Mélanie Gourarier is a French anthropologist specializing in issues of gender and sexuality. Since 2017, she has been a research fellow at the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 engi ...

(CNRS).

Biography

Mélanie Gourarier defended her doctoral thesis in social anthropology at the

School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (, EHESS) is a graduate ''grande école'' and '' grand établissement'' in Paris focused on academic research in the social sciences. The school awards Master and PhD degrees alone and conjo ...

in 2012, entitled ''Séduire les femmes pour s'apprécier entre hommes, Une ethnographie des sociabilités masculines au sein de la Communauté de la séduction en France''. Mélanie Gourarier is a lecturer in the Genre, politique et sexualité master's program at her alma mater and a teaching and research fellow hired on a limited-time basis at the Le Mans University. Since 2017, she has been a research fellow at the CNRS. Her research focuses mainly on gender, the anthropology of kinship and paternity, power relations, the hegemony and uses of genetics and bioethics. As part of the ETHOPOL program, funded by the National Research Agency from 2015 to 2019 and hosted at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, she is conducting research on the framing and communication of DNA paternity tests in order to study doubt in ways of determining parentage. She is a member of the French Association of Anthropologists.

Selected works

In 2010, Mélanie Gourarier published a book devoted to artist

Niki de Saint Phalle Niki de Saint Phalle (; born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle; 29 October 193021 May 2002) was a French sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculp ...

. She is mainly interested in the work known as the "Garden of Tarots" installed in Tuscany, Italy to which the artist devoted herself entirely for nearly 20 years, between 1979 and 1998. Within this space, dictated by complete freedom of action and without any commission, Niki de Saint Phalle designed 22 colossal and colorful sculptures, symbolizing the major arcana of the divinatory

tarot Tarot (, first known as ''trionfi (cards), trionfi'' and later as ''tarocchi'' or ''tarocks'') is a set of playing cards used in tarot games and in fortune-telling or divination. From at least the mid-15th century, the tarot was used to play t ...

. Gourarier's book ''Niki de Saint-Phalle. The Garden of Tarots'' is accompanied by unpublished photographs taken by the photographer Laurent Condominas. Gourarier published the comic strip ''Séducteurs de rue'' in 2016. The comic strip co-produced with Léon Maret for the Sociorama collection, deciphers the different flirting techniques observed over the past ten years in the streets of large Western cities. In 2017, she published ''Alpha Male, Seducing Women to Appreciate Each Other Between Men''. For three years, the anthropologist analyzed the behavior of young men who integrate flirting as an animal and ultra-codified practice. Doing everything to regain a masculine hegemony, the ''Alpha Males'' or ''Community of Seduction'', define themselves as a group of mostly white men from the middle or upper classes, whose sometimes violent behavior responds to a form of female oppression of which they insist that they are the victims. Instead, she proposes that the question of evaluating the quality of male seduction requires evaluation of the question of consent between the parties, the consideration of "seduction as a relationship of reciprocity."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gourarier, Melanie French anthropologists French women anthropologists Social anthropologists 21st-century French educators 21st-century French anthropologists 21st-century French women scientists 21st-century French women educators School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences alumni Gender and education Living people Year of birth missing (living people)