gender

The interpretive framework applied to the transitioning of trans people by sociologist Emmanuel Beaubatie produces a wealth of knowledge. Male domination and heteronormativity are shown in a new light.

Through an ethnographic investigation allowing them to go behind the scenes of notaries public’s offices and law firms, two sociologists show the origins of profound gender inequalities in the distribution of family assets.

A French qualitative strand of research opens new paths to understanding wealth accumulation in the post-Piketty era and renews our vision of elite groups and beyond.

Challenging the essentialist conception of transgendered people as “born in the wrong body,” Miquel Missé proposes a sociology of the body that emphasizes the burden of social norms.

This panorama of the mobilizations against homosexual marriage in twelve European countries highlights the federation of several conservative movements under the unifying ‘Anti-Gender Crusade’ banner.

In his incisive, concise and stimulating book, the sociologist Rogers Brubaker examines the reasons why, in the United States today, social acceptance of transgender situations has no equivalent in “transracial” cases.

On the 5^th anniversary of Pope Francis’ election to the throne of St. Peter, Anthony Favier reflects on the career path and achievements of a pontiff torn between the desire for change and the need to embody a weakening Catholic institution.

The Encyclopédie critique du genre edited by Juliette Rennes offers so much more than a general overview of studies about gender : it examines how gender has reinvented the study of traditional social sciences and raised new issues. Going far beyond the controversies, the notion of gender reveals the extent of its critical force.

At a time when gender is on the debating table, the Dictionnaire genre et science politique [Dictionary of gender and political science] does more than just summarise current knowledge in the field. The book reminds us that politics has always had gender-related divisions that define it, and that the recent inclusion of gender issues in the political arena raises new questions.

Starting with a discussion of three related but distinct ideas – sex, gender and sexuality – Elsa Dorlin summarizes forty years of feminist theories. She also traces these three categories back to practices that are inseparable from a context of domination.

For more than thirty years, Joan Scott has been informing and transforming both our history and the way we write history, while encouraging us to question categories and change our modes of thinking. From class struggle to sex differentiation, sexual emancipation and race, she proposes a critical analysis of Republican rhetoric to undermine naturalized forms of inequality.

With the exception of kilts, the skirt symbolises a woman: scatterbrained, seductive or “feminine”, the wearer is well and truly a member of the weaker sex. The historian Christine Bard analyses the introduction of a “Skirt Day”, which would aim to make the skirt an acceptable garment once more. Could this be a new liberation, following the liberation of trousers for women?

After the publication of her last book, Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of zionism, Judith Butler discusses her most recent work in an interview, proposing a new analytics of power. She discusses how the most recent evolution of capitalism exposes populations to greater precarity, and defends the idea of a life that would be completely democratic, taking into account the multiplicity of power relations.

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier have published a new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s famed The Second Sex sixty years after its initial publication. They explain for Books and Ideas how they set out to restore Beauvoir’s existentialist, but also very personal approach to the history of the Western notion of “woman”.

The latest issue of the St Petersburg based social science journal, Laboratorium, is devoted to gender sensitive ethnographies in the post-Soviet space. Despite the fact that it lacks an overarching thesis, it convincingly questions the notion of private sphere in a space clouded by the legacy of an ideologically intrusive communist system.