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This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes's peculiar conception of what he calls "the Neutral" and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show that Barthes's Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone.

Cette lecture critique porte sur l'ouvrage de Joseph Fischel Screw Consent : A Better Politics of Sexual Justice . Le livre remet en cause la centralité du prisme du consentement dans les débats contemporains sur le sexe et propose un appareil conceptuel alternatif pour penser la justice sexuelle structuré autour des notions d'autonomie sexuelle, d'égalité d'accès, et d'hédonisme démocratique. Si le livre s'inscrit d'abord dans le contexte des débats et des campagnes de lutte contre les violences sexuelles sur les campus étasuniens et les régulations légales du sexe aux États-Unis, ma recension vise à mettre en évidence sa contribution pour le champ de la théorie politique et féministe ainsi que la pertinence de son analyse pour penser les débats actuels sur la justice sexuelle et le mouvement #metoo.

This article argues in favour of the abolition of gender markers on identity documents. Its main goal is to assess the emancipatory dimension of such a proposition not only for gender minorities but also for individuals who recognise themselves within traditional gender identities. I first discuss the discriminations resulting from the practices of binary gender registration for intersex children, trans persons, and non-conforming individuals. Then, I look at the different deadlocks ensuing from the most popular remedy to those discriminations that loosen gender binary by adding one or more registration options. I go on to argue that those should lead us to advocate for the abolition of gender registration as a "transformative remedy" (Fraser, 1995) for the harmful consequences of normative gender regulations and as a way to integrate the queer conception of identity within a debate about institutional change and public policy. Such a proposition however raises question for feminist politics, since identity categories are also tools to achieve rights, equality and reparation on the basis of group oppression and specific shared situations. Yet, degendering civil registration could be part of a broader claim to a renewed conception of neutrality, not the liberal gender blindness, famously criticised by feminists but a neutrality critically reconstructed as non-assignation. This alternative neutrality would ask the collective not to assign its members to predetermined identities, to try and suspend the will to institutionally identify individuals according to collective categories and to construct distinctive groups.

This article focuses on educational policies for gender and sexual diversity in the United-States. From an analysis of several documents produced by the GLSEN (gay, lesbian, straight educational network) and of legal material, I show that these policies are centered on the notion of safe space. They aim at reducing sexual and gender minority students' vulnerability to bullying and harassment and improving their experience in schools by implementing anti-harassment and non-discrimination procedures and favoring LGBT recognition and affirmation measures. If such safe spaces improve student' security and sense of safety, they run the risk of depoliticizing and reinforcing groups boundaries by focusing on students' emotional and intellectual comfort and concealing other types of domination. ; À partir d'une analyse de documents produits par le GLSEN (gay, lesbian, straight education network), principale association de défense des minorités sexuelles et de genre en contexte éducatif aux États-Unis et de textes législatifs, cet article montre que les politiques éducatives étasuniennes contre les discriminations fondées sur l'orientation sexuelle et l'identification ou expression de genre sont organisées autour de la notion de safe space. Ces politiques incluent d'une part des procédures anti-harcèlement et anti-discrimination, et d'autre part, des mesures de reconnaissance visant à valoriser les minorités sexuelles dans l'espace scolaire. Ces politiques de safe space, si elles permettent d'améliorer l'expérience scolaire des élèves non conformes à la norme hétérosexiste dans les établissements qui les mettent en place comportent aussi des risques et des paradoxes. Le prisme de la sécurité peut en effet dépolitiser et renforcer les frontières entre les groupes sociaux au lieu de déconstruire les normes qui les façonnent en mettant au centre des démarches la préservation du confort émotionnel et intellectuel des élèves et en invisibilisant les autres types de domination.

This article focuses on educational policies for gender and sexual diversity in the United-States. From an analysis of several documents produced by the GLSEN (gay, lesbian, straight educational network) and of legal material, I show that these policies are centered on the notion of safe space. They aim at reducing sexual and gender minority students' vulnerability to bullying and harassment and improving their experience in schools by implementing anti-harassment and non-discrimination procedures and favoring LGBT recognition and affirmation measures. If such safe spaces improve student' security and sense of safety, they run the risk of depoliticizing and reinforcing groups boundaries by focusing on students' emotional and intellectual comfort and concealing other types of domination. ; À partir d'une analyse de documents produits par le GLSEN (gay, lesbian, straight education network), principale association de défense des minorités sexuelles et de genre en contexte éducatif aux États-Unis et de textes législatifs, cet article montre que les politiques éducatives étasuniennes contre les discriminations fondées sur l'orientation sexuelle et l'identification ou expression de genre sont organisées autour de la notion de safe space. Ces politiques incluent d'une part des procédures anti-harcèlement et anti-discrimination, et d'autre part, des mesures de reconnaissance visant à valoriser les minorités sexuelles dans l'espace scolaire. Ces politiques de safe space, si elles permettent d'améliorer l'expérience scolaire des élèves non conformes à la norme hétérosexiste dans les établissements qui les mettent en place comportent aussi des risques et des paradoxes. Le prisme de la sécurité peut en effet dépolitiser et renforcer les frontières entre les groupes sociaux au lieu de déconstruire les normes qui les façonnent en mettant au centre des démarches la préservation du confort émotionnel et intellectuel des élèves et en invisibilisant les autres types de domination.