Genre, territoire et promotion de la santé communautaire : enjeux théoriques et méthodologiques

Health promotion is “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health” (OMS, 2009, p.1), putting the emphasis on the role of people as actors of their health. However, as Horrocks and Johnson (2014) claim, mainstream perspectives tend to conceptualize health-related actions as individually driven – hence the focus on lifestyles as a matter of choice. Drawing on these authors’ critical perspective, we consider these actions as social practices that are historically and geographically situated. In this article we address the relation between social categories – such as gender, class and ethnicity – and health-related social practices. In this regard, we propose intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1993) as an approach to study the interaction of social categories. In spite of the current interest that the intersectional approach has raised in the health field, its study has been mainly theoretical; therefore, more empirically-grounded research is needed. However, the empirical study of intersectionality is not unproblematic, its core principles raising a number of methodological challenges. In this article we present the theoretical and methodological proposal that conforms the core of our research about community health promotion in the Region of Brussels in order to address and empirically study the relation between gender, territory and health. Drawing on post-structural approaches the first part of the article presents a theoretical perspective to understand the complex relation between social categories, territory and health through the notion of health-related social practices. In this perspective the territory is considered in two different ways: as a methodological tool and –together with the body and individual ressources- as an element of health-related social practices. Community action being one of the main characteristics of health promotion programs (OMS, 2009), the definition and selection of a community is a key issue. In our research in the Region of Brussels a geographical approach towards community has been privileged, choosing the neighborhood – the space where daily life activities take place and to which inhabitants identify themselves (IBSA, 2007) – as the scale of analysis. This decision is motivated by several reasons. On the one hand, the key principles of intersectionality (Bowleg, 2012 ; Christensen et Qvotrup, 2012) – especially the mutual constitution of social categories and the idea that subjectivi