Plutôt vivre. Comprendre le validisme et valoriser une culture crip. (Rather Live. Understanding Ableism and Valuing a Crip Culture). Chiara Kahn & Charlotte Puiseux, Le Cavalier Bleu Publishing, 2025
Plutôt vivre. Comprendre le validisme et valoriser une culture crip. (Rather Live. Understanding Ableism and Valuing a Crip Culture). Chiara Kahn & Charlotte Puiseux, Le Cavalier Bleu Publishing, 2025
Talk with the authors. In collaboration with Librairie La Brèche.
“Better to die than to be disabled!” — this exclamation alone sums up the ableist gaze our society casts on disability. Rooted in a capitalist system that prizes performance, it divides so-called “able-bodied” people, supposedly destined for happiness, from disabled people, whose lives would allegedly not be worth living.
Yet one in two people will, at some point in their life, be directly affected by disability, whether temporarily or permanently. Chiara Kahn and Charlotte Puiseux revisit the history of how ableism has been socially constructed. They expose the mechanisms at work in order to open up new perspectives, where every human being can find their place without the need to transcend their difference. Not living in spite of, but living with.
Learning to step away from productivist logics, no longer being ashamed of vulnerability and interdependence, embracing all our particularities to carve a path toward solidarity, pride, and recognition — this is the ambitious yet essential goal of the book.
Plutôt vivre. Comprendre le validisme et valoriser une culture crip
(Rather Live. Understanding Ableism and Valuing a Crip Culture)
Chiara Kahn & Charlotte Puiseux
Le Cavalier Bleu Publishing, 2025
13 x 20,5cm– 144 pages
18€
Books will be available for sale on site by Librairie La Brèche.
Chiara Kahn
A graduate of Sciences Po Paris, Chiara Kahn is a journalist and handi-feminist activist. After working for various media outlets, she now hosts the podcast Conpassion, in which she discusses ableism with disabled guests. See the podcast’s Instagram page here. In 2024, she contributed to the book En finir avec les idées fausses sur le handicap (Ending False Ideas About Disability), published by Éditions de l’Atelier and edited by social psychologist Clara Mautalent.
Charlotte Puiseux
Charlotte Puiseux holds a PhD in philosophy. She is an author and long-time anti-ableist activist, as she herself is directly concerned by these issues. In 2022, she published the essay De chair et de fer, vivre et lutter dans une société validiste (Of Flesh and Iron: Living and Fighting in an Ableist Society) with Éditions La Découverte. She also shares some of her research, as well as poetry, on her website.
