Charlotte Puiseux: Teoria Queer e Antivalidismo

Abstract

Abstract

In De Chair et de Fer: vivre et lutter dans une société validiste, the philosopher Charlotte Puiseux brings not only a radical critique of the normative sociocultural model, anchored in highly validist dynamics, but also seeks to think about the tensions with the norms instituted over bodies and social lives. In her reflections she provides theoretical-philosophical and militant alternatives to problematize validism. That is, its capacitating imposition on bodies and forms of existences that transgress a narcissistic, Euro-phallocentric notion of what a body is. One of the alternatives proposed by Puiseux is the intersection between queer theory and antivalidist theories. She claims that it is necessary to "queerize disability." The author questions the centrality imposed by a dual and binary perspective, instituted by guiding notions of thought and social practices present, both in the discourse about bodies and in the spaces destined for them. Thus, a problematization of the conceptual and social typologies of normal and pathological, of the valid and invalid body, of the myth of ability and disability, are thought by the author from the queer perspective. For her, queer theory builds its theoretical status precisely from the criticism of the naturalization and biologization of socio-historically organized, reinstituted, and reinvented norms that impose themselves as an organizational model of social life. In this sense, this article aims at thinking about Charlotte Puiseux's idea of queerizing the debate on disabilities and the interrelation between queer theory and antivalidist theory.
Keywords: Validism; Disability; Normal; Pathological; Queer.