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À partir d’enquêtes par questionnaires puis par entretiens, cet article analyse l’intégration des doctorant·es au sein d’un laboratoire français de recherche en histoire et en histoire de l’art modernes et contemporaines (« Lab »), au service d’une réflexion plus globale sur la production des inégalités dans les domaines de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche. L’enquête fait le constat de l’absence de constitution d’un collectif de doctorant·es, tant entre elles et eux qu’au sein du laboratoire. Plusieurs raisons sont avancées pour expliquer cette absence. En premier lieu, la communauté des doctorant·es n’existe qu’en théorie : elles et ils ont des parcours avec de fortes différences, qu’il s’agisse de leur situation financière, de leur localisation géographique ou de leur parcours de vie. Cette situation est complexifiée par le statut hybride des doctorant‧es, qui les maintient dans une professionnalisation inachevée. Et si une image de doctorant·e imaginaire semble être partagée, les vécus révélés par l’enquête plaident pour des différences profondes dans l’appréhension de cette période particulière de la vie d’un·e chercheur·euse. Dans cette diversité, le laboratoire pourrait apparaître comme un acteur unifiant. Or, impensé par la quasi-totalité des doctorant‧es à l’entrée de thèse, il est l’objet d’un intérêt lointain par la suite, sans devenir une réelle structure d’appui pour la majorité d’entre elles et eux.

The Labouchère amendment is often regarded as the piece of British legislation that criminalized male homosexuality. Indeed, while before it was passed, only sodomy had been a criminal offence, this amendment extended the scope of the criminal law by making a misdemeanour ‘the commission of or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person’. As a consequence, it marked the beginning of a ‘homosexual exception’ surrounding its adoption as it was part of a wider bill—the Criminal Law Amendment Bill—, intended to protect younger girls from vice and prostitution. The bill took over four years to become law. The general consensus about the evils of male homosexuality was such that the amendment was adopted without any real debate in only four minutes. The broad spectrum of what was then considered a misdemeanour, whether committed by consenting adults in private or not, its vague phrasing made the prosecution of many men possible. However, that being said, in some respects there is a case for considering that English law regarding male homosexuality in Victorian England was not so ‘exceptional’ after all, and indeed could even be seen as representing a potentially more lenient evolution of the criminal law. However, this article argues that the ‘homosexual exception’ also needs to be seen from a different perspective: as the visible tip of the iceberg on sexual control.

Symonds was the driving force behind Sexual Inversion, the first medical book about homosexuality in English. Not a doctor himself, but being a homosexual, Symonds developed his identity as a member of the Victorian upper-middle class, shaped by the norms of the time, as he told his story in his correspondence and his posthumous Memoirs. He attempted to repress then conceal his homosexuality to the world and to his own eyes, trying to conform to what his father and society were expecting from him, that is to say to be an exemplary and ‘productive’ member of Victorian society (and therefore a husband and a father), even if that meant having to sublimate his desires until he could no longer do so and ‘was finally born to himself’. He then developed an ideal conception of relationships between men, and found that satisfying his sexual needs was a way of living a life worth living that would no longer make him sick as he was trying to suppress this part of himself. Reading Sexual Inversion through the lens of his autobiographical writings allows us to see a posthumous portrait of Symonds on the path to acceptance and eventually vindication of his natural homosexuality.