ABSTRACT

This chapter draws on detailed ethnographic observations and interviews with 68 young Morrocan men who live in France and Italy as migrants, and who are Muslim. It argues how the 'normative veil' is becoming more and more a sociological tool in itself, able to offer a solution to interpret sexual conduct, gender construction, as well as young adult condition in modern context. The chapter describes a social scientific path towards the constitution of a reliable sociological instrument to study sexual behaviour and its representations within a specific cultural perspective. Telling sexual stories can become a narrative context to stage cultural belongings and rhetorical images of one's own culture, to reinforce shared feelings, or perhaps, even, to satisfy the researcher's expectations. The chapter considers the case of Bader to show and define the implications that normativity can have on reporting sexual experiences in the context of a research interview, especially when dealing with influence of heteromasculinity's hegemonic models on sexual accounts.