French and Francophone Disability Studies

Disability studies is now recognized as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, and intersectional field of study that encompasses work from disciplines including history, sociology, anthropology, law, education, and medicine.¹ But commentators agree that disability studies does not have an easy French equivalent.² Indeed, as eminent French disability historian Henri-Jacques Stiker points out, disability studies—which is sometimes (unsatisfactorily) referred to as 'les études sur le handicap'—does not exist on an institutional level in France.³ Alexandre Baril agrees, explaining that 'there are no [. . .] disability studies departments or programs in French-speaking universities', although, as Zina Weygand points out, French social scientists are beginning to include disability on their research agendas.⁴ It is precisely what Anglo-American academia values about disability studies, that is its inherent interdisciplinarity, which at least in part explains its apparent absence from French academia. Again according to Stiker, French academia's heavy reliance on traditional disciplines means that when disability-centred work is produced, it is not valued and thus not well represented.⁵ In addition, unlike the 'nothing about us without us' adage embraced by Anglo-American disability scholars, many of whom also identify as disability activists, advocates, or allies, the relative paucity of user-led disability activism in France means that disabled people are not necessarily at the centre of research conducted about them.⁶ But despite these limitations, some works have been instrumental in the development of disability studies in France: as well as Stiker's own seminal Corps infirmes et sociétés, we might cite Jean-Christophe Coffin's La Transmission de la folie and Zina Weygand's Vivre sans voir as particularly interesting examples of historical enquiry that put disability at their heart.⁷ The title of the special issue of Corpus edited by Marion Chottin, Éléments pour une contre-histoire de la cécité et des aveugles, is indicative of French disability history's attempts to challenge established narratives of disability, whilst the Paris-based, peer-reviewed journal ALTER: European Journal of Disability Research / Revue européenne de recherche sur le handicap publishes cutting-edge disability research from the social sciences in both French and English, as does the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies / Revue canadienne des études sur l'incapacité. In their insightful Introduction to the 2007 special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research devoted to French disability studies, Isabelle Ville and Jean-François Ravaud explain how the specificity of France's Republican universalism has influenced its distinctive approach to disability. Like the vast majority of French-language articles published in ALTER, the research showcased in the états présents by Ville and Ravaud and Albrecht, Ravaud, and Stiker comes from the social sciences.⁸ In a move that heralds a new direction in French disability studies, two graduate researchers, Céline Roussel and Soline Vennetier, organized in November 2015 the first major international colloquium in France to overtly encourage disability-studies-inflected readings of literature and art. This event showcased work that critiques, challenges, or foregrounds the representation of disability in culture.⁹ The forthcoming proceedings—in which work on the relationship between disability, culture, and representation by established disability studies scholars including Stiker, Tammy Berberi, and Pierre Ancet is presented alongside research by emerging scholars such as Anne-Lyse Chabert, Barbara Fougère, Marie Astier, and Olivier Schetrit—will demonstrate how French researchers are now engaging with disability studies in varied and important ways.¹⁰ It is this specific sub-category of literary and cultural analysis to which I now turn in the remainder of this état présent.

Critical disability studies, or the examination, analysis, and critique of literary and cultural representations of disability, is not always easily separated from the broader concerns of disability studies activism, especially in Anglo-American contexts, and has consequently remained relatively neglected or subsumed into broader discussions. But this disability-activism-informed concern with the critical analysis of texts (meant in its broadest sense) by and about disabled people is becoming an increasingly significant strand of disability studies, as demonstrated by the inauguration, in 2007, of the Journal of...