Institution familiale et injonction à l’hétérosexualité à Dakar

This article examines the discursive manifestations around heterosexual norms, when they emanate from members of the Senegalese family institution to young men. To do so, we will present four different male profiles, all belonging to the same family unit, in order to understand how someone comes to be designated by the reputation of “loving women”. Our observations show that a man must display a certain number of aptitudes in order to be considered as “loving women”. His seduction capabilities are tested as well as his ability to sustain multiple romantic relationships. This reputation is gratifying for young men from Dakar, up to a point. Their reputation of “loving women” shouldn’t prevent them from reaching a social recognition obtained through matrimonial alliance. Thus, they shouldn’t “love women too much” or “love them too long”, or they would risk an excessive stigmatization. This article tends to conceive of the notion of reputation as the wording of judgements by a group, on one of its member. If this is a tool enabling normative and heteronormative aspirations to be heard, it is interesting to question the various issues of appreciation/depreciation of a gendered reputation, centered around the subjectivization of the evaluation of masculine desires. If this reputation clearly articulates a social injunction to virility and heterosexuality, it also expresses the limits of its functioning in terms of social reproduction when the individuals bearing it develop strategies of resistance and of getting around it.