The Gender Cycle Podcast - "The construction of gender, beyond binarity".

Initiated and supported by the professors of Inalco's "Gender and Sexuality in the World" program, this lecture series, open to all, is offered by the Inalco Foundation, with the support of the Rothschild Foundation. It brings together gender specialists from a wide variety of cultural areas, to enrich and extend the reflection begun as part of the "Gender and Sexuality in the World" degree course.

The 2023-2024 lecture series has made it possible to approach the theory of sexual binarity and sexual and gender violence around the world by breaking away from an essentially Western-centric epistemological construction, thanks to the integration of varied historical and cultural perceptions from several geographical areas.

You can now discover or rediscover all the lectures in the gender cycle on podcast right here!

Conferences in the 2023-2024 cycle

October 25 - Frédéric Noy: Ekifire Conference - "the half-dead. On the forced invisibility of LGBTQ minorities in Great Lakes Africa"

Frédéric Noy returned to the origins of his work in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. Through audio testimonies and video clips, he then addressed the daily lives of LGBTQ people, whose situation has deteriorated significantly, both in law and on the ground, since he began his research.

November 9 - Saitô Emiko: Conference "Gender binarity in Japanese constitutional law: towards indifference or redefinition?"

Emerging demands from LGBT communities tend to relativize heteronormativity and gender dichotomy. And yet, the fight for more substantial equality between women and men often requires us to start from an acknowledgement of the duality of the sexes, in order to better grasp and correct unequal realities. So how can we deal with these new demands without threatening Japan's already fragile gender equality?

December 11 - Zeynep Ugur: Lecture "The Tunisian LGBT/queer movement and the contestation of gender binarity"

This talk looked at queer performativities in the performing arts from the 1990s onwards, and analyzed how the official discourses of the openly anti-LGBTIA+ political power look at everyday life, where many theaters and nightlife initiatives create queer performances that make up an underground art scene.

March 6 - Bettina Dennerlein: Lecture "Sexual difference in modern Islamic discourse: glimpses from contentious debates (1950s-2000s)"

In this lecture, Bettina Dennerlein analyzed the evolution of notions of sex and gender in Islamic debates and revisited public debates on religion, the nature and role of women within gender relations, the family and society.

March 11 - Gabrielle Houbre : Conference " Parcours transgenres dans la France du XIXe siècle "

Through this conference, Gabrielle Houbre focused on transidentity and gender fluidity in the different social strata of nineteenth-century France strongly marked by sexual binarity.

April 3 - Patricio Simonetto: Conference "A History without Binaries? Queer and Trans Histories of Gender Transgression in Argentina"

This presentation explored the challenges of writing histories of gender non-conformity. Focusing on the cases of maricas, invertidos sexuales, and mujeres hombres in the early twentieth century in Argentina.

May 2 - Iris Rachamimov: Lecture "Coccinellim: A History of the Israeli Transgender Community from the 1950s to the Present Day"

This presentation followed the historical development of transgender life in Israel during eight decades. It focused in particular on the 1970s and 1980s - a period in which the Israeli gay and lesbian movement underwent a steady growth while the transgender community experienced extreme marginalization and brutalization.

Following on from the

On May 10, 2024, Elisa Carandina, one of the gender cycle project leaders, took part in the conference "Being for Another: New Forms of Life-Writing by Women" on women's life-writing explored, from various languages and transnational contexts, the complex issues of gender and genre raised by the works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers.

An international study day on the theme of "Gender and Violence in Contemporary Europe and Eurasia" was held on May 17, 2024. The symposium marked the end of the PAUSE contract for Saida Sirazhudinova, a PhD in political science, sociologist, lawyer and human rights activist specializing in gender and violence, civil society and Islam, and member of CREE. The mission of this symposium was to address regional aspects of domestic violence as well as the transformation of the problem of domestic violence in recent years, gender-based violence in times of armed conflict and feminicide practices in the contemporary world, but also to identify means and methods of preventing domestic violence.