Disability rights as a radical form of care in French culture

This article argues that disability rights in contemporary France must be understood not only as a legal or policy framework, but also as a radical form of care grounded in vulnerability, interdependence and embodied knowledge. Although the 2005 disability law promised equality of rights and opportunities, lived experience reveals a persistent gap between legislative rhetoric and everyday exclusion. Drawing on care theory, disability studies and contemporary French cultural production, the article develops this argument through three domains: literary practice; visual practice; and embodied practice. It reads Zig Blanquer’s autopathographical writing as a critique of ‘validisme’ and of republican norms of autonomy; Denis Darzacq’s ‘ACT’ as a visual ethics of care that reconfigures mobility, visibility and public space; and narrative medicine as an embodied practice that unsettles clinical hierarchy through touch, shared interpretation and coproduced knowledge. Taken together, these practices show how disability rights can be enacted as radical care in contemporary French and Francophone culture.