Anthropologie visuelle et représentations alternatives du corps en situation de handicap

This article proposes to reflect on models of documentary staging of sensory disability in open and closed environments. Based on an anthropology of the sensitive, the analysis will focus on the works of Frederick Wiseman and Werner Herzog in particular. The analysis tools of visual anthropology will allow us to examine the scenic biases and the singularity of the authors’ views on disability as well as the variety of learning methods used by the people filmed. We will focus on the description of the body in a situation of disability, on the relationship between the able-bodied and the disabled, as well as on the significant function that the social, medical and educational context can have in the situations described.

Les invalides dans la littérature juridique, autour des représentations de la dette patriotique

he function of poetry is to express what cannot be apprehended without the thickness of the lived, to reveal, denounce or celebrate. It thus humanizes the overly bureaucratic taxonomies or classifications of forensic medicine and standards. The poetry of law allows a linguistic humanity where disability or dependence is the other of ourselves. The idea of the recognition of fragility and otherness; of the right to compensation was in no way the order of evidence for the wounded and disabled of war. The asylum for the disabled was a place of military discipline before becoming a place of reception and care. The pension was a reward of no value other than military before it had any economic value. Indeed, the poetry of law has pitted the party of the debt of blood and patriotic debt against that of the debt of the nation and the sacred debt of protection for the guardians of the City. It is this sacred debt that the nation owes that has to be put into perspective in this article. Of this debt which it is impossible to liquidate without extra care and humanity because it is irretrievably more than a debt.

Refuser d’être l’aveugle des autres Dynamiques et pratiques de l’écriture de soi, à l’encontre des représentations sociales de la cécité

This paper aims at exploring the autobiographical writing of blind, deaf-blind or partially sighted people from a sociopoetical perspective. It contends the following idea: for the authors to be considered, the first-person text opens up a space which allows them to refuse and deconstruct the conception of blindness shared by sighted persons. This literary process, from which the construction of a counter-discourse that can even go as far as subversion emerges, gives the author the opportunity to reappropriate his or her blindness beyond the imaginary, the myths and the fancies deriving from what is commonly understood and depicted as an impairment and a deprivation. Focusing on the fundamental concept of “préjugé de la cécité” (“prejudice of blindness”) developed by the French blind intellectual Pierre Villey, the article shall furthermore demonstrate that this common imaginary and these collective social representations are deeply rooted in culture and literature: They turn out to be an archetype one cannot easily avoid, inhabiting autobiographical texts and taking the form of stereotyped associations. This archetype is nevertheless swiftly challenged and deconstructed by the autobiographer’s writing, therefore leaving room for a representation of blindness from an internal point of view, based on individual experience and nurtured by everyday life. This paper thus argues that autobiographical space and textuality display a discursive power that the author can use as he or she wishes, in order to dismantle stereotypes and transform collective and social representations of blind people and blindness.

La littérature dans la toile (de Jouy)

Among ornamented canvas, many take their subjects from popular themes, including those of literary topical successes, such as the works of Marmontel (Bélisaire, Les Incas), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (Paul and Virginie), Chateaubriand (Atala), Carmouche (The Vampire). Moments deemed to be key from these novels are retained in the imaging, responding to the expectations of the public at the time in the context of ideological, memorial and educational functions for these dream machines that are the “toiles de Jouy”.

Le traitement de l’hermaphrodite dans la littérature juridique de l’Ancien Régime Droit, société et idéologie

Under the Ancien Régime in France, the individual was inserted into a legal system of binary classification shaped around masculinity and femininity already used in earlier periods. Roman jurists and after them the medieval canonists refuted the proven existence of both male and female sexes in one body and such an orientation continued in the West under the Ancien Régime. During these times, this physiological feature was assimilated to deviant and condemnable sexual behaviours. The study of several trials against hermaphrodites shows the social embarrassment caused by sexual ambivalent. This strange physiognomy was enough to suggest he was a criminal or a debauchee. Nowadays, French legal system is fortunately milder but remains organized around a unique and defined sex as stated in the birth certificate. Therefore it fails to recognize the concept of third gender. A mental revolution has to rise on this point.

Mise en scène du handicap mental et représentations sociales dans le théâtre allemand contemporain

This article bases its analysis on the shows Mental Institution (2005) from Thikwa Theatre, Endgame from RambaZamba Theatre and The 120 Days of Sodom (2017) from the International Institute for Political Murder. It fits in the search field of the « new disability studies » that analyse a society considered as corrective and normative by studying opposites such as « normal / abnormal » or « abled / disabled ». Which role do performing arts play in the evolution of these social constructs and their medicalization? How do these plays deconstruct oppressive and discriminating mechanisms and can they help bring a collective change of our social behaviors?

De « Riquet à la Houppe » dans les réécritures contemporaines Un éclairage sociopoétique

To illustrate his theoretical presentation of sociopoetics, Alain Montandon uses the rewriting of traditional tales in contemporary times. Pascale Auraix-Jonchière reminds us that many tales, and long before the term was in use, present characters that can be described as ‘disabled’. We propose to focus on the main character of ‘Riquet à la houppe’, stigmatised, despite his high-ranking birth, by an accumulation of infirmities. After having enjoyed undeniable success from the 17th to the 19th century, this little-known tale is rarely published today. We wish to examine this rarity in some reformulations, including iconographic ones. To observe these variations, in which disability echoes social representations, we will study the trio of characters in the tale: not only the eponymous hunchbacked, lame and ugly hero, but also the two sisters who are also ‘disabled’, one ugly and witty, like Riquet, the other with a beauty that struggles to compensate for her mental and intellectual deficit. How are these characters represented in contemporary production? How are their handicaps socially considered when ‘the tyranny of appearances’ (Amadieu, 2002) or the influence of feminist currents incite to renew the look on this tale?

Le handicap au risque de l’amour Un combat incertain contre les représentations sociales du xixe siècle

Through two works taken from Balzac's Comédie humaine (César Birotteau and Modeste Mignon) our study seeks to demonstrate the power of ostracization of social representations against deviant bodies in the 19th century in Western societies. We question the tolerance scale for mild disability, the club-foot, in two parts, and then in the face of a deformity considered to be monstrous, that of a hunchbacked dwarf. If the first person with a disability manages to marry his sweetheart, he owes it to its intact validity, to a share of luck afforded by the novelist, but above all to the force of money! We will find this character in the Human comedy. The second only exists for the duration of the novel. Faced with the one he loves and the reader, he shines with the intelligence and sensitivity bestowed by the narrator. For happiness, he will have to be content to be the true craftsman of the one whom the one he loves aims for, without sharing it, because a monster, even bright and full of humor, remains a monster.

Représentation du handicap et changement de paradigme dans deux romans canadiens contemporains

We propose, in this article, to use a sociopoetic approach, in order to identify the representations of disability through various characters in two contemporary French-Canadian novels. We have studied the poetical processes at work, and especially how the authors use artistic creation and production, in order to question and overturn the existing prejudices dehumanizing people with disabilities. In both novels, Homme invisible à la fenêtre by Monique Proulx (1993) and Un jour ils entendront mes silences by Marie-Josée Martin (2012), the literary discourse constitutes a radical questioning of how disability is perceived, of how and why people with disabilities are being dehumanized, medicalised, and of our understanding of what constitutes “able” and “disabled”.