The Political Grammar of Consent. Investigating a New Gender Order

International audienceThis paper aims to show how a political grammar that seeks to overcome the gender order as a hierarchical order - centered on the notion of consent - ultimately participates in reconstructing it. In the first section I seek to ground the claim that the grammar of consent is monopolizing academic debates on gender, or involving gender. In the second section, I highlight regimes of justification that render the relevance of women’s consent conditional, examining, in the French context, two contemporary controversies, one concerning the Muslim veil and the other the criminalization of the clients of prostitution. Furthermore, I show the effects this differentiated relationship to consent has on the political status of women