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A number of research projects in the social sciences have added complexity to the woman/man model. This article examines the genesis and contributions of these approaches, while suggesting a new avenue of research. An abundant literature exists on the intertwining of social relations and on femininity and masculinity types, but it often fails to break down what gender means for each or to question the woman/man divide. Drawing on the sociology of social classes and considering contemporary transformations of the gendered order, this article calls for an understanding of gender as a multidimensional space in which positions are both numerous and composite.

This article examines how in the former settlement colony of New Caledonia, in the process of decolonization, the social issue of violence against women within couples and families, which affects Kanak women more than other Caledonian women, has been framed as a public concern. After recalling the scale of this violence and examining the patterns of feminicide, which reveal strong gender inequalities, the article shows how the forms of public action differ depending on whether it is initiated from a feminist or a familialist perspective. An analysis of the range of policy responses highlights the weight of reactionary familialism in relation to the heritage of missionaries and a long history of hostility to divorce.

Are employees' working conditions influenced by their level of involvement in unpaid domestic labor? In other words, do women and men who have to work a “second shift”, or “double day”, benefit from more favorable conditions in their professional work? Or, as argued with the hypothesis of the cross-sectional character of the sexual division of labor, do they on the contrary accumulate this domestic burden with poorer working conditions, with consequences in terms of health risks? For the first time in the history of French national surveys on working conditions, the Conditions de travail - Risques psychosociaux (CT-RPS 2016) survey (Working Conditions - Psychosocial Risks) asked respondents to quantify their domestic work hours. We question here the interactions between this domestic work time and professional working conditions: while we cannot give conclusions on obviously complex causalities, the hypothesis of the correlation between high domestic workload and poor professional conditions is statistically confirmed, even when controlling for a wide range of characteristics, in particular occupation; fewer men engage in domestic work, and men who do so have even poorer working conditions than women.

Drawing on the case of the Lip women's group, this article analyzes emancipatory practices confronted with the effects of cumulative gender and class-based dominations. The aim is to show that a radical questioning of class-based social relations does not necessarily lead to a reshaping of gender-based social relations. The achievement of the liberation process even appears to be a twofold challenge for the women workers. For this reason, the focus will be on biographical accounts in order to better understand how emancipatory practices unfold at the crossroads of several kinds of power relations and different levels of collective action.

This article analyzes men's contraceptive practices using data from the French 2013 Fecond survey. Results show that men's use of contraception is structured by the French contraceptive norm, which was already observed among women. Moreover, we show that this contraceptive norm is gendered. In prescribing the switch from condoms to oral contraceptive pills when a relationship becomes stable, it also prescribes a shift from shared responsibility between the partners to exclusively female responsibility for contraception. Finally, the use of male contraceptive methods by men in stable relationships could be the result of strategies of « distinction » allowing the expression of different types of masculinities.