Résumé
The thesis explores the subjective experiences and social trajectories of Chinese migrant women doing prostitution in France. The methodological approach is based on co-constructed life stories through an intersubjective perspective. I analyze how these women assign meaning to the social situations they face while re-appropriating their collective and individual experiences. From the subjectivation processes that occur during the collection of data, I attempt to elucidate these migrant women’s socio-psychic investments and their complex relationships with money, love, intimacy, family, responsibility, freedom, history, the future, themselves and others. I analyze how these women try to construct themselves as subject of their own history, in particular through the responses they provide to the contradictions within their living circumstances. In this context, their ways of socialization are understood as attempts to exist, resist and create. By mobilizing clinical epistemology within sociology, in the second part of the thesis, I propose a reflection on clinical contributions to the research process. I support these considerations firstly by considering that the analysis at the intersubjective, subjective and intrapsychic levels in the researcher-researched pairing contributes to highlight the socio-psychic traits characteristic of this population of women born after the sixties in China. Secondly, I develop how on the fact of knowing how the countertransference work in the afterwardsness becomes one of the conditions in the accompaniment of psychic working-through; and finally I consider scenic thinking in group as a production of knowledge which transform ordinary social scenes into analytical situations. In the third and final part, I situate these stories within the socio-historical narrative of the modernization of China, by understanding the life trajectories of these women as part of globalization processes and emerging relations between the Chinese society and the West. This implies taking into account the articulation between collectivism and individualism charactering today’s Chinese people, as they adopt new existential modalities that mobilize specific social and psychic resources. Thus I here explore a subject that discusses the relationship between desire and the social in a different way.
Source: http://www.theses.fr/2021UNIP7127
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