Breaking away form Hegemonic Sociologies in Order to Capture lesser Practices. An Illustration : Commitments of Juvenile and Women's Sports

Alhough the concept of "hegemony" has been popularized in a simplified way, it remains effective in identifying certain dominant intellectual frames, from which sociology, as a site of knowledge and production of meaning, is not exempt. We wish to examine the limits imposed by studies on hegemony in the sociology of sports. These are, in particular, studies on the commitment of working-class girls to participation in recreational sports clubs, practicing activities not properly recognized; the studies in question use "critical" theoretical frames (the theories of reproduction, dominance/influence or gender); they also include research approaches that set high value on structural causalities. These studies disqualify the girls' commitments and, so doing, only consider the influence of, or submission to, more or less visible social determinism. In Switzerland, research on sports clubs, which is non-hegemonic in terms of practices and publics, reveals the more complex realities of these commitments as soon as pragmatic approaches are used. The outcomes of this research thus lead us to pause and reflect on the narrowness of the frames that exclude the power of self-commitment of social beings.