My monograph in-progress, Neutral encounters. Ethics and politics for a less gendered world argues that gender justice not only asks for a more equally and flexibly gendered world but also for a less gendered one. It makes two main arguments. The first formulates a critique of the gender tyranny, that is of our excessively gendered forms of life. The adjective gendered here insists however on the concrete practices that gender embodied subjects, asking them to take and keep their place in the gender order and establishing sexual difference as an almost inescapable social norm. The second argument is reconstructive and theorizes an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms which consists in suspending, undoing, and reducing the multiple occurrences through which those norms impose their weight and solicit us as gendered beings. To that end, the book offers an innovative reading of French thinker Roland Barthes’ work on the neutral and politicize his propositions in light of feminist, queer and trans scholarship and existing social practices. From there, emerges an ethics and politics of gender suspension opening  an inclusive path towards gender justice.

I am also working on two other projects that will pursue my theoretical inquiry on the various ways social norms can be traversed, questioned, and transformed. 

The first project looks at issues of authority and voice in the work of contemporary francophone philosophers from marginalized groups. With insights from history, literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, the project will examine how gender, race and class shaped those thinkers’ subjective relationship with the activity of theory writing. The goal is to interrogate the conditions of possibility of theoretical writing, highlight the exclusionary figure of the French philosopher, and analyze the racial, gender, and class frontiers of philosophy as a social practice. 

The second project looks at issues of privileges and solidarity to examine the kind of ethics and politics implicated in transformative forms of allyship. It will examine the ambiguous patterns of renouncement, loss, exposure, and discomfort that might be associated with, for instance, non-oppressive embodiments of masculinity or whiteness.