> Call for papers

For over a century, the question of gender has traversedknowledge, culture, and institutions, becoming one of the major signifiers of contemporarydiscourse. At once a theoretical concept, an administrative category, and a politicalstake, gendercirculatesacrosslaw, medicine, psychology, the arts, and the humanities. It referssimultaneously to the social construction of sexualdifferences, a subjective experience of body and speech, and a vector of collective recognition. 

In 2025, itappearsnecessary to take stock of the contemporaryeffects of gender: how are we to thinkwhatremains a project of emancipation (equality, rights, visibility) and what tends to become new forms of normativity? How does the polis – understood as the space of living together, care, and debate – accommodate, regulate, or resistthesetransformations? 

This conference proposes to examine, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the epistemic, cultural, and unconsciouseffects of gender, articulatingclinical and psychoanalyticpsychopathologywithotherfields of knowledge. The aimis to interrogate how gender reconfigures forms of the social bond, institutional practices, and processes of subjectivation at a moment when the freedom to defineoneselfencounters the difficulty of sustainingsingularity. 

The conferencewelcomescontributions: 

– Theoretical, addressing the place of gender in the history of knowledge about sex, the body, and subjectivity, and in the way the polis organizes and conceptualizessuchknowledge. Thesemay explore transformations in paradigms of sexualdifference and theireffects on conceptions of the subject and the social bond, including analyses of gender’sconceptual construction in the humanities and social sciences, itsclinical dimension in psychology and psychoanalysis, or criticalexaminations of scientific, medical, and legaldiscoursesthatshape the symbolicorganization of the polis. 

– Clinical, focusing on the speech of subjectsgrapplingwithgender issues and on how institutions of care, education, or training– privilegedspaces of the polis – receive, accompany, or resistsuchdemands, sometimesrevealingtheirimplicitly libidinal dimension linked to love and sexuality. Contributions maydraw on clinical vignettes frompsychotherapeutic, institutional, or medico-social practice, or on analyses of contemporarylistening and care dispositifs (sexualhealth centers, transition clinics, school and university settings). Thesepapersshouldinterrogate how clinical practice illuminates the relation between subjectivation, normativity, and social belonging. 

– Multidisciplinary and cultural, analyzing how the contemporary polis elaborates, translates, or resists transformations related to gender. This axis welcomesapproachesfromliterature, politicalphilosophy, sociology, anthropology, law, medicine, and cultural studies. Proposalsmayaddressrepresentations and limits of representinggender in the arts and public arenas, legal and medical reconfigurations of sexedidentities, social effects of activist or reactionarymovements, or how the polis constructstoday the symbolic and political conditions for a social bond grounded in speech that can include a diversity of life-styles as well as diverse conceptions of gender.