meetings in which participants share and discuss their experience. The discussion often focuses on the problems children will have to face in their relationship with parents and with other children living in a more traditional family. In discussing these problems, participants often produce hypothetical narratives with made-up scenes in which their children either call them or refer to them. Two different processes of constructing homoparental categories have attracted our attention: those activated to choose the kinship terms participants consider most appropriate to name parents in a gay or lesbian couple, and those used to evoke participants’ collective identity as focus-group members. In the first case, identity categories of gay and lesbian parents are the topic of the conversations, and the choice of kinship terms with the semantic traits they bring is constantly negotiated and reformulated in the interaction. In the second case, the focus - group collective identity, even if not thematized, emerges in humourous episodes in which participants propose paradoxical made-up scenes that evidently oversimplify the parental experience they are discussing about. Participants laugh at those scenes and, in so doing, re-establish the problematic perspective upon the homoparental experience they share. Those humoristic episodes are thus functional to the evocation of the collective focus - group identity.